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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windy McPherson’s Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Windy McPherson’s Son
+
+Author: Sherwood Anderson
+
+
+Release Date: February, 2005  [EBook #7443]
+This file was first posted on April 30, 2003
+Last Updated: October 31, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDY MCPHERSON’S SON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anne Soulard, Eric Eldred, John R. Bilderback,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WINDY MCPHERSON’S SON
+
+By Sherwood Anderson
+
+
+
+To The Living Men And Women Of My Own Middle Western Home Town This Book
+Is Dedicated
+
+
+
+
+WINDY MCPHERSON’S SON
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam
+McPherson, a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black
+eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he
+walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping
+town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked
+cautiously, lifting his bare feet and putting them down with extreme
+deliberateness on the hot, dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried
+a bundle of newspapers. A long black cigar was in his hand.
+
+In front of the station he stopped; and Jerry Donlin, the baggage-man,
+seeing the cigar in his hand, laughed, and slowly drew the side of his
+face up into a laboured wink.
+
+“What is the game to-night, Sam?” he asked.
+
+Sam stepped to the baggage-room door, handed him the cigar, and
+began giving directions, pointing into the baggage-room, intent and
+business-like in the face of the Irishman’s laughter. Then, turning, he
+walked across the station platform to the main street of the town, his
+eyes bent on the ends of his fingers on which he was making computations
+with his thumb. Jerry looked after him, grinning so that his red gums
+made a splash of colour on his bearded face. A gleam of paternal pride
+lit his eyes and he shook his head and muttered admiringly. Then,
+lighting the cigar, he went down the platform to where a wrapped
+bundle of newspapers lay against the building, under the window of the
+telegraph office, and taking it in his arm disappeared, still grinning,
+into the baggage-room.
+
+Sam McPherson walked down Main Street, past the shoe store, the bakery,
+and the candy store kept by Penny Hughes, toward a group lounging at
+the front of Geiger’s drug store. Before the door of the shoe store he
+paused a moment, and taking a small note-book from his pocket ran his
+finger down the pages, then shaking his head continued on his way, again
+absorbed in doing sums on his fingers.
+
+Suddenly, from among the men by the drug store, a roaring song broke the
+evening quiet of the street, and a voice, huge and guttural, brought a
+smile to the boy’s lips:
+
+  “He washed the windows and he swept the floor,
+  And he polished up the handle of the big front door.
+  He polished that handle so carefullee,
+  That now he’s the ruler of the queen’s navee.”
+
+The singer, a short man with grotesquely wide shoulders, wore a long
+flowing moustache, and a black coat, covered with dust, that reached to
+his knees. He held a smoking briar pipe in his hand, and with it beat
+time for a row of men sitting on a long stone under the store window and
+pounding on the sidewalk with their heels to make a chorus for the song.
+Sam’s smile broadened into a grin as he looked at the singer, Freedom
+Smith, a buyer of butter and eggs, and past him at John Telfer, the
+orator, the dandy, the only man in town, except Mike McCarthy, who kept
+his trousers creased. Among all the men of Caxton, Sam most admired
+John Telfer and in his admiration had struck upon the town’s high light.
+Telfer loved good clothes and wore them with an air, and never allowed
+Caxton to see him shabbily or indifferently dressed, laughingly
+declaring that it was his mission in life to give tone to the town.
+
+John Telfer had a small income left him by his father, once a banker
+in the town, and in his youth he had gone to New York to study art, and
+later to Paris; but lacking ability or industry to get on had come back
+to Caxton where he had married Eleanor Millis, a prosperous milliner.
+They were the most successful married pair in Caxton, and after years
+of life together they were still in love; were never indifferent to
+each other, and never quarrelled; Telfer treated his wife with as much
+consideration and respect as though she were a sweetheart, or a guest in
+his house, and she, unlike most of the wives in Caxton, never ventured
+to question his goings and comings, but left him free to live his own
+life in his own way while she attended to the millinery business.
+
+At the age of forty-five John Telfer was a tall, slender, fine looking
+man, with black hair and a little black pointed beard, and with
+something lazy and care-free in his every movement and impulse. Dressed
+in white flannels, with white shoes, a jaunty cap upon his head,
+eyeglasses hanging from a gold chain, and a cane lightly swinging from
+his hand, he made a figure that might have passed unnoticed on the
+promenade before some fashionable summer hotel, but that seemed a breach
+of the laws of nature when seen on the streets of a corn-shipping town
+in Iowa. And Telfer was aware of the extraordinary figure he cut; it was
+a part of his programme of life. Now as Sam approached he laid a hand on
+Freedom Smith’s shoulder to check the song, and, with his eyes twinkling
+with good-humour, began thrusting with his cane at the boy’s feet.
+
+“He will never be ruler of the queen’s navee,” he declared, laughing and
+following the dancing boy about in a wide circle. “He is a little mole
+that works underground intent upon worms. The trick he has of tilting up
+his nose is only his way of smelling out stray pennies. I have it from
+Banker Walker that he brings a basket of them into the bank every day.
+One of these days he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket.”
+
+Circling about on the stone sidewalk and dancing to escape the flying
+cane, Sam dodged under the arm of Valmore, a huge old blacksmith with
+shaggy clumps of hair on the back of his hands, and sought refuge
+between him and Freedom Smith. The blacksmith’s hand stole out and lay
+upon the boy’s shoulder. Telfer, his legs spread apart and the cane
+hooked upon his arm, began rolling a cigarette; Geiger, a yellow skinned
+man with fat cheeks and with hands clasped over his round paunch, smoked
+a black cigar, and as he sent each puff into the air, grunted forth his
+satisfaction with life. He was wishing that Telfer, Freedom Smith,
+and Valmore, instead of moving on to their nightly nest at the back of
+Wildman’s grocery, would come into his place for the evening. He
+thought he would like to have the three of them there night after night
+discussing the doings of the world.
+
+Quiet once more settled down upon the sleepy street. Over Sam’s
+shoulder, Valmore and Freedom Smith talked of the coming corn crop and
+the growth and prosperity of the country.
+
+“Times are getting better about here, but the wild things are almost
+gone,” said Freedom, who in the winter bought hides and pelts.
+
+The men sitting on the stone beneath the window watched with idle
+interest Telfer’s labours with paper and tobacco. “Young Henry Kerns
+has got married,” observed one of them, striving to make talk. “He
+has married a girl from over Parkertown way. She gives lessons in
+painting--china painting--kind of an artist, you know.”
+
+An ejaculation of disgust broke from Telfer: his fingers trembled and
+the tobacco that was to have been the foundation of his evening smoke
+rained on the sidewalk.
+
+“An artist!” he exclaimed, his voice tense with excitement. “Who said
+artist? Who called her that?” He glared fiercely about. “Let us have an
+end to this blatant misuse of fine old words. To say of one that he is
+an artist is to touch the peak of praise.”
+
+Throwing his cigarette paper after the scattered tobacco he thrust
+one hand into his trouser pocket. With the other he held the cane,
+emphasising his points by ringing taps upon the pavement. Geiger, taking
+the cigar between his fingers, listened with open mouth to the outburst
+that followed. Valmore and Freedom Smith dropped their conversation and
+with broad smiles upon their faces gave attention, and Sam McPherson,
+his eyes round with wonder and admiration, felt again the thrill that
+always ran through him under the drum beats of Telfer’s eloquence.
+
+“An artist is one who hungers and thirsts after perfection, not one
+who dabs flowers upon plates to choke the gullets of diners,” declared
+Telfer, setting himself for one of the long speeches with which he loved
+to astonish the men of Caxton, and glaring down at those seated upon the
+stone. “It is the artist who, among all men, has the divine audacity.
+Does he not hurl himself into a battle in which is engaged against him
+all of the accumulative genius of the world?”
+
+Pausing, he looked about for an opponent upon whom he might pour the
+flood of his eloquence, but on all sides smiles greeted him. Undaunted,
+he rushed again to the charge.
+
+“A business man--what is he?” he demanded. “He succeeds by outwitting
+the little minds with which he comes in contact. A scientist is of
+more account--he pits his brains against the dull unresponsiveness of
+inanimate matter and a hundredweight of black iron he makes do the work
+of a hundred housewives. But an artist tests his brains against the
+greatest brains of all times; he stands upon the peak of life and hurls
+himself against the world. A girl from Parkertown who paints flowers
+upon dishes to be called an artist--ugh! Let me spew forth the thought!
+Let me cleanse my mouth! A man should have a prayer upon his lips who
+utters the word artist!”
+
+“Well, we can’t all be artists and the woman can paint flowers upon
+dishes for all I care,” spoke up Valmore, laughing good naturedly. “We
+can’t all paint pictures and write books.”
+
+“We do not want to be artists--we do not dare to be,” shouted Telfer,
+whirling and shaking his cane at Valmore. “You have a misunderstanding
+of the word.”
+
+He straightened his shoulders and threw out his chest and the boy
+standing beside the blacksmith threw up his chin, unconsciously
+imitating the swagger of the man.
+
+“I do not paint pictures; I do not write books; yet am I an artist,”
+ declared Telfer, proudly. “I am an artist practising the most difficult
+of all arts--the art of living. Here in this western village I stand
+and fling my challenge to the world. ‘On the lip of not the greatest of
+you,’ I cry, ‘has life been more sweet.’”
+
+He turned from Valmore to the men upon the stone.
+
+“Make a study of my life,” he commanded. “It will be a revelation to
+you. With a smile I greet the morning; I swagger in the noontime; and
+in the evening, like Socrates of old, I gather a little group of you
+benighted villagers about me and toss wisdom into your teeth, striving
+to teach you judgment in the use of great words.”
+
+“You talk an almighty lot about yourself, John,” grumbled Freedom Smith,
+taking his pipe from his mouth.
+
+“The subject is complex, it is varied, it is full of charm,” Telfer
+answered, laughing.
+
+Taking a fresh supply of tobacco and paper from his pocket, he rolled
+and lighted a cigarette. His fingers no longer trembled. Flourishing his
+cane he threw back his head and blew smoke into the air. He thought
+that in spite of the roar of laughter that had greeted Freedom Smith’s
+comment, he had vindicated the honour of art and the thought made him
+happy.
+
+To the newsboy, who had been leaning against the storefront lost in
+admiration, it seemed that he had caught in Telfer’s talk an echo of the
+kind of talk that must go on among men in the big outside world. Had
+not this Telfer travelled far? Had he not lived in New York and Paris?
+Without understanding the sense of what had been said, Sam felt that it
+must be something big and conclusive. When from the distance there came
+the shriek of a locomotive, he stood unmoved, trying to comprehend the
+meaning of Telfer’s outburst over the lounger’s simple statement.
+
+“There’s the seven forty-five,” cried Telfer, sharply. “Is the war
+between you and Fatty at an end? Are we going to lose our evening’s
+diversion? Has Fatty bluffed you out or are you growing rich and lazy
+like Papa Geiger here?”
+
+Springing from his place beside the blacksmith and grasping the bundle
+of newspapers, Sam ran down the street, Telfer, Valmore, Freedom Smith
+and the loungers following more slowly.
+
+When the evening train from Des Moines stopped at Caxton, a blue-coated
+train news merchant leaped hurriedly to the platform and began looking
+anxiously about.
+
+“Hurry, Fatty,” rang out Freedom Smith’s huge voice, “Sam’s already half
+through one car.”
+
+The young man called “Fatty” ran up and down the station platform.
+“Where is that bundle of Omaha papers, you Irish loafer?” he shouted,
+shaking his fist at Jerry Donlin who stood upon a truck at the front of
+the train, up-ending trunks into the baggage car.
+
+Jerry paused with a trunk dangling in mid-air. “In the baggage-room, of
+course. Hurry, man. Do you want the kid to work the whole train?”
+
+An air of something impending hung over the idlers upon the platform,
+the train crew, and even the travelling men who began climbing off the
+train. The engineer thrust his head out of the cab; the conductor, a
+dignified looking man with a grey moustache, threw back his head and
+shook with mirth; a young man with a suit-case in his hand and a long
+pipe in his mouth ran to the door of the baggage-room, calling, “Hurry!
+Hurry, Fatty! The kid is working the entire train. You won’t be able to
+sell a paper.”
+
+The fat young man ran from the baggage-room to the platform and shouted
+again to Jerry Donlin, who was now slowly pushing the empty truck along
+the platform. From the train came a clear voice calling, “Latest Omaha
+papers! Have your change ready! Fatty, the train newsboy, has fallen
+down a well! Have your change ready, gentlemen!”
+
+Jerry Donlin, followed by Fatty, again disappeared from sight. The
+conductor, waving his hand, jumped upon the steps of the train. The
+engineer pulled in his head and the train began to move.
+
+The fat young man emerged from the baggage-room, swearing revenge upon
+the head of Jerry Donlin. “There was no need to put it under a mail
+sack!” he shouted, shaking his fist. “I’ll be even with you for this.”
+
+Followed by the shouts of the travelling men and the laughter of the
+idlers upon the platform he climbed upon the moving train and began
+running from car to car. Off the last car dropped Sam McPherson, a smile
+upon his lips, the bundle of newspapers gone, his pocket jingling with
+coins. The evening’s entertainment for the town of Caxton was at an end.
+
+John Telfer, standing by the side of Valmore, waved his cane in the air
+and began talking.
+
+“Beat him again, by Gad!” he exclaimed. “Bully for Sam! Who says the
+spirit of the old buccaneers is dead? That boy didn’t understand what I
+said about art, but he is an artist just the same!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Windy McPherson, the father of the Caxton newsboy, Sam McPherson, had
+been war touched. The civilian clothes that he wore caused an itching
+of the skin. He could not forget that he had once been a sergeant in a
+regiment of infantry and had commanded a company through a battle fought
+in ditches along a Virginia country road. He chafed under the fact of
+his present obscure position in life. Had he been able to replace his
+regimentals with the robes of a judge, the felt hat of a statesman, or
+even with the night stick of a village marshal life might have retained
+something of its sweetness, but to have ended by becoming an obscure
+housepainter in a village that lived by raising corn and by feeding that
+corn to red steers--ugh!--the thought made him shudder. He looked with
+envy at the blue coat and the brass buttons of the railroad agent; he
+tried vainly to get into the Caxton Cornet Band; he got drunk to forget
+his humiliation and in the end he fell to loud boasting and to the
+nursing of a belief within himself that in truth not Lincoln nor Grant
+but he himself had thrown the winning die in the great struggle. In his
+cups he said as much and the Caxton corn grower, punching his neighbour
+in the ribs, shook with delight over the statement.
+
+When Sam was a twelve year old, barefooted boy upon the streets a kind
+of backwash of the wave of glory that had swept over Windy McPherson in
+the days of ‘61 lapped upon the shores of the Iowa village. That strange
+manifestation called the A. P. A. movement brought the old soldier to
+a position of prominence in the community. He founded a local branch
+of the organisation; he marched at the head of a procession through the
+streets; he stood on a corner and pointing a trembling forefinger
+to where the flag on the schoolhouse waved beside the cross of Rome,
+shouted hoarsely, “See, the cross rears itself above the flag! We shall
+end by being murdered in our beds!”
+
+But although some of the hard-headed, money-making men of Caxton joined
+the movement started by the boasting old soldier and although for the
+moment they vied with him in stealthy creepings through the streets to
+secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands the movement
+subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its leader more
+desolate.
+
+In the little house at the end of the street by the shores of Squirrel
+Creek, Sam and his sister Kate regarded their father’s warlike
+pretensions with scorn. “The butter is low, father’s army leg will ache
+to-night,” they whispered to each other across the kitchen table.
+
+Following her mother’s example, Kate, a tall slender girl of sixteen
+and already a bread winner with a clerkship in Winney’s drygoods store,
+remained silent under Windy’s boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate
+them, did not always succeed. There was now and then a rebellious
+muttering that should have warned Windy. It had once burst into an open
+quarrel in which the victor of a hundred battles withdrew defeated from
+the field. Windy, half-drunk, had taken an old account book from a shelf
+in the kitchen, a relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when he had
+first come to Caxton, and had begun reading to the little family a list
+of names of men who, he claimed, had been the cause of his ruin.
+
+“There is Tom Newman, now,” he exclaimed excitedly. “Owns a hundred
+acres of good corn-growing land and won’t pay for the harness on the
+backs of his horses or for the ploughs in his barn. The receipt he has
+from me is forged. I could put him in prison if I chose. To beat an old
+soldier!--to beat one of the boys of ‘61!--it is shameful!”
+
+“I have heard of what you owed and what men owed you; you had none the
+worst of it,” Sam protested coldly, while Kate held her breath and Jane
+McPherson, at work over the ironing board in the corner, half turned and
+looked silently at the man and the boy, the slightly increased pallor of
+her long face the only sign that she had heard.
+
+Windy had not pressed the quarrel. Standing for a moment in the middle
+of the kitchen, holding the book in his hand, he looked from the pale
+silent mother by the ironing board to the son now standing and staring
+at him, and, throwing the book upon the table with a bang, fled the
+house. “You don’t understand,” he had cried, “you don’t understand the
+heart of a soldier.”
+
+In a way the man was right. The two children did not understand the
+blustering, pretending, inefficient old man. Having moved shoulder to
+shoulder with grim, silent men to the consummation of great deeds Windy
+could not get the flavour of those days out of his outlook upon life.
+Walking half drunk in the darkness along the sidewalks of Caxton on
+the evening of the quarrel the man became inspired. He threw back his
+shoulders and walked with martial tread; he drew an imaginary sword from
+its scabbard and waved it aloft; stopping, he aimed carefully at a body
+of imaginary men who advanced yelling toward him across a wheatfield; he
+felt that life in making him a housepainter in a farming village in Iowa
+and in giving him an unappreciative son had been cruelly unfair; he wept
+at the injustice of it.
+
+The American Civil War was a thing so passionate, so inflaming, so vast,
+so absorbing, it so touched to the quick the men and women of those
+pregnant days that but a faint echo of it has been able to penetrate
+down to our days and to our minds; no real sense of it has as yet crept
+into the pages of a printed book; it yet wants its Thomas Carlyle; and
+in the end we are put to the need of listening to old fellows boasting
+on our village streets to get upon our cheeks the living breath of it.
+For four years the men of American cities, villages and farms walked
+across the smoking embers of a burning land, advancing and receding as
+the flame of that universal, passionate, death-spitting thing swept down
+upon them or receded toward the smoking sky-line. Is it so strange that
+they could not come home and begin again peacefully painting houses or
+mending broken shoes? A something in them cried out. It sent them to
+bluster and boast upon the street corners. When people passing continued
+to think only of their brick laying and of their shovelling of corn
+into cars, when the sons of these war gods walking home at evening and
+hearing the vain boastings of the fathers began to doubt even the facts
+of the great struggle, a something snapped in their brains and they fell
+to chattering and shouting their vain boastings to all as they looked
+hungrily about for believing eyes.
+
+When our own Thomas Carlyle comes to write of our Civil War he will make
+much of our Windy McPhersons. He will see something big and pathetic in
+their hungry search for auditors and in their endless war talk. He
+will go filled with eager curiosity into little G. A. R. halls in the
+villages and think of the men who coming there night after night, year
+after year, told and re-told endlessly, monotonously, their story of
+battle.
+
+Let us hope that in his fervour for the old fellows he will not fail to
+treat tenderly the families of those veteran talkers; the families that
+with their breakfasts and their dinners, by the fire at evening, through
+fast day and feast day, at weddings and at funerals got again and again
+endlessly, everlastingly this flow of war words. Let him reflect that
+peaceful men in corn-growing counties do not by choice sleep among the
+dogs of war nor wash their linen in the blood of their country’s foe.
+Let him, in his sympathy with the talkers, remember with kindness the
+heroism of the listeners.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On a summer day Sam McPherson sat on a box before Wildman’s grocery lost
+in thought. In his hand he held the little yellow account book and in
+this he buried himself, striving to wipe from his consciousness a scene
+being enacted before his eyes upon the street.
+
+The realisation of the fact that his father was a confirmed liar and
+braggart had for years cast a shadow over his days and the shadow had
+been made blacker by the fact that in a land where the least fortunate
+can laugh in the face of want he had more than once stood face to face
+with poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation was
+money in the bank and with all the ardour of his boy’s heart he strove
+to realise that answer. He wanted to be a money-maker and the totals at
+the foot of the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones
+that marked the progress he had already made. They told him that the
+daily struggles with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton’s streets on
+bleak winter evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when crowds
+filled the stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he worked
+among them tirelessly and persistently were not without fruit.
+
+Suddenly, above the murmur of men’s voices on the street, his father’s
+voice rose loud and insistent. A block further down the street, leaning
+against the door of Hunter’s jewelry store, Windy talked at the top of
+his lungs, pumping his arms up and down with the air of a man making a
+stump speech.
+
+“He is making a fool of himself,” thought Sam, and returned to his
+bankbook, striving in the contemplation of the totals at the foot of the
+pages to shake off the dull anger that had begun to burn in his brain.
+Glancing up again, he saw that Joe Wildman, son of the grocer and a
+boy of his own age, had joined the group of men laughing and jeering at
+Windy. The shadow on Sam’s face grew heavier.
+
+Sam had been at Joe Wildman’s house; he knew the air of plenty and of
+comfort that hung over it; the table piled high with meat and potatoes;
+the group of children laughing and eating to the edge of gluttony; the
+quiet, gentle father who amid the clamour and the noise did not raise
+his voice, and the well-dressed, bustling, rosy-cheeked mother. As a
+contrast to this scene he began to call up in his mind a picture of
+life in his own home, getting a kind of perverted pleasure out of his
+dissatisfaction with it. He saw the boasting, incompetent father telling
+his endless tales of the Civil War and complaining of his wounds; the
+tall, stoop-shouldered, silent mother with the deep lines in her long
+face, everlastingly at work over her washtub among the soiled clothes;
+the silent, hurriedly-eaten meals snatched from the kitchen table; and
+the long winter days when ice formed upon his mother’s skirts and
+Windy idled about town while the little family subsisted upon bowls of
+cornmeal mush everlastingly repeated.
+
+Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half gone
+in drink, and knew that he was boasting of his part in the Civil War.
+“He is either doing that or telling of his aristocratic family or lying
+about his birthplace,” he thought resentfully, and unable any longer to
+endure the sight of what seemed to him his own degradation, he got up
+and went into the grocery where a group of Caxton citizens stood talking
+to Wildman of a meeting to be held that morning at the town hall.
+
+Caxton was to have a Fourth of July celebration. The idea, born in the
+heads of the few, had been taken up by the many. Rumours of it had run
+through the streets late in May. It had been talked of in Geiger’s drug
+store, at the back of Wildman’s grocery, and in the street before the
+New Leland House. John Telfer, the town’s one man of leisure, had
+for weeks been going from place to place discussing the details with
+prominent men. Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall over
+Geiger’s drug store and to a man the citizens of Caxton had turned out
+for the meeting. The housepainter had come down off his ladder, the
+clerks were locking the doors of the stores, men went along the streets
+in groups bound for the hall. As they went they shouted to each other.
+“The old town has woke up,” they called.
+
+On a corner by Hunter’s jewelry store Windy McPherson leaned against a
+building and harangued the passing crowd.
+
+“Let the old flag wave,” he shouted excitedly, “let the men of Caxton
+show the true blue and rally to the old standards.”
+
+“That’s right, Windy, expostulate with them,” shouted a wit, and a roar
+of laughter drowned Windy’s reply.
+
+Sam McPherson also went to the meeting in the hall. He came out of the
+grocery store with Wildman and went along the street looking at the
+sidewalk and trying not to see the drunken man talking in front of the
+jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up
+and down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the
+town’s life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned.
+He squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window
+ledge where he could watch the men come in and find seats.
+
+As Caxton’s one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a
+living and a kind of standing in the town’s life. To be a newsboy or a
+bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in
+the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great
+men and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day
+likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town owe to
+future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the men of Caxton
+and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the window ledge of the
+hall while the other boys of the town waited on the sidewalk below.
+
+John Telfer was chairman of the mass meeting. He was always chairman of
+public meetings in Caxton. The industrious silent men of position in
+the town envied his easy, bantering style of public address, while
+pretending to treat it with scorn. “He talks too much,” they said,
+making a virtue of their own inability with apt and clever words.
+
+Telfer did not wait to be appointed chairman of the meeting, but went
+forward, climbed the little raised platform at the end of the hall,
+and usurped the chairmanship. He walked up and down on the platform
+bantering with the crowd, answering gibes, calling to well-known men,
+getting and giving keen satisfaction with his talent. When the hall was
+filled with men he called the meeting to order, appointed committees and
+launched into a harangue. He told of plans made to advertise the big
+day in other towns and to get low railroad rates arranged for excursion
+parties. The programme, he said, included a musical carnival with brass
+bands from other towns, a sham battle by the military company at the
+fairgrounds, horse races, speeches from the steps of the town hall,
+and fireworks in the evening. “We’ll show them a live town here,” he
+declared, walking up and down the platform and swinging his cane, while
+the crowd applauded and shouted its approval.
+
+When a call came for voluntary subscriptions to pay for the fun, the
+audience quieted down. One or two men got up and started to go out,
+grumbling that it was a waste of money. The fate of the celebration was
+on the knees of the gods.
+
+Telfer arose to the occasion. He called out the names of the departing,
+and made jests at their expense so that they dropped back into their
+chairs unable to face the roaring laughter of the crowd, and shouted
+to a man at the back of the hall to close and bolt the door. Men began
+getting up in various parts of the hall and calling out sums, Telfer
+repeating the name and the amount in a loud voice to young Tom Jedrow,
+clerk in the bank, who wrote them down in a book. When the amount
+subscribed did not meet with his approval, he protested and the crowd
+backing him up forced the increase he demanded. When a man did not rise,
+he shouted at him and the man answered back an amount.
+
+Suddenly in the hall a diversion arose. Windy McPherson emerged from the
+crowd at the back of the hall and walked down the centre aisle to the
+platform. He walked unsteadily straightening his shoulders and thrusting
+out his chin. When he got to the front of the hall he took a roll of
+bills from his pocket and threw it on the platform at the chairman’s
+feet. “From one of the boys of ‘61,” he announced in a loud voice.
+
+The crowd shouted and clapped its hands with delight as Telfer picked
+up the bills and ran his finger over them. “Seventeen dollars from our
+hero, the mighty McPherson,” he shouted while the bank clerk wrote the
+name and the amount in the book and the crowd continued to make merry
+over the title given the drunken soldier by the chairman.
+
+The boy on the window ledge slipped to the floor and stood with burning
+cheeks behind the mass of men. He knew that at home his mother was
+doing a family washing for Lesley, the shoe merchant, who had given five
+dollars to the Fourth-of-July fund, and the resentment he had felt on
+seeing his father talking to the crowd before the jewelry store blazed
+up anew.
+
+After the taking of subscriptions, men in various parts of the hall
+began making suggestions for added features for the great day. To some
+of the speakers the crowd listened respectfully, at others they
+hooted. An old man with a grey beard told a long rambling story of a
+Fourth-of-July celebration of his boyhood. When voices interrupted he
+protested and shook his fist in the air, pale with indignation.
+
+“Oh, sit down, old daddy,” shouted Freedom Smith and a murmur of
+applause greeted this sensible suggestion.
+
+Another man got up and began to talk. He had an idea. “We will have,” he
+said, “a bugler mounted on a white horse who will ride through the town
+at dawn blowing the reveille. At midnight he will stand on the steps of
+the town hall and blow taps to end the day.”
+
+The crowd applauded. The idea had caught their fancy and had instantly
+taken a place in their minds as one of the real events of the day.
+
+Again Windy McPherson emerged from the crowd at the back of the hall.
+Raising his hand for silence he told the crowd that he was a bugler,
+that he had been a regimental bugler for two years during the Civil War.
+He said that he would gladly volunteer for the place.
+
+The crowd shouted and John Telfer waved his hand. “The white horse for
+you, McPherson,” he said.
+
+Sam McPherson wriggled along the wall and out at the now unbolted door.
+He was filled with astonishment at his father’s folly, and was still
+more astonished at the folly of these other men in accepting his
+statement and handing over the important place for the big day. He knew
+that his father must have had some part in the war as he was a member of
+the G. A. R., but he had no faith at all in the stories he had heard
+him relate of his experiences in the war. Sometimes he caught himself
+wondering if there ever had been such a war and thought that it must be
+a lie like everything else in the life of Windy McPherson. For years he
+had wondered why some sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did
+not rise, and in a matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing
+as the Civil War had ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in
+the minds of pompous old men demanding unearned glory of their fellows.
+Now hurrying along the street with burning cheeks, he decided that after
+all there must have been such a war. He had had the same feeling about
+birthplaces and there could be no doubt that people were born. He
+had heard his father claim as his birthplace Kentucky, Texas, North
+Carolina, Louisiana and Scotland. The thing had left a kind of defect in
+his mind. To the end of his life when he heard a man tell the place of
+his birth he looked up suspiciously, and a shadow of doubt crossed his
+mind.
+
+From the mass meeting Sam went home to his mother and presented the case
+bluntly. “The thing will have to be stopped,” he declared, standing
+with blazing eyes before her washtub. “It is too public. He can’t blow
+a bugle; I know he can’t. The whole town will have another laugh at our
+expense.”
+
+Jane McPherson listened in silence to the boy’s outburst, then, turning,
+went back to rubbing clothes, avoiding his eyes.
+
+With his hands thrust into his trousers pocket Sam stared sullenly at
+the ground. A sense of justice told him not to press the matter, but as
+he walked away from the washtub and out at the kitchen door, he hoped
+there would be plain talk of the matter at supper time. “The old fool!”
+ he protested, addressing the empty street. “He is going to make a show
+of himself again.”
+
+When Windy McPherson came home that evening, something in the eyes of
+the silent wife, and the sullen face of the boy, startled him. He passed
+over lightly his wife’s silence but looked closely at his son. He felt
+that he faced a crisis. In the emergency he was magnificent. With a
+flourish, he told of the mass meeting, and declared that the citizens
+of Caxton had arisen as one man to demand that he take the responsible
+place as official bugler. Then, turning, he glared across the table at
+his son.
+
+Sam, openly defiant, announced that he did not believe his father
+capable of blowing a bugle.
+
+Windy roared with amazement. He rose from the table declaring in a loud
+voice that the boy had wronged him; he swore that he had been for two
+years bugler on the staff of a colonel, and launched into a long story
+of a surprise by the enemy while his regiment lay asleep in their tents,
+and of his standing in the face of a storm of bullets and blowing his
+comrades to action. Putting one hand on his forehead he rocked back and
+forth as though about to fall, declaring that he was striving to
+keep back the tears wrenched from him by the injustice of his son’s
+insinuation and, shouting so that his voice carried far down the street,
+he declared with an oath that the town of Caxton should ring and echo
+with his bugling as the sleeping camp had echoed with it that night in
+the Virginia wood. Then dropping again into his chair, and resting his
+head upon his hand, he assumed a look of patient resignation.
+
+Windy McPherson was victorious. In the little house a great stir
+and bustle of preparation arose. Putting on his white overalls and
+forgetting for the time his honourable wounds the father went day after
+day to his work as a housepainter. He dreamed of a new blue uniform for
+the great day and in the end achieved the realisation of his dreams, not
+however without material assistance from what was known in the house
+as “Mother’s Wash Money.” And the boy, convinced by the story of the
+midnight attack in the woods of Virginia, began against his judgment to
+build once more an old dream of his father’s reformation. Boylike, the
+scepticism was thrown to the winds and he entered with zeal into the
+plans for the great day. As he went through the quiet residence streets
+delivering the late evening papers, he threw back his head and revelled
+in the thought of a tall blue-clad figure on a great white horse passing
+like a knight before the gaping people. In a fervent moment he even drew
+money from his carefully built-up bank account and sent it to a firm in
+Chicago to pay for a shining new bugle that would complete the picture
+he had in his mind. And when the evening papers were distributed he
+hurried home to sit on the porch before the house discussing with his
+sister Kate the honours that had alighted upon their family.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With the coming of dawn on the great day the three McPhersons hurried
+hand in hand toward Main Street. In the street, on all sides of them,
+they saw people coming out of houses rubbing their eyes and buttoning
+their coats as they went along the sidewalk. All of Caxton seemed
+abroad.
+
+In Main Street the people were packed on the sidewalk, and massed on the
+curb and in the doorways of the stores. Heads appeared at windows, flags
+waved from roofs or hung from ropes stretched across the street, and a
+great murmur of voices broke the silence of the dawn.
+
+Sam’s heart beat so that he was hard put to it to keep back the tears
+from his eyes. He thought with a gasp of the days of anxiety that had
+passed when the new bugle had not come from the Chicago company, and in
+retrospect he suffered again the horror of the days of waiting. It
+had been all important. He could not blame his father for raving and
+shouting about the house, he himself had felt like raving, and had put
+another dollar of his savings into telegrams before the treasure was
+finally in his hands. Now, the thought that it might not have come
+sickened him, and a little prayer of thankfulness rose from his lips.
+To be sure one might have been secured from a nearby town, but not a new
+shining one to go with his father’s new blue uniform.
+
+A cheer broke from the crowd massed along the street. Into the street
+rode a tall figure seated upon a white horse. The horse was from
+Culvert’s livery and the boys there had woven ribbons into its mane and
+tail. Windy McPherson, sitting very straight in the saddle and looking
+wonderfully striking in the new blue uniform and the broad-brimmed
+campaign hat, had the air of a conqueror come to receive the homage of
+the town. He wore a gold band across his chest and against his hip
+rested the shining bugle. With stern eyes he looked down upon the
+people.
+
+The lump in the throat of the boy hurt more and more. A great wave of
+pride ran over him, submerging him. In a moment he forgot all the past
+humiliations the father had brought upon his family, and understood
+why his mother remained silent when he, in his blindness, had wanted to
+protest against her seeming indifference. Glancing furtively up he saw
+a tear lying upon her cheek and felt that he too would like to sob aloud
+his pride and happiness.
+
+Slowly and with stately stride the horse walked up the street between
+the rows of silent waiting people. In front of the town hall the tall
+military figure, rising in the saddle, took one haughty look at the
+multitude, and then, putting the bugle to his lips, blew.
+
+Out of the bugle came only a thin piercing shriek followed by a squawk.
+Again Windy put the bugle to his lips and again the same dismal
+squawk was his only reward. On his face was a look of helpless boyish
+astonishment.
+
+And in a moment the people knew. It was only another of Windy
+McPherson’s pretensions. He couldn’t blow a bugle at all.
+
+A great shout of laughter rolled down the street. Men and women sat on
+the curbstones and laughed until they were tired. Then, looking at the
+figure upon the motionless horse, they laughed again.
+
+Windy looked about him with troubled eyes. It is doubtful if he had ever
+had a bugle to his lips until that moment, but he was filled with wonder
+and astonishment that the reveille did not roll forth. He had heard
+the thing a thousand times and had it clearly in his mind; with all his
+heart he wanted it to roll forth, and could picture the street ringing
+with it and the applause of the people; the thing, he felt, was in him,
+and it was only a fatal blunder in nature that it did not come out at
+the flaring end of the bugle. He was amazed at this dismal end of his
+great moment--he was always amazed and helpless before facts.
+
+The crowd began gathering about the motionless, astonished figure,
+laughter continuing to send them off into something near convulsions.
+Grasping the bridle of the horse, John Telfer began leading it off up
+the street. Boys whooped and shouted at the rider, “Blow! Blow!”
+
+The three McPhersons stood in a doorway leading into a shoe store. The
+boy and the mother, white and speechless with humiliation, dared not
+look at each other. In the flood of shame sweeping over them they stared
+straight before them with hard, stony eyes.
+
+The procession led by John Telfer at the bridle of the white horse
+marched down the street. Looking up, the eyes of the laughing, shouting
+man met those of the boy and a look of pain shot across his face.
+Dropping the bridle he hurried away through the crowd. The procession
+moved on, and watching their chance the mother and the two children
+crept home along side streets, Kate weeping bitterly. Leaving them at
+the door Sam went straight on down a sandy road toward a small wood.
+“I’ve got my lesson. I’ve got my lesson,” he muttered over and over as
+he went.
+
+At the edge of the wood he stopped and leaning on a rail fence watched
+until he saw his mother come out to the pump in the back yard. She had
+begun to draw water for the day’s washing. For her also the holiday was
+at an end. A flood of tears ran down the boy’s cheeks, and he shook his
+fist in the direction of the town. “You may laugh at that fool Windy,
+but you shall never laugh at Sam McPherson,” he cried, his voice shaking
+with excitement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+One evening, when he had grown so that he outtopped Windy, Sam McPherson
+returned from his paper route to find his mother arrayed in her black,
+church-going dress. An evangelist was at work in Caxton and she had
+decided to hear him. Sam shuddered. In the house it was an understood
+thing that when Jane McPherson went to church her son went with her.
+There was nothing said. Jane McPherson did all things without words,
+always there was nothing said. Now she stood waiting in her black
+dress when her son came in at the door and he hurriedly put on his best
+clothes and went with her to the brick church.
+
+Valmore, John Telfer, and Freedom Smith, who had taken upon themselves
+a kind of common guardianship of the boy and with whom he spent evening
+after evening at the back of Wildman’s grocery, did not go to church.
+They talked of religion and seemed singularly curious and interested in
+what other men thought on the subject but they did not allow themselves
+to be coaxed into a house of worship. To the boy, who had become a
+fourth member of the evening gatherings at the back of the grocery
+store, they would not talk of God, answering the direct questions he
+sometimes asked by changing the subject. Once Telfer, the reader of
+poetry, answered the boy. “Sell papers and fill your pockets with money
+but let your soul sleep,” he said sharply.
+
+In the absence of the others Wildman talked more freely. He was a
+spiritualist and tried to make Sam see the beauties of that faith.
+On long summer afternoons the grocer and the boy spent hours driving
+through the streets in a rattling old delivery wagon, the man striving
+earnestly to make clear to the boy the shadowy ideas of God that were in
+his mind.
+
+Although Windy McPherson had been the leader of a Bible class in his
+youth, and had been a moving spirit at revival meetings during his early
+days in Caxton, he no longer went to church and his wife did not ask
+him to go. On Sunday mornings he lay abed. If there was work to be done
+about the house or yard he complained of his wounds. He complained of
+his wounds when the rent fell due, and when there was a shortage of food
+in the house. Later in his life and after the death of Jane McPherson
+the old soldier married the widow of a farmer by whom he had four
+children and with whom he went to church twice on Sunday. Kate wrote
+Sam one of her infrequent letters about it. “He has met his match,” she
+said, and was tremendously pleased.
+
+In church on Sunday mornings Sam went regularly to sleep, putting his
+head on his mother’s arm and sleeping throughout the service. Jane
+McPherson loved to have the boy there beside her. It was the one thing
+in life they did together and she did not mind his sleeping the time
+away. Knowing how late he had been upon the streets at the paper selling
+on Saturday evenings, she looked at him with eyes filled with tenderness
+and sympathy. Once the minister, a man with brown beard and hard,
+tightly-closed mouth, spoke to her. “Can’t you keep him awake?” he
+asked impatiently. “He needs the sleep,” she said and hurried past the
+minister and out of the church, looking ahead of her and frowning.
+
+The evening of the evangelist meeting was a summer evening fallen on a
+winter month. All day the warm winds had come up from the southwest. Mud
+lay soft and deep in the streets and among the little pools of water
+on the sidewalks were dry spots from which steam arose. Nature had
+forgotten herself. A day that should have sent old fellows to their
+nests behind stoves in stores sent them forth to loaf in the sun. The
+night fell warm and cloudy. A thunder storm threatened in the month of
+February.
+
+Sam walked along the sidewalk with his mother bound for the brick
+church, wearing a new grey overcoat. The night did not demand the
+overcoat but Sam wore it out of an excess of pride in its possession.
+The overcoat had an air. It had been made by Gunther the tailor after a
+design sketched on the back of a piece of wrapping paper by John Telfer
+and had been paid for out of the newsboy’s savings. The little
+German tailor, after a talk with Valmore and Telfer, had made it at a
+marvellously low price. Sam swaggered as he walked.
+
+He did not sleep in church that evening; indeed he found the quiet
+church filled with a medley of strange noises. Folding carefully the new
+coat and laying it beside him on the seat he looked with interest at
+the people, feeling within him something of the nervous excitement with
+which the air was charged. The evangelist, a short, athletic-looking man
+in a grey business suit, seemed to the boy out of place in the church.
+He had the assured business-like air of the travelling men who come to
+the New Leland House, and Sam thought he looked like a man who had goods
+to be sold. He did not stand quietly back of the pulpit giving out the
+text as did the brown-bearded minister, nor did he sit with closed eyes
+and clasped hands waiting for the choir to finish singing. While the
+choir sang he ran up and down the platform waving his arms and shouting
+excitedly to the people on the church benches, “Sing! Sing! Sing! For
+the glory of God, sing!”
+
+When the song was finished, he began talking, quietly at first, of life
+in the town. As he talked he grew more and more excited. “The town is a
+cesspool of vice!” he shouted. “It reeks with evil! The devil counts it
+a suburb of hell!”
+
+His voice rose, and sweat ran off his face. A sort of frenzy seized him.
+He pulled off his coat and throwing it over a chair ran up and down the
+platform and into the aisles among the people, shouting, threatening,
+pleading. People began to stir uneasily in their seats. Jane McPherson
+stared stonily at the back of the woman in front of her. Sam was
+horribly frightened.
+
+The newsboy of Caxton was not without a hunger for religion. Like all
+boys he thought much and often of death. In the night he sometimes
+awakened cold with fear, thinking that death must be just without the
+door of his room waiting for him. When in the winter he had a cold and
+coughed, he trembled at the thought of tuberculosis. Once, when he was
+taken with a fever, he fell asleep and dreamed that he had died and was
+walking on the trunk of a fallen tree over a ravine filled with lost
+souls that shrieked with terror. When he awoke he prayed. Had some one
+come into his room and heard his prayer he would have been ashamed.
+
+On winter evenings as he walked through the dark streets with the papers
+under his arm he thought of his soul. As he thought a tenderness came
+over him; a lump came into his throat and he pitied himself; he felt
+that there was something missing in his life, something he wanted very
+badly.
+
+Under John Telfer’s influence, the boy, who had quit school to devote
+himself to money making, read Walt Whitman and had a season of admiring
+his own body with its straight white legs, and the head that was poised
+so jauntily on the body. Sometimes he would awaken on summer nights and
+be so filled with strange longing that he would creep out of bed and,
+pushing open the window, sit upon the floor, his bare legs sticking out
+beyond his white nightgown, and, thus sitting, yearn eagerly toward some
+fine impulse, some call, some sense of bigness and of leadership that
+was absent from the necessities of the life he led. He looked at the
+stars and listened to the night noises, so filled with longing that the
+tears sprang to his eyes.
+
+Once, after the affair of the bugle, Jane McPherson had been ill--and
+the first touch of the finger of death reaching out to her--had sat with
+her son in the warm darkness in the little grass plot at the front of
+the house. It was a clear, warm, starlit evening without a moon, and as
+the two sat closely together a sense of the coming of death crept over
+the mother.
+
+At the evening meal Windy McPherson had talked voluminously, ranting
+and shouting about the house. He said that a housepainter who had a real
+sense of colour had no business trying to work in a hole like Caxton.
+He had been in trouble with a housewife about a colour he had mixed for
+painting a porch floor and at his own table he raved about the woman
+and what he declared her lack of even a primitive sense of colour. “I
+am sick of it all,” he shouted, going out of the house and up the street
+with uncertain steps. His wife had been unmoved by his outburst, but in
+the presence of the quiet boy whose chair touched her own she trembled
+with a strange new fear and began to talk of the life after death,
+making effort after effort to get at what she wanted to say, and only
+succeeding in finding expression for her thoughts in little sentences
+broken by long painful pauses. She told the boy she had no doubt at all
+that there was some kind of future life and that she believed she should
+see and live with him again after they had finished with this world.
+
+One day the minister who had been annoyed because he had slept in his
+church, stopped Sam on the street to talk to him of his soul. He said
+that the boy should be thinking of making himself one of the brothers in
+Christ by joining the church. Sam listened silently to the talk of the
+man, whom he instinctively disliked, but in his silence felt there was
+something insincere. With all his heart he wanted to repeat a sentence
+he had heard from the lips of grey-haired, big-fisted Valmore--“How can
+they believe and not lead a life of simple, fervent devotion to their
+belief?” He thought himself superior to the thin-lipped man who talked
+with him and had he been able to express what was in his heart he might
+have said, “Look here, man! I am made of different stuff from all the
+people there at the church. I am new clay to be moulded into a new man.
+Not even my mother is like me. I do not accept your ideas of life just
+because you say they are good any more than I accept Windy McPherson
+just because he happens to be my father.”
+
+During one winter Sam spent evening after evening reading the Bible in
+his room. It was after Kate’s marriage--she had got into an affair with
+a young farmer that had kept her name upon the tongues of whisperers for
+months but was now a housewife on a farm at the edge of a village some
+miles from Caxton, and the mother was again at her endless task among
+the soiled clothes in the kitchen and Windy McPherson off drinking and
+boasting about town. Sam read the book in secret. He had a lamp on a
+little stand beside his bed and a novel, lent him by John Telfer, beside
+it. When his mother came up the stairway he slipped the Bible under
+the cover of the bed and became absorbed in the novel. He thought it
+something not quite in keeping with his aims as a business man and a
+money getter to be concerned about his soul. He wanted to conceal his
+concern but with all his heart wanted to get hold of the message of
+the strange book, about which men wrangled hour after hour on winter
+evenings in the store.
+
+He did not get it; and after a time he stopped reading the book. Left to
+himself he might have sensed its meaning, but on all sides of him were
+the voices of the men--the men at Wildman’s who owned to no faith and
+yet were filled with dogmatisms as they talked behind the stove in the
+grocery; the brown-bearded, thin-lipped minister in the brick church;
+the shouting, pleading evangelists who came to visit the town in
+the winter; the gentle old grocer who talked vaguely of the spirit
+world,--all these voices were at the mind of the boy pleading,
+insisting, demanding, not that Christ’s simple message that men love
+one another to the end, that they work together for the common good, be
+accepted, but that their own complex interpretation of his word be taken
+to the end that souls be saved.
+
+In the end the boy of Caxton got to the place where he had a dread
+of the word soul. It seemed to him that the mention of the word in
+conversation was something shameful and to think of the word or the
+shadowy something for which the word stood an act of cowardice. In his
+mind the soul became a thing to be hidden away, covered up, not thought
+of. One might be allowed to speak of the matter at the moment of death,
+but for the healthy man or boy to have the thought of his soul in
+his mind or word of it on his lips--one might better become blatantly
+profane and go to the devil with a swagger. With delight he imagined
+himself as dying and with his last breath tossing a round oath into the
+air of his death chamber.
+
+In the meantime Sam continued to have inexplicable longings and hopes.
+He kept surprising himself by the changing aspect of his own viewpoint
+of life. He found himself indulging in the most petty meannesses, and
+following these with flashes of a kind of loftiness of mind. Looking at
+a girl passing in the street, he had unbelievably mean thoughts; and the
+next day, passing the same girl, a line caught from the babbling of John
+Telfer came to his lips and he went his way muttering, “June’s twice
+June since she breathed it with me.”
+
+And then into the complex nature of this boy came the sex motive.
+Already he dreamed of having women in his arms. He looked shyly at the
+ankles of women crossing the street, and listened eagerly when the crowd
+about the stove in Wildman’s fell to telling smutty stories. He sank
+to unbelievable depths of triviality in sordidness, looking shyly into
+dictionaries for words that appealed to the animal lust in his queerly
+perverted mind and, when he came across it, lost entirely the beauty of
+the old Bible tale of Ruth in the suggestion of intimacy between man and
+woman that it brought to him. And yet Sam McPherson was no evil-minded
+boy. He had, as a matter of fact, a quality of intellectual honesty that
+appealed strongly to the clean-minded, simple-hearted old blacksmith
+Valmore; he had awakened something like love in the hearts of the women
+school teachers in the Caxton schools, at least one of whom continued
+to interest herself in him, taking him with her on walks along country
+roads, and talking to him constantly of the development of his mind; and
+he was the friend and boon companion of Telfer, the dandy, the reader of
+poems, the keen lover of life. The boy was struggling to find himself.
+One night when the sex call kept him awake he got up and dressed, and
+went and stood in the rain by the creek in Miller’s pasture. The wind
+swept the rain across the face of the water and a sentence flashed
+through his mind: “The little feet of the rain run on the water.” There
+was a quality of almost lyrical beauty in the Iowa boy.
+
+And this boy, who couldn’t get hold of his impulse toward God, whose sex
+impulses made him at times mean, at times full of beauty, and who had
+decided that the impulse toward bargaining and money getting was the
+impulse in him most worth cherishing, now sat beside his mother in
+church and watched with wide-open eyes the man who took off his coat,
+who sweated profusely, and who called the town in which he lived a
+cesspool of vice and its citizens wards of the devil.
+
+The evangelist from talking of the town began talking instead of heaven
+and hell and his earnestness caught the attention of the listening boy
+who began seeing pictures.
+
+Into his mind there came a picture of a burning pit of fire in which
+great flames leaped about the heads of the people who writhed in the
+pit. “Art Sherman would be there,” thought Sam, materialising the
+picture he saw; “nothing can save him; he keeps a saloon.”
+
+Filled with pity for the man he saw in the picture of the burning pit,
+his mind centered on the person of Art Sherman. He liked Art Sherman.
+More than once he had felt the touch of human kindness in the man. The
+roaring, blustering saloonkeeper had helped the boy sell and collect
+for newspapers. “Pay the kid or get out of the place,” the red-faced man
+roared at drunken men leaning on the bar.
+
+And then, looking into the burning pit, Sam thought of Mike McCarthy,
+for whom he had at that moment a kind of passion akin to a young girl’s
+blind devotion to her lover. With a shudder he realised that Mike also
+would go into the pit, for he had heard Mike laughing at churches and
+declaring there was no God.
+
+The evangelist ran upon the platform and called to the people demanding
+that they stand upon their feet. “Stand up for Jesus,” he shouted;
+“stand up and be counted among the host of the Lord God.”
+
+In the church people began getting to their feet. Jane McPherson stood
+with the others. Sam did not stand. He crept behind his mother’s dress,
+hoping to pass through the storm unnoticed. The call to the faithful to
+stand was a thing to be complied with or resisted as the people might
+wish; it was something entirely outside of himself. It did not occur to
+him to count himself among either the lost or the saved.
+
+Again the choir began singing and a businesslike movement began among
+the people. Men and women went up and down the aisles clasping the hands
+of people in the pews, talking and praying aloud. “Welcome among us,”
+ they said to certain ones who stood upon their feet. “It gladdens our
+hearts to see you among us. We are happy at seeing you in the fold among
+the saved. It is good to confess Jesus.”
+
+Suddenly a voice from the bench back of him struck terror to Sam’s
+heart. Jim Williams, who worked in Sawyer’s barber shop, was upon his
+knees and in a loud voice was praying for the soul of Sam McPherson.
+“Lord, help this erring boy who goes up and down in the company of
+sinners and publicans,” he shouted.
+
+In a moment the terror of death and the fiery pit that had possessed him
+passed, and Sam was filled instead with blind, dumb rage. He remembered
+that this same Jim Williams had treated lightly the honour of his sister
+at the time of her disappearance, and he wanted to get upon his feet and
+pour out his wrath on the head of the man, who, he felt, had betrayed
+him. “They would not have seen me,” he thought; “this is a fine trick
+Jim Williams has played me. I shall be even with him for this.”
+
+He got to his feet and stood beside his mother. He had no qualms about
+passing himself off as one of the lambs safely within the fold. His mind
+was bent upon quieting Jim Williams’ prayers and avoiding the attention
+of the people.
+
+The minister began calling on the standing people to testify of their
+salvation. From various parts of the church the people spoke out, some
+loudly and boldly and with a ring of confidence in their voices, some
+tremblingly and hesitatingly. One woman wept loudly shouting between the
+paroxysms of sobbing that seized her, “The weight of my sins is heavy on
+my soul.” Girls and young men when called on by the minister responded
+with shamed, hesitating voices asking that a verse of some hymn be sung,
+or quoting a line of scripture.
+
+At the back of the church the evangelist with one of the deacons and two
+or three women had gathered about a small, black-haired woman, the wife
+of a baker to whom Sam delivered papers. They were urging her to rise
+and get within the fold, and Sam turned and watched her curiously, his
+sympathy going out to her. With all his heart he hoped that she would
+continue doggedly shaking her head.
+
+Suddenly the irrepressible Jim Williams broke forth again. A quiver
+ran over Sam’s body and the blood rose to his cheeks. “Here is another
+sinner saved,” shouted Jim, pointing to the standing boy. “Count this
+boy, Sam McPherson, in the fold among the lambs.”
+
+On the platform the brown-bearded minister stood upon a chair and looked
+over the heads of the people. An ingratiating smile played about his
+lips. “Let us hear from the young man, Sam McPherson,” he said, raising
+his hand for silence, and, then, encouragingly, “Sam, what have you to
+say for the Lord?”
+
+Become the centre for the attention of the people in the church Sam
+was terror-stricken. The rage against Jim Williams was forgotten in the
+spasm of fear that seized him. He looked over his shoulder to the door
+at the back of the church and thought longingly of the quiet street
+outside. He hesitated, stammered, grew more red and uncertain,
+and finally burst out: “The Lord,” he said, and then looked about
+hopelessly, “the Lord maketh me to lie out in green pastures.”
+
+In the seats behind him a titter arose. A young woman sitting among the
+singers in the choir put her handkerchief to her face and throwing back
+her head rocked back and forth. A man near the door guffawed loudly and
+went hurriedly out. All over the church people began laughing.
+
+Sam turned his eyes upon his mother. She was staring straight ahead of
+her, and her face was red. “I’m going out of this place and I’m never
+coming back again,” he whispered, and, stepping into the aisle, walked
+boldly toward the door. He had made up his mind that if the evangelist
+tried to stop him he would fight. At his back he felt the rows of people
+looking at him and smiling. The laughter continued.
+
+In the street he hurried along consumed with indignation. “I’ll never
+go into any church again,” he swore, shaking his fist in the air.
+The public avowals he had heard in the church seemed to him cheap and
+unworthy. He wondered why his mother stayed in there. With a sweep of
+his arm he dismissed all the people in the church. “It is a place to
+make public asses of the people,” he thought.
+
+Sam McPherson wandered through Main Street, dreading to meet Valmore and
+John Telfer. Finding the chairs back of the stove in Wildman’s grocery
+deserted, he hurried past the grocer and hid in a corner. Tears of wrath
+stood in his eyes. He had been made a fool of. He imagined the scene
+that would go on when he came upon the street with the papers the next
+morning. Freedom Smith would be there sitting in the old worn buggy and
+roaring so that all the street would listen and laugh. “Going to lie out
+in any green pastures to-night, Sam?” he would shout. “Ain’t you afraid
+you’ll take cold?” By Geiger’s drug store would stand Valmore and
+Telfer, eager to join in the fun at his expense. Telfer would pound on
+the side of the building with his cane and roar with laughter. Valmore
+would make a trumpet of his hands and shout after the fleeing boy. “Do
+you sleep out alone in them green pastures?” Freedom Smith would roar
+again.
+
+Sam got up and went out of the grocery. As he hurried along, blind with
+wrath, he felt he would like a stand-up fight with some one. And, then,
+hurrying and avoiding the people, he merged with the crowd on the street
+and became a witness to the strange thing that happened that night in
+Caxton.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Main Street hushed people stood about in groups talking. The air
+was heavy with excitement. Solitary figures went from group to group
+whispering hoarsely. Mike McCarthy, the man who had denied God and
+who had won a place for himself in the affection of the newsboy, had
+assaulted a man with a pocket knife and had left him bleeding and
+wounded beside a country road. Something big and sensational had
+happened in the life of the town.
+
+Mike McCarthy and Sam were friends. For years the man had idled upon the
+streets of the town, loitering about, boasting and talking. He had sat
+for hours in a chair under a tree before the New Leland House, reading
+books, doing tricks with cards, engaging in long discussions with John
+Telfer or any who would stand up to him.
+
+Mike McCarthy got into trouble in a fight over a woman. A young farmer
+living at the edge of Caxton had come home from the fields to find his
+wife in the bold Irishman’s arms and the two men had gone out of the
+house together to fight in the road. The woman, weeping in the house,
+followed to ask forgiveness of her husband. Running in the gathering
+darkness along the road she had found him cut and bleeding terribly,
+lying in a ditch under a hedge. On down the road she ran and appeared at
+the door of a neighbour, screaming and calling for help.
+
+The story of the fight in the road got to Caxton just as Sam came out of
+the corner, back of the stove in Wildman’s and appeared on the street.
+Men ran from store to store and from group to group along the street
+saying that the young farmer had died and that murder had been done. On
+a street corner Windy McPherson harangued the crowd declaring that the
+men of Caxton should arise in the defence of their homes and string the
+murderer to a lamp post. Hop Higgins, driving a horse from Culvert’s
+livery, appeared on Main Street. “He will be at the McCarthy farm,” he
+shouted. When several men, coming out of Geiger’s drug store, stopped
+the marshal’s horse, saying, “You will have trouble out there; you had
+better take help,” the little red-faced marshal with the crippled leg
+laughed. “What trouble?” he asked--“To get Mike McCarthy? I shall ask
+him to come and he will come. The rest of that lot won’t cut any figure.
+Mike can wrap the entire McCarthy family around his finger.”
+
+There were six of the McCarthy men, all, except Mike, silent, sullen
+men who only talked when they were in liquor. Mike furnished the town’s
+social touch with the family. It was a strange family to live there
+in that fat, corn-growing country, a family with something savage and
+primitive about it, one that belonged among western mining camps or
+among the half savage dwellers in deep alleys in cities, and the fact
+that it lived on a corn farm in Iowa was, in the words of John Telfer,
+“something monstrous in Nature.”
+
+The McCarthy farm, lying some four miles east of Caxton, had once
+contained a thousand acres of good corn-growing land. Lem McCarthy, the
+father of the family, had inherited it from a brother, a gold miner,
+a forty-niner, a sport owning fast horses, who planned to breed race
+horses on the Iowa land. Lem had come out of the back streets of an
+eastern city, bringing his brood of tall, silent, savage boys to live
+upon the land and, like the forty-niner, to be a sport. Thinking the
+wealth that had come to him vast beyond spending, he had plunged into
+horse racing and gambling. When, within two years, five hundred acres
+of the farm had to be sold to pay gambling debts, and the wide acres lay
+covered with weeds, Lem became alarmed, and settled down to hard work,
+the boys working all day in the field and at long intervals coming
+into town at night to get into trouble. Having no mother or sister, and
+knowing that no Caxton woman could be hired to go upon the place, they
+did their own housework; and on rainy days sat about the old farmhouse
+playing cards and fighting. On other days they would stand around the
+bar in Art Sherman’s saloon in Piety Hollow drinking until they had lost
+their savage silence and had become loud and quarrelsome, going from
+there upon the streets to seek trouble. Once, going into Hayner’s
+restaurant, they took stacks of plates from shelves back of the counter
+and, standing in the doorway, threw them at people passing in the
+street, the crash of the breaking crockery accompanying their roaring
+laughter. When they had driven the people to cover they got upon their
+horses and with wild shouts raced up and down Main Street between the
+rows of tied horses until Hop Higgins, the town marshal, appeared, when
+they rode off into the country awakening the farmers along the darkened
+road as they fled, shouting and singing, toward home.
+
+When the McCarthy boys got into trouble in Caxton, old Lem McCarthy
+drove into town and got them out of it, paying for the damage done and
+going about declaring the boys meant no harm. When told to keep them out
+of town he shook his head and said he would try.
+
+Mike McCarthy did not ride swearing and singing with the five brothers
+along the dark road. He did not work all day in the hot corn fields. He
+was the family gentleman, and, wearing good clothes, strolled instead
+upon the street or loitered in the shade before the New Leland House.
+Mike had been educated. For some years he had attended a college in
+Indiana from which he was expelled for an affair with a woman. After his
+return from college he stayed in Caxton, living at the hotel and making
+a pretence of studying law in the office of old Judge Reynolds. He paid
+slight attention to the study of law, but with infinite patience had so
+trained his hands that he became wonderfully dexterous with coins and
+cards, plucking them out of the air and making them appear in the shoes,
+the hats, and even in the mouths, of bystanders. During the day he
+walked the streets looking at the girl clerks in the stores, or stood
+upon the station platform waving his hand to women passengers on passing
+trains. He told John Telfer that the flattery of women was a lost art
+that he intended to restore. Mike McCarthy carried in his pockets books
+which he read sitting in a chair before the hotel or on the stones
+before store windows. When on Saturdays the streets were filled with
+people, he stood on the corners giving gratuitous performances of his
+magical art with cards and coins, and eyeing country girls in the crowd.
+Once, a woman, the town stationer’s wife, shouted at him, calling him
+a lazy lout, whereupon he threw a coin in the air, and when it did not
+come down rushed toward her shouting, “She has it in her stocking.” When
+the stationer’s wife ran into her shop and banged the door the crowd
+laughed and shouted with delight.
+
+Telfer had a liking for the tall, grey-eyed, loitering McCarthy
+and sometimes sat with him discussing a novel or a poem; Sam in the
+background listened eagerly. Valmore did not care for the man, shaking
+his head and declaring that such a fellow could come to no good end.
+
+The rest of the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this,
+sunned himself in the town’s displeasure. For the sake of the public
+furor it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist,
+an anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone
+cared greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations
+of his passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in
+Wildman’s grocery store he would stand whipping them into a frenzy by
+declaring for free love, and vowing that he would have the best of any
+woman who gave him the chance.
+
+For this man the frugal, hard working newsboy had conceived a regard
+amounting to a passion. As he listened to McCarthy he got continuous
+delightful little thrills. “There is nothing he would not dare,” thought
+the boy. “He is the freest, the boldest, the bravest man in town.”
+ When the young Irishman, seeing the admiration in his eyes, flung him
+a silver dollar saying, “That is for your fine brown eyes, my boy; it
+I had them I would have half the women in town after me,” Sam kept the
+dollar in his pocket and counted it a kind of treasure like the rose
+given a lover by his sweetheart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was past eleven o’clock when Hop Higgins returned to town with
+McCarthy, driving quietly along the street and through an alley at the
+back of the town hall. The crowd upon the street had broken up. Sam had
+gone from one to another of the muttering groups, his heart quaking with
+fear. Now he stood at the back of the mass of men gathered at the jail
+door. An oil lamp, burning at the top of the post above the door, threw
+dancing, flickering lights on the faces of the men before him. The
+thunder storm that had threatened had not come, but the unnatural warm
+wind continued and the sky overhead was inky black.
+
+Through the alley, to the jail door, drove the town marshal, the young
+McCarthy sitting in the buggy beside him. A man rushed forward to hold
+the horse. McCarthy’s face was chalky white. He laughed and shouted,
+raising his hand toward the sky.
+
+“I am Michael, son of God. I have cut a man with a knife so that his
+red blood ran upon the ground. I am the son of God and this filthy jail
+shall be my sanctuary. In there I shall talk aloud with my Father,” he
+roared hoarsely, shaking his fist at the crowd. “Sons of this cesspool
+of respectability, stay and hear! Send for your females and let them
+stand in the presence of a man!”
+
+Taking the white, wild-eyed man by the arm Marshal Higgins led him into
+the jail, the clank of locks, the low murmur of the voice of Higgins and
+the wild laughter of McCarthy floating out to the group of silent men
+standing in the mud of the alley.
+
+Sam McPherson ran past the group of men to the side of the jail and
+finding John Telfer and Valmore leaning silently against the wall of
+Tom Folger’s wagon shop slipped between them. Telfer put out his arm and
+laid it upon the boy’s shoulder. Hop Higgins, coming out of the jail,
+addressed the crowd. “Don’t answer if he talks,” he said; “he is as
+crazy as a loon.”
+
+Sam moved closer to Telfer. The voice of the imprisoned man, loud,
+and filled with a startling boldness, rolled out of the jail. He began
+praying.
+
+“Hear me, Father Almighty, who has permitted this town of Caxton to
+exist and has let me, Thy son, grow to manhood. I am Michael, Thy son.
+They have put me in this jail where rats run across the floor and
+they stand in the mud outside as I talk with Thee. Are you there, old
+Truepenny?”
+
+A breath of cold air blew up the alley followed by a flaw of rain. The
+group under the flickering lamp by the jail entrance drew back against
+the walls of the building. Sam could see them dimly, pressing closely
+against the wall. The man in the jail laughed loudly.
+
+“I have had a philosophy of life, O Father,” he shouted. “I have seen
+men and women here living year after year without children. I have seen
+them hoarding pennies and denying Thee new life on which to work Thy
+will. To these women I have gone secretly talking of carnal love. With
+them I have been gentle and kind; them I have flattered.”
+
+A roaring laugh broke from the lips of the imprisoned man. “Are you
+there, oh dwellers in the cesspool of respectability?” he shouted. “Do
+you stand in the mud with cold feet listening? I have been with your
+wives. Eleven Caxton wives without babes have I been with and it has
+been fruitless. The twelfth woman I have just left, leaving her man in
+the road a bleeding sacrifice to thee. I shall call out the names of the
+eleven. I shall have revenge also upon the husbands of the women, some
+of whom wait with the others in the mud outside.”
+
+He began calling off the names of Caxton wives. A shudder ran through
+the body of the boy, sensitised by the new chill in the air and by the
+excitement of the night. Among the men standing along the wall of the
+jail a murmur arose. Again they grouped themselves under the flickering
+light by the jail door, disregarding the rain. Valmore, stumbling out of
+the darkness beside Sam, stood before Telfer. “The boy should be going
+home,” he said; “this isn’t fit for him to hear.”
+
+Telfer laughed and drew Sam closer to him. “He has heard enough lies in
+this town,” he said. “Truth won’t hurt him. I would not go myself, nor
+would you, and the boy shall not go. This McCarthy has a brain. Although
+he is half insane now he is trying to work something out. The boy and I
+will stay to hear.”
+
+The voice from the jail continued calling out the names of Caxton wives.
+Voices in the group before the jail door began shouting: “This should be
+stopped. Let us tear down the jail.”
+
+McCarthy laughed aloud. “They squirm, oh Father, they squirm; I have
+them in the pit and I torture them,” he cried.
+
+An ugly feeling of satisfaction came over Sam. He had a sense of the
+fact that the names shouted from the jail would be repeated over and
+over through the town. One of the women whose names had been called out
+had stood with the evangelist at the back of the church trying to induce
+the wife of the baker to rise and be counted in the fold with the lambs.
+
+The rain, falling on the shoulders of the men by the jail door, changed
+to hail, the air grew colder and the hailstones rattled on the roofs of
+buildings. Some of the men joined Telfer and Valmore, talking in low,
+excited voices. “And Mary McKane, too, the hypocrite,” Sam heard one of
+them say.
+
+The voice inside the jail changed. Still praying, Mike McCarthy seemed
+also to be talking to the group in the darkness outside.
+
+“I am sick of my life. I have sought leadership and have not found
+it. Oh Father! Send down to men a new Christ, one to get hold of us, a
+modern Christ with a pipe in his mouth who will swear and knock us about
+so that we vermin who pretend to be made in Thy image will understand.
+Let him go into churches and into courthouses, into cities, and into
+towns like this, shouting, ‘Be ashamed! Be ashamed of your cowardly
+concern over your snivelling souls!’ Let him tell us that never will our
+lives, so miserably lived, be repeated after our bodies lie rotting in
+the grave.”
+
+A sob broke from his lips and a lump came into Sam’s throat.
+
+“Oh Father! help us men of Caxton to understand that we have only this,
+our lives, this life so warm and hopeful and laughing in the sun, this
+life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls
+with their long legs and freckles on their noses, that are meant to
+carry life within themselves, new life, kicking and stirring, and waking
+them at night.”
+
+The voice of the prayer broke. Wild sobs took the place of speech.
+“Father!” shouted the broken voice, “I have taken a life, a man that
+moved and talked and whistled in the sunshine on winter mornings; I have
+killed.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The voice inside the jail became inaudible. Silence, broken by low sobs
+from the jail, fell on the little dark alley and the listening men began
+going silently away. The lump in Sam’s throat grew larger. Tears stood
+in his eyes. He went with Telfer and Valmore out of the alley and into
+the street, the two men walking in silence. The rain had ceased and a
+cold wind blew.
+
+The boy felt that he had been shriven. His mind, his heart, even his
+tired body seemed strangely cleansed. He felt a new affection for Telfer
+and Valmore. When Telfer began talking he listened eagerly, thinking
+that at last he understood him and knew why men like Valmore, Wildman,
+Freedom Smith, and Telfer loved each other and went on being friends
+year after year in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings. He
+thought that he had got hold of the idea of brotherhood that John Telfer
+talked of so often and so eloquently. “Mike McCarthy is only a brother
+who has gone the dark road,” he thought and felt a glow of pride in the
+thought and in the apt expression of it in his mind.
+
+John Telfer, forgetting the boy, talked soberly to Valmore, the two men
+stumbling along in the darkness intent upon their own thoughts.
+
+“It is an odd thought,” said Telfer and his voice seemed far away and
+unnatural like the voice from the jail; “it is an odd thought that but
+for a quirk in the brain this Mike McCarthy might himself have been a
+kind of Christ with a pipe in his mouth.”
+
+Valmore stumbled and half fell in the darkness at a street crossing.
+Telfer went on talking.
+
+“The world will some day grope its way into some kind of an
+understanding of its extraordinary men. Now they suffer terribly. In
+success or in such failures as has come to this imaginative, strangely
+perverted Irishman their lot is pitiful. It is only the common, the
+plain, unthinking man who slides peacefully through this troubled
+world.”
+
+At the house Jane McPherson sat waiting for her boy. She was thinking of
+the scene in the church and a hard light was in her eyes. Sam went
+past the sleeping room of his parents, where Windy McPherson snored
+peacefully, and up the stairway to his own room. He undressed and,
+putting out the light, knelt upon the floor. From the wild ravings of
+the man in the jail he had got hold of something. In the midst of the
+blasphemy of Mike McCarthy he had sensed a deep and abiding love of
+life. Where the church had failed the bold sensualist succeeded. Sam
+felt that he could have prayed in the presence of the entire town.
+
+“Oh, Father!” he cried, sending up his voice in the silence of the
+little room, “make me stick to the thought that the right living of
+this, my life, is my duty to you.”
+
+By the door below, while Valmore waited on the sidewalk, Telfer talked
+to Jane McPherson.
+
+“I wanted Sam to hear,” he explained. “He needs a religion. All young
+men need a religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man like Mike
+McCarthy keeps instinctively trying to justify himself before God.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+John Telfer’s friendship was a formative influence upon Sam McPherson.
+His father’s worthlessness and the growing realisation of the hardship
+of his mother’s position had given life a bitter taste in his mouth,
+and Telfer sweetened it. He entered with zeal into Sam’s thoughts
+and dreams, and tried valiantly to arouse in the quiet, industrious,
+money-making boy some of his own love of life and beauty. At night, as
+the two walked down country roads, the man would stop and, waving his
+arms about, quote Poe or Browning or, in another mood, would compel
+Sam’s attention to the rare smell of a hayfield or to a moonlit stretch
+of meadow.
+
+Before people gathered on the streets he teased the boy, calling him a
+little money grubber and saying, “He is like a little mole that
+works underground. As the mole goes for a worm so this boy goes for a
+five-cent piece. I have watched him. A travelling man goes out of town
+leaving a stray dime or nickel here and within an hour it is in this
+boy’s pocket. I have talked to banker Walker of him. He trembles lest
+his vaults become too small to hold the wealth of this young Croesus.
+The day will come when he will buy the town and put it into his vest
+pocket.”
+
+For all his public teasing of the boy Telfer had the genius to adopt a
+different attitude when they were alone together. Then he talked to him
+openly and freely as he talked to Valmore and Freedom Smith and to other
+cronies of his on the streets of Caxton. Walking along the road he would
+point with his cane to the town and say, “You and that mother of yours
+have more of the real stuff in you than the rest of the boys and mothers
+of the town put together.”
+
+In all Caxton Telfer was the only man who knew books and who took them
+seriously. Sam sometimes found his attitude toward them puzzling and
+would stand with open mouth listening as Telfer swore or laughed at a
+book as he did at Valmore or Freedom Smith. He had a fine portrait
+of Browning which he kept hung in the stable and before this he would
+stand, his legs spread apart, and his head tilted to one side, talking.
+
+“A rich old sport you are, eh?” he would say, grinning. “Getting
+yourself discussed by women and college professors in clubs, eh? You old
+fraud!”
+
+Toward Mary Underwood, the school teacher who had become Sam’s friend
+and with whom the boy sometimes walked and talked, Telfer had no
+charity. Mary Underwood was a sort of cinder in the eyes of Caxton. She
+was the only child of Silas Underwood, the town harness maker, who once
+had worked in a shop belonging to Windy McPherson. After the business
+failure of Windy he had started independently and for a time did
+well, sending his daughter to a school in Massachusetts. Mary did
+not understand the people of Caxton and the people misunderstood and
+distrusted her. Taking no part in the life of the town and keeping to
+herself and to her books she awoke a kind of fear in others. Because she
+did not join them at church suppers, or go from porch to porch gossiping
+with other women through the long summer evenings, they thought her
+something abnormal. On Sundays she sat alone in her pew at church and
+on Saturday afternoons, come storm, come sunshine, she walked on country
+roads and through the woods accompanied by a collie dog. She was a small
+woman with a straight, slender figure and had fine blue eyes filled with
+changing lights, hidden by the eye-glasses she almost constantly wore.
+Her lips were very full and red, and she sat with them parted so that
+the edges of her fine teeth showed. Her nose was large, and a fine
+reddish-brown colour glowed in her cheeks. Though different, she had,
+like Jane McPherson, a habit of silence; and under her silence, she,
+like Sam’s mother, possessed an unusually strong and vigorous mind.
+
+As a child she was a sort of half invalid and had not been on friendly
+footing with other children. It was then that her habit of silence and
+reticence had been established. The years in the school in Massachusetts
+restored her health but did not break this habit. She came home and took
+the place in the schools to earn money with which to take her back East,
+dreaming of a position as instructor in an eastern college. She was that
+rare thing, a woman scholar, loving scholarship for its own sake.
+
+Mary Underwood’s position in the town and in the schools was insecure.
+Out of her silent, independent way of life had sprung a misunderstanding
+that, at least once, had taken definite form and had come near driving
+her from the town and schools. That she did not succumb to the storm of
+criticism that for some weeks beat about her head was due to her habit
+of silence and to a determination to get her own way in the face of
+everything.
+
+It was a suggestion of scandal that had put the grey hairs upon her
+head. The scandal had blown over before the time of her friendship for
+Sam, but he had known of it. In those days he knew of everything that
+went on in the town--his quick ears and eyes missed nothing. More than
+once he had heard the men waiting to be shaved in Sawyer’s barber shop
+speak of her.
+
+The tale ran that she had been involved in an affair with a real estate
+agent who had afterward left town. It was said that the man, a tall,
+fine-looking fellow, had been in love with Mary and had wanted to desert
+his wife and go away with her. One night he had driven to Mary’s house
+in a closed buggy and the two had driven into the country. They had sat
+for hours in the covered buggy at the side of the road and talked, and
+people driving past had seen them there talking together.
+
+And then she had got out of the buggy and walked home alone through snow
+drifts. The next day she was at school as usual. When told of it the
+school superintendent, a puttering old fellow with vacant eyes, had
+shaken his head in alarm and declared that it must be looked into. He
+called Mary into his little narrow office in the school building, but
+lost courage when she sat before him, and said nothing. The man in the
+barber shop, who repeated the tale, said that the real estate man drove
+on to a distant station and took a train to the city, and that some days
+later he came back to Caxton and moved his family out of town.
+
+Sam dismissed the story from his mind. Having begun a friendship for
+Mary he put the man in the barber shop into a class with Windy McPherson
+and thought of him as a pretender and liar who talked for the sake of
+talk. He remembered with a shock the crude levity with which the loafers
+in the shop had greeted the repetition of the tale. Their comments
+had come back to his mind as he walked through the streets with his
+newspapers and had given him a kind of jolt. He went along under the
+trees thinking of the sunlight falling upon the grey hair as they walked
+together on summer afternoons, and bit his lip and opened and closed his
+fist convulsively.
+
+During Mary’s second year in the Caxton schools her mother died, and at
+the end of another year, her father, failing in the harness business,
+Mary became a fixture in the schools. The house at the edge of the town,
+the property of her mother, had come down to her and she lived there
+with an old aunt. After the passing of the wind of scandal concerning
+the real estate man the town lost interest in her. She was thirty-six
+at the time of her first friendship with Sam and lived alone among her
+books.
+
+Sam had been deeply moved by her friendship. It had seemed to him
+something significant that grown people with affairs of their own should
+be so in earnest about his future as she and Telfer were. Boylike, he
+counted it a tribute to himself rather than to the winsome youth in him,
+and was made proud by it. Having no real feeling for books, and only
+pretending to have out of a desire to please, he sometimes went from one
+to the other of his two friends, passing off their opinions as his own.
+
+At this trick Telfer invariably caught him. “That is not your notion,”
+ he would shout, “you have it from that school teacher. It is the opinion
+of a woman. Their opinions, like the books they sometimes write, are
+founded on nothing. They are not the real things. Women know nothing.
+Men only care for them because they have not had what they want from
+them. No woman is really big--except maybe my woman, Eleanor.”
+
+When Sam continued to be much in the company of Mary, Telfer grew more
+bitter.
+
+“I would have you observe women’s minds and avoid letting them influence
+your own,” he told the boy. “They live in a world of unrealities. They
+like even vulgar people in books, but shrink from the simple, earthy
+folk about them. That school teacher is so. Is she like me? Does she,
+while loving books, love also the very smell of human life?”
+
+In a way Telfer’s attitude toward the kindly little school teacher
+became Sam’s attitude. Although they walked and talked together the
+course of study she had planned for him he never took up and as he
+grew to know her better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced
+appealed to him less and less. He thought that she, as Telfer held,
+lived in a world of illusion and unreality and said so. When she lent
+him books, he put them in his pocket and did not read them. When he did
+read, he thought the books reminded him of something that hurt him. They
+were in some way false and pretentious. He thought they were like
+his father. One day he tried reading aloud to Telfer from a book Mary
+Underwood had lent him.
+
+The story was one of a poetic man with long, unclean fingernails who
+went among people preaching the doctrine of beauty. It began with a
+scene on a hillside in a rainstorm where the poetic man sat under a tent
+writing a letter to his sweetheart.
+
+Telfer was beside himself. Jumping from his seat under a tree by the
+roadside he waved his arms and shouted:
+
+“Stop! Stop it! Do not go on with it. The story lies. A man could not
+write love letters under the circumstances and he was a fool to pitch
+his tent on a hillside. A man in a tent on a hillside in a storm would
+be cold and wet and getting the rheumatism. To be writing letters he
+would need to be an unspeakable ass. He had better be out digging a
+trench to keep the water from running through his tent.”
+
+Waving his arms, Telfer went off up the road and Sam followed thinking
+him altogether right, and, if later in life he learned that there are
+men who could write love letters on a piece of housetop in a flood, he
+did not know it then and the least suggestion of windiness or pretence
+lay heavy in his stomach.
+
+Telfer had a vast enthusiasm for Bellamy’s “Looking Backward,” and read
+it aloud to his wife on Sunday afternoons, sitting under the apple trees
+in the garden. They had a fund of little personal jokes and sayings that
+they were forever laughing over, and she had infinite delight in his
+comments on the life and people of Caxton, but did not share his love of
+books. When she sometimes went to sleep in her chair during the Sunday
+afternoon readings he poked her with his cane and laughingly told her
+to wake up and listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning’s
+verses his favourites were “A Light Woman” and “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and
+he would recite these aloud with great gusto. He declared Mark Twain the
+greatest man in the world and in certain moods he would walk the road
+beside Sam reciting over and over one or two lines of verse, often this
+from Poe:
+
+  Helen, thy beauty is to me
+  Like some Nicean bark of yore.
+
+Then, stopping and turning upon the boy, he would demand whether or not
+the writing of such lines wasn’t worth living a life for.
+
+Telfer had a pack of dogs that always went with them on their walks
+at night and he had for them long Latin names that Sam could never
+remember. One summer be bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and
+gave great attention to the colt, which he named Bellamy Boy, trotting
+him up and down a little driveway by the side of his house for hours at
+a time and declaring he would be a great trotting horse. He could recite
+the colt’s pedigree with great gusto and when he had been talking to Sam
+of some book he would repay the boy’s attention by saying, “You, my boy,
+are as far superior to the run of boys about town as the colt, Bellamy
+Boy, is superior to the farm horses that are hitched along Main Street
+on Saturday afternoons.” And then, with a wave of his hand and a look
+of much seriousness on his face, he would add, “And for the same reason.
+You have been, like him, under a master trainer of youth.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One evening Sam, now grown to man’s stature and full of the awkwardness
+and self-consciousness of his new growth, was sitting on a cracker
+barrel at the back of Wildman’s grocery. It was a summer evening and a
+breeze blew through the open doors swaying the hanging oil lamps that
+burned and sputtered overhead. As usual he was listening in silence to
+the talk that went on among the men.
+
+Standing with legs wide apart and from time to time jabbing with his
+cane at Sam’s legs, John Telfer held forth on the subject of love.
+
+“It is a theme that poets do well to write of,” he declared. “In
+writing of it they avoid the necessity of embracing it. In trying for a
+well-turned line they forget to look at well-turned ankles. He who
+sings most passionately of love has been in love the least; he woos the
+goddess of poesy and only gets into trouble when he, like John Keats,
+turns to the daughter of a villager and tries to live the lines he has
+written.”
+
+“Stuff and nonsense,” roared Freedom Smith, who had been sitting tilted
+far back in a chair with his feet against the cold stove, smoking a
+short, black pipe, and who now brought his feet down upon the floor with
+a bang. Admiring Telfer’s flow of words he pretended to be filled with
+scorn. “The night is too hot for eloquence,” he bellowed. “If you must
+be eloquent talk of ice cream or mint juleps or recite a verse about the
+old swimming pool.”
+
+Telfer, wetting his finger, thrust it into the air.
+
+“The wind is in the north-west; the beasts roar; we will have a storm,”
+ he said, winking at Valmore.
+
+Banker Walker came into the store, followed by his daughter. She was a
+small, dark-skinned girl with black, quick eyes. Seeing Sam sitting with
+swinging legs upon the cracker barrel she spoke to her father and went
+out of the store. At the sidewalk she stopped and, turning, made a quick
+motion with her hand.
+
+Sam jumped off the cracker barrel and strolled toward the street door.
+A flush was on his cheeks. His mouth felt hot and dry. He went with
+extreme deliberateness, stopping to bow to the banker, and for a moment
+lingering to read a newspaper that lay upon the cigar case, to avoid the
+comments he feared his going might excite among the men by the stove.
+In his heart he trembled lest the girl should have disappeared down the
+street, and with his eyes, he looked guiltily at the banker, who had
+joined the group at the back of the store and who now stood listening
+to the talk, while he read from a list held in his hand and Wildman
+went here and there doing up packages and repeating aloud the names of
+articles called off by the banker.
+
+At the end of the lighted business section of Main Street, Sam found the
+girl waiting for him. She began to tell of the subterfuge by which she
+had escaped her father.
+
+“I told him I would go home with my sister,” she said, tossing her head.
+
+Taking hold of the boy’s hand, she led him along the shaded street. For
+the first time Sam walked in the company of one of the strange beings
+that had begun to bring him uneasy nights, and overcome with the wonder
+of it the blood climbed through his body and made his head reel so that
+he walked in silence unable to understand his own emotions. He felt the
+soft hand of the girl with delight; his heart pounded against the walls
+of his chest and a choking sensation gripped at his throat.
+
+Walking along the street, past lighted residences where the low voices
+of women in talk greeted his ears, Sam was inordinately proud. He
+thought that he should like to turn and walk with this girl through the
+lighted Main Street. Had she not chosen him from among all the boys of
+the town; had she not, with a flutter of her little, white hand, called
+to him with a call that he wondered the men upon the cracker barrels had
+not heard? Her boldness and his own took his breath away. He could not
+talk. His tongue seemed paralysed.
+
+Down the street went the boy and girl, loitering in the shadows,
+hurrying past the dim oil lamps at street crossings, getting from each
+other wave after wave of exquisite little thrills. Neither spoke. They
+were beyond words. Had they not together done this daring thing?
+
+In the shadow of a tree they stopped and stood facing each other; the
+girl looked at the ground and stood facing the boy. Putting out his hand
+he laid it upon her shoulder. In the darkness on the other side of the
+street a man stumbled homeward along a board sidewalk. The lights of
+Main Street glowed in the distance. Sam drew the girl toward him. She
+raised her head. Their lips met, and then, throwing her arms about his
+neck, she kissed him again and again eagerly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sam’s return to Wildman’s was marked by extreme caution. Although he had
+been absent but fifteen minutes it seemed to him that hours must have
+passed and he would not have been surprised to see the stores locked
+and darkness settled down on Main Street. It was inconceivable that the
+grocer could still be wrapping packages for banker Walker. Worlds had
+been remade. Manhood had come to him. Why! the man should have wrapped
+the entire store, package after package, and sent it to the ends of the
+earth. He lingered in the shadows at the first of the store lights
+where ages before he had gone, a mere boy, to meet her, a mere girl, and
+looked with wonder at the lighted way before him.
+
+Sam crossed the street and, from the front of Sawyer’s barber shop,
+looked into Wildman’s. He felt like a spy looking into the camp of an
+enemy. There before him sat the men into whose midst he had it in
+his power to cast a thunderbolt. He might walk to the door and say,
+truthfully enough, “Here before you is a boy that by the flutter of a
+white hand has been made into a man; here is one who has wrung the heart
+of womankind and eaten his fill at the tree of the knowledge of life.”
+
+In the grocery the talk still continued among the men upon the cracker
+barrels who seemed unconscious of the boy’s slinking entrance. Indeed,
+their talk had sunk. From talking of love and of poets they talked of
+corn and of steers. Banker Walker, his packages of groceries lying on
+the counter, smoked a cigar.
+
+“You can fairly hear the corn growing to-night,” he said. “It wants but
+another shower or two and we shall have a record crop. I plan to feed a
+hundred steers at my farm out Rabbit Road this winter.”
+
+The boy climbed again upon a cracker barrel and tried to look
+unconcerned and interested in the talk. Still his heart thumped; still
+a throbbing went on in his wrists. He turned and looked at the floor
+hoping his agitation would pass unnoticed.
+
+The banker, taking up the packages, walked out at the door. Valmore and
+Freedom Smith went over to the livery barn for a game of pinochle.
+And John Telfer, twirling his cane and calling to a troup of dogs that
+loitered in an alley back of the store, took Sam for a walk into the
+country.
+
+“I will continue this talk of love,” said Telfer, striking at weeds
+along the road with his cane and from time to time calling sharply to
+the dogs that, filled with delight at being abroad, ran growling and
+tumbling over each other in the dusty road.
+
+“That Freedom Smith is a sample of life in this town. At the word love
+he drops his feet upon the floor and pretends to be filled with disgust.
+He will talk of corn or steers or of the stinking hides that he buys,
+but at the mention of the word love he is like a hen that has seen a
+hawk in the sky. He runs about in circles making a fuss. ‘Here! Here!
+Here!’ he cries, ‘you are making public something that should be kept
+hidden. You are doing in the light of day what should only be done with
+a shamed face in a darkened room.’ Why, boy, if I were a woman in
+this town I would not stand it--I would go to New York, to France,
+to Paris--To be wooed for but a passing moment by a shame-faced yokel
+without art--uh--it is unthinkable.”
+
+The man and the boy walked in silence. The dogs, scenting a rabbit,
+disappeared across a long pasture, their master letting them go. From
+time to time he threw back his head and took long breaths of the night
+air.
+
+“I am not like banker Walker,” he declared. “He thinks of the growing
+corn in terms of fat steers feeding on the Rabbit Run farm; I think of
+it as something majestic. I see the long corn rows with the men and the
+horses half hidden, hot and breathless, and I think of a vast river of
+life. I catch a breath of the flame that was in the mind of the man who
+said, ‘The land is flowing with milk and honey.’ I am made happy by my
+thoughts not by the dollars clinking in my pocket.
+
+“And then in the fall when the corn stands shocked I see another
+picture. Here and there in companies stand the armies of the corn.
+It puts a ring in my voice to look at them. ‘These orderly armies has
+mankind brought out of chaos,’ I say to myself. ‘On a smoking black ball
+flung by the hand of God out of illimitable space has man stood up these
+armies to defend his home against the grim attacking armies of want.’”
+
+Telfer stopped and stood in the road with his legs spread apart. He took
+off his hat and throwing back his head laughed up at the stars.
+
+“Freedom Smith should hear me now,” he cried, rocking back and forth
+with laughter and switching his cane at the boy’s legs so that Sam had
+to hop merrily about in the road to avoid it. “Flung by the hand of God
+out of illimitable space--eh! not bad, eh! I should be in Congress. I
+am wasted here. I am throwing priceless eloquence to dogs who prefer to
+chase rabbits and to a boy who is the worst little money grubber in the
+town.”
+
+The midsummer madness that had seized Telfer passed and for a time he
+walked in silence. Suddenly, putting his arm on the boy’s shoulder, he
+stopped and pointed to where a faint light in the sky marked the lighted
+town.
+
+“They are good people,” he said, “but their ways are not my ways or your
+ways. You will go out of the town. You have genius. You will be a man of
+finance. I have watched you. You are not niggardly and you do not cheat
+and lie--result--you will not be a little business man. What have you?
+You have the gift of seeing dollars where the rest of the boys of the
+town see nothing and you are tireless after those dollars--you will be
+a big man of dollars, it is plain.” Into his voice came a touch of
+bitterness. “I also was marked out. Why do I carry a cane? why do I not
+buy a farm and raise steers? I am the most worthless thing alive. I have
+the touch of genius without the energy to make it count.”
+
+Sam’s mind that had been inflamed by the kiss of the girl cooled in the
+presence of Telfer. In the summer madness of the talking man there was
+something soothing to the fever in his blood. He followed the words
+eagerly, seeing pictures, getting thrills, filled with happiness.
+
+At the edge of town a buggy passed the walking pair. In the buggy sat
+a young farmer, his arm about the waist of a girl, her head upon his
+shoulder. Far in the distance sounded the faint call of the dogs. Sam
+and Telfer sat down on a grassy bank under a tree while Telfer rolled
+and lighted a cigarette.
+
+“As I promised, I will talk to you of love,” he said, making a wide
+sweep with his arm each time as he put his cigarette into his mouth.
+
+The grassy bank on which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot
+days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind
+them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of
+serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer and
+his face became serious.
+
+“My foolishness is more than half earnest,” he said. “I think that a
+man or boy who has set for himself a task had better let women and girls
+alone. If he be a man of genius, he has a purpose independent of all
+the world, and should cut and slash and pound his way toward his mark,
+forgetting every one, particularly the woman that would come to grips
+with him. She also has a mark toward which she goes. She is at war with
+him and has a purpose that is not his purpose. She believes that the
+pursuit of women is an end for a life. For all they now condemn Mike
+McCarthy who went to the asylum because of them and who, while loving
+life, came near to taking life, the women of Caxton do not condemn his
+madness for themselves; they do not blame him for loitering away his
+good years or for making an abortive mess of his good brain. While he
+made an art of the pursuit of women they applauded secretly. Did
+not twelve of them accept the challenge thrown out by his eyes as he
+loitered in the streets?”
+
+The man, who had begun talking quietly and seriously, raised his voice
+and waved the lighted cigarette in the air and the boy who had begun
+to think again of the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker listened
+attentively. The barking of the dogs grew nearer.
+
+“If you as a boy can get from me, a grown man, an understanding of the
+purpose of women you will not have lived in this town for nothing. Set
+your mark at money making if you will, but drive at that. Let yourself
+but go and a sweet wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd or a pair
+of little feet running over a dance floor will retard your growth for
+years. No man or boy can grow toward the purpose of a life while he
+thinks of women. Let him try it and he will be undone. What is to him
+a passing humour is to them an end. They are diabolically clever. They
+will run and stop and run and stop again, keeping just without his
+reach. He sees them here and there about him. His mind is filled with
+vague, delicious thoughts that come out of the very air; before he
+realises what he has done he has spent his years in vain pursuit and
+turning finds himself old and undone.”
+
+Telfer began jabbing at the ground with his stick.
+
+“I had my chance. In New York I had money to live on and time to have
+made an artist of myself. I won prize after prize. The master, walking
+up and down back of us, lingered longest over my easel. There was a
+fellow sat beside me who had nothing. I made sport of him and called him
+Sleepy Jock after a dog we used to have about our house here in Caxton.
+Now I am here idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only
+last week I saw in a paper that he had won a place among the world’s
+great artists by a picture he has painted. In the school I watched for
+a look in the eyes of the girl students and went about with them night
+after night winning, like Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy
+Jock had the best of it. He did not look about with open eyes but kept
+peering instead at the face of the master. My days were full of small
+successes. I could wear clothes. I could make soft-eyed girls turn to
+look at me in a dance hall. I remember a night. We students gave a dance
+and Sleepy Jock came. He went about asking for dances and the girls
+laughed and told him they had none to give, that the dances were taken.
+I followed him and had my ears filled with flattery and my card with
+names. In riding the wave of small success I got the habit of small
+success. When I could not catch the line I wanted to make a drawing
+live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my arm, went for a
+day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I overheard two women
+talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy for a week.”
+
+Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.
+
+“My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me?
+Let me tell you. It has brought me to this--that at fifty I, who might
+have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of
+beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a
+flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising
+corn.
+
+“If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small
+success and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you
+that I got it when I saw it lurking in a woman’s eyes and heard the
+pleasant little songs that lull to sleep upon a woman’s lips.”
+
+The boy, sitting upon the grassy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of
+life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare
+silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at
+night, of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little
+blue-eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith’s home and
+of how he had gone at night to stand under her window.
+
+In Caxton adolescent love had about it a virility befitting a land
+that raised so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers
+through the streets to be loaded upon cars. Men and women went their
+ways believing, with characteristic American what-boots-it attitude
+toward the needs of childhood, that it was well for growing boys and
+girls to be much alone together. To leave them alone together was a
+principle with them. When a young man called upon his sweetheart,
+her parents sat in the presence of the two with apologetic eyes and
+presently disappeared leaving them alone together. When boys’ and girls’
+parties were given in Caxton houses, parents went away leaving the
+children to shift for themselves.
+
+“Now have a good time and don’t tear the house down,” they said, going
+off upstairs.
+
+Left to themselves the children played kissing games and young men
+and tall half-formed girls sat on the front porches in the darkness,
+thrilled and half frightened, getting through their instincts, crudely
+and without guidance, their first peep at the mystery of life. They
+kissed passionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds
+fevered and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.
+
+Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing
+aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a
+kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as
+a drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on
+the next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost
+their keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men
+about the station and in the stores, they went slinking through the
+streets in groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said,
+“It is the loutish age.”
+
+If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to
+increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to
+the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and
+to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now
+sat musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to
+do with the Walker girl. He remembered his sister’s affair with a young
+farmer and shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the
+shoulder of the man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the
+rolling fields stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came
+Telfer’s speech. So vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the
+armies of standing corn which men had set up in the fields to protect
+themselves against the march of pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the
+picture in his mind as he followed the sense of Telfer’s talk, thought
+that all society had resolved itself into a few sturdy souls who went
+on and on regardless, and a hunger to make of himself such another arose
+engulfing him. The desire within him seemed so compelling that he turned
+and haltingly tried to express what was in his mind.
+
+“I will try,” he stammered, “I will try to be a man. I will try to
+not have anything to do with them--with women. I will work and make
+money--and--and----”
+
+Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the
+ground.
+
+“To Hell with women and girls,” he burst forth as though throwing
+something distasteful out of his throat.
+
+In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits,
+came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the grassy
+bank, covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his
+sensitive nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. His _sang
+froid_ had returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the
+dogs he cried joyfully, “We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy,
+and dog. We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked
+into bed.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to
+him. For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun
+come up hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the
+streets in the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from
+the north came into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on
+the deserted little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry
+Donlin to hurry with his work that they might get back into the warm
+stale air of the smoking car.
+
+In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become
+a man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some
+subtle way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that
+to make money and to have money would in some way make up for the old
+half-forgotten humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and
+would set it on a more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had
+provided, grew and influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly
+he kept at his efforts to get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of
+dollars. Jane McPherson had herself a passion for frugality. In spite
+of Windy’s incompetence and her own growing ill health, she would
+not permit the family to go into debt, and although, in the long hard
+winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush until his mind revolted at the
+thought of a corn field, yet was the rent of the little house paid on
+the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to increase the totals in the
+yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the death of his wife had lived
+in a loft above his shop and who was a blacksmith of the old days, a
+workman first and a money maker later, did not despise the thought of
+gain.
+
+“It is money makes the mare go,” he said with a kind of reverence as
+banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of
+Wildman’s grocery.
+
+Of John Telfer’s attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain.
+The man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.
+
+“That’s right,” he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express
+opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly
+that the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their
+achievements, “Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big
+world! Get your name up for a modern, high-class American!”
+
+And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to
+berate the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that
+the day would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning,
+he shouted, “Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old
+clerkliness lies asleep!”
+
+Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who
+had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a
+man, was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they
+talked to him of the city and of the money to be made there.
+
+“It is the place for a live young man,” they said.
+
+Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their
+affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into
+his nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the
+great ways filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching
+the sky, the men running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks
+going on year after year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of,
+and yet not understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises
+that supported them.
+
+In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of
+life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a
+sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing,
+had he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he
+not introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the
+Saturday night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the
+totals in the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He
+felt within him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and
+would do.
+
+“I will be richer than any man in town here,” he declared in his pride.
+“I will be richer than Ed Walker.”
+
+Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks
+in the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn
+venders, for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses
+close by the beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the
+farmers, and the labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth
+to mingle with their fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores,
+the sidewalks, and drinking places, and men stood about in groups
+talking while young girls with their lovers walked up and down. In
+the hall over Geiger’s drug store a dance went on and the voice of the
+caller-off rose above the clatter of voices and the stamping of horses
+in the street. Now and then a fight broke out among the roisterers in
+Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was killed with a knife.
+
+In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.
+
+“Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon,” he said, pushing a paper
+into the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. “Recipes for cooking new
+dishes,” he urged to the farmer’s wife. “There is a page of new fashions
+in dress,” he told the young girl.
+
+Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and
+the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Saturday
+paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day’s business.
+
+And it was on a Saturday night that he decided to drop paper selling.
+
+“I will take you into business with me,” announced Freedom Smith,
+stopping him as he hurried by. “You are getting too old to sell papers
+and you know too much.”
+
+Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday
+night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year
+he had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he
+nodded his head as he hurried away.
+
+“It is the end of romance,” shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom
+Smith before Geiger’s drug store and who had heard the offer. “A boy,
+who has seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe
+and Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am
+overcome by the thought.”
+
+The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to
+Sam of the matter at length.
+
+“For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place,” he
+declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time
+to time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. “For any boy
+I put money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who
+despise money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she
+puts into the selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been
+the making of her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without
+the millinery business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon
+clothes and with it she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to
+her.”
+
+Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the
+ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking
+thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the
+boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret
+regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face
+by throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue,
+making the words roll and tumble from his lips.
+
+“No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes
+many virtues that are forever on men’s lips,” he declared fiercely as
+though trying to down an opponent. “It is one of the virtues that proves
+man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power
+to make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys
+fear. Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings
+into men’s lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go
+adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.
+
+“Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
+wealth,” he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. “No doubt
+the things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the
+instinct to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of
+poverty, the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim
+silences of the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient,
+and the defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid
+rich man’s city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a
+factory at the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty
+than you and I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious,
+and who has not acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables
+him to get on, may build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is
+diseased and decaying.”
+
+Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his
+eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.
+
+“The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that
+makes our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for
+shrewd money getting or it will destroy itself,” he declared. “And the
+really great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve
+in garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages
+on Fifth Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for
+yourself. Visit the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to
+one that you will find him not only incapable in money getting but also
+incapable in the very art for which he starves.”
+
+After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer
+for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted
+a chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and
+hides he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged
+persistency with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank
+had caught Freedom’s imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the
+fact.
+
+Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty
+dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn
+business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with
+the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business,
+backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the
+cashier telling of Sam’s record as a depositor, and the seven hundred
+dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with
+Freedom, Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his
+savings as he had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was
+impressed. He thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a
+week Sam had seen the silent suggestive power of cash.
+
+The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to
+more than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have
+two-thirds of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other
+hand was to furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam
+was to take care of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things
+bought were to be fixed each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at
+less than the prices named two-thirds of the savings went to him. The
+arrangement was suggested by Sam, who thought he would make more from
+the saving than from the wage.
+
+Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice,
+roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great
+inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man,
+woman and child he knew and liked. “Old Maybe-Not” he called Windy
+McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed
+rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low
+phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip
+in the top. To Sam’s knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed
+during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying.
+Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar
+until the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him.
+And then haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his
+way while the farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward
+child.
+
+Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton’s best
+streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked
+him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing
+and roaring about it. “Good morning, Mary,” he would shout at the neat
+German woman across the street. “Wait and you’ll see me clean up about
+here. I’m going at it right now. I’m going to brush the flies off the
+fence first.”
+
+Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the
+county.
+
+Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and
+agricultural implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard,
+gathering rust and decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the
+lot were a half dozen buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction
+engine, a mowing machine, several farm wagons and other farm tools gone
+beyond naming. Every few days he came home bringing a new prize. They
+overflowed the yard and crept onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell
+any of this stuff. He had at one time sixteen sets of harness all broken
+and unrepaired in the barn and in a shed back of the house. A great
+flock of chickens and two or three pigs wandered about among this junk
+and all the children of the neighbourhood joined Freedom’s four and ran
+howling and shouting over and under the mass.
+
+Freedom’s wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house.
+She had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally
+stood at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at
+evening as he stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both
+she and Freedom treated him with great respect.
+
+As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling.
+He was a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very
+systematically and within a year more than doubling the bulk of
+Freedom’s purchases.
+
+There is a little of Windy McPherson’s grotesque pretentiousness in
+every man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of
+it. He let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value
+of their goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they
+had recovered from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam’s day,
+farmers did not watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets
+were not systematised and regulated as they were later, and the skill
+of the buyer was of the first importance. Having the skill, Sam used
+it constantly to put money into his pockets, but in some way kept the
+confidence and respect of the men with whom he traded.
+
+The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading
+ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the
+streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.
+
+“Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy,” he would shout to the
+loafers in the store.
+
+Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his
+own affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom’s
+affairs, but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and
+apples, butter and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working
+always to swell his commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business
+and many times profited little, but the two liked and respected each
+other and it was through Freedom’s efforts that Sam finally got out of
+Caxton and into larger affairs.
+
+One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam
+stood taking the harness off his horse.
+
+“Here is a chance for you, my boy,” he said, putting his hand
+affectionately on Sam’s shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his
+voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the
+things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had
+replied making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might
+hope for in Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.
+
+When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for
+him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at
+last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in
+the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the
+door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his
+thumb to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told
+him that in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and
+filled with uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom’s
+stable wishing that he also might be gone.
+
+Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken
+from the horse upon a peg in the wall.
+
+“I will be glad to go,” he said heavily.
+
+Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who
+had come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man
+of eighteen. He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago
+company because of his affection for the boy and because he believed him
+capable of something more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence
+holding the lantern aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the
+yard, filled with regrets.
+
+By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who,
+putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her
+eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street,
+Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From
+a street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could
+see them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom’s hand and the
+slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving
+March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom’s hand. At the
+front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on
+the gate and looking at the sky.
+
+“We shall have a rain,” he said in a quavering voice, as though giving
+a decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an
+answer went along a narrow path into the house.
+
+The incident brought a smile to Sam’s lips followed by a kind of
+weariness of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had,
+day after day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking
+at the sky. The man was one of Sam’s old newspaper customers who stood
+as a kind of figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he
+had been a gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part
+in more than one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he
+had come to end his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself
+by keeping year after year a carefully tabulated record of weather
+variations. Once or twice a month during the warm season he stumbled
+into Wildman’s and, sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the
+accuracy of his records and the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at
+his heels. In his present mood the endless sameness and uneventfulness
+of the man’s life seemed to Sam amusing and in some way sad.
+
+“To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point
+to a day--to look forward to and depend upon that--what deadliness!” he
+thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt with pleasure
+the letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much of the big
+outside world to him.
+
+In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he
+felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought
+on by his mother’s approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of
+confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost
+cheerful. The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom
+was renewed by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at
+the sky.
+
+“I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching
+a mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer,” he
+thought.
+
+The three years in Freedom Smith’s service had taught Sam not to doubt
+his ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his
+way. He knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business
+man, one of the men who direct and control the affairs in which they
+are concerned because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He
+recalled with pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped
+calling him a bright boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.
+
+At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these
+things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old
+man he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his
+mother’s life had been as barren as that of the man who depended for
+companionship upon a dog and a thermometer.
+
+“Indeed,” he said to himself, pursuing the thought, “it has been worse.
+She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the
+remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the
+last days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old
+man watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house
+chasing playthings.” The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the
+wind singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional
+drop of rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with
+his mother. During the last two or three years he had been trying to
+make things up to her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the
+beginning of his success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub
+and since the beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after
+evening with her instead of going to Wildman’s to sit with the four
+friends and hear the talk that went on among them. No more did he walk
+with Telfer or Mary Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the
+bedside of the sick woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an
+arm chair upon the grass plot at the front of the house.
+
+The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an
+understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to
+the ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together,
+the mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much
+speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it
+unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought
+of the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had
+been made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which
+he had been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the
+doings of the pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane’s illness
+continued to go off after pension day for long periods of drunkenness,
+and who only came home to weep and wail through the house, when the
+pension money was gone, regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the
+loss of both the washwoman and the wife.
+
+“She has been the most wonderful woman in the world,” he told himself
+and tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend,
+John Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy
+trotting beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of
+her long gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A
+picture of George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness
+in the kitchen of Freedom Smith’s house, had caught his eye some days
+before, and in the darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his
+lips, realising that in some indescribable way it was like his mother
+as she had been before her illness. Freedom’s wife had given him the
+picture and he had been carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on
+lonely stretches of road as he went about his work.
+
+Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of
+an attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue
+the thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details
+of a long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It
+was extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could
+remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her
+youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy’s
+mind. She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of
+a thin-lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a
+farm, and of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved
+to buy books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a
+school teacher, and of her marriage to Windy--then John McPherson.
+
+Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in
+the town’s life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man
+who walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and
+who taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.
+
+When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him
+eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should
+have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.
+
+“And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour
+and unhappiness for me,” the sick woman had told her son.
+
+After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton
+where he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the
+store into the sheriff’s hands and his wife into the position of town
+laundress.
+
+In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted
+across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy
+and another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the
+state giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs
+and had written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the
+applause that greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances,
+the little dimly-lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces
+shining in the light of the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted
+Windy running here and there, talking the jargon of stageland, arraying
+himself in his motley and strutting upon the little stage.
+
+“And all winter he did not send me a penny,” the sick woman had said,
+interrupting his thoughts.
+
+Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth,
+the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been
+killed in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an
+anecdote, touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her
+son.
+
+The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for
+an hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old
+woman looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter
+feel she had been a fool to come.
+
+At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The
+story ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding
+the woman alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman,
+then in her prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house.
+The railroad agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and
+laughed.
+
+“She knocked him out, too,” he said, “knocked him cold upon the ground
+and then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town
+declaring her the finest woman in the state.”
+
+In the darkness by the broken shed Sam’s mind turned from thoughts of
+his mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young
+farmer. He thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of
+the failings of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of
+the house to wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of
+war talk always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of
+the night when, getting a rig from Culvert’s livery, she had driven off
+alone into the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show
+her wedding ring.
+
+Before him there rose a picture of a summer afternoon when he had seen
+a part of the love making that had preceded this. He had gone into the
+store to see his sister when the young farmer came in, looked awkwardly
+about and pushed a new gold watch across the counter to Kate. A sudden
+wave of respect for his sister had pervaded the boy. “What a sum it must
+have cost,” he thought, and looked with new interest at the back of the
+lover and at the flushed cheek and shining eyes of his sister. When the
+lover, turning, had seen young McPherson standing at the counter, he
+laughed self-consciously and walked out at the door. Kate had been
+embarrassed and secretly pleased and flattered by the look in her
+brother’s eyes, but had pretended to treat the gift lightly, twirling
+it carelessly back and forth on the counter and walking up and down
+swinging her arms.
+
+“Don’t go telling,” she had said.
+
+“Then don’t go pretending,” the boy had answered.
+
+Sam thought that his sister’s indiscretion, which had brought her a babe
+and a husband in the same month had, after all, ended better than the
+indiscretion of his mother in her marriage with Windy.
+
+Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for
+the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of
+his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.
+
+Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and
+presently returned, bringing a daughter.
+
+There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in
+a house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an
+attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code,
+if she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The
+thought amused and saddened him.
+
+“You would have thought her safe,” he mused. She was fifty, small,
+nervous and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled
+as she talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue
+because of nervousness.
+
+In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the
+door holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of
+himself.
+
+“My wife--my wife is dying. She may die any day,” he wailed, tears
+standing in his eyes.
+
+The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed
+had been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with
+anger and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and
+began sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped
+and Sam could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as
+the man turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels
+rose a voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had
+begun to rain.
+
+“He has got into the wrong street,” thought the boy stupidly.
+
+Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs
+echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air
+of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother’s ironing board stood
+against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering
+in Sam’s heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store
+doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of
+his father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate’s wedding, when
+Windy had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and
+the mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house,
+sick with humiliation.
+
+The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores
+replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy’s anger. Sam began thinking
+again of his mother’s life.
+
+The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now
+seemed utterly fruitless. “I would like to repay him,” he thought,
+shaken with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him.
+The cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages
+on the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol
+of the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he
+turned his face and stared at the wall.
+
+He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith’s house.
+Freedom had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just
+as to-night he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and
+just as Sam was shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the
+stable door had come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy
+girl of fourteen with the strength of a man and an inclination to burst
+out of her clothes at unexpected places, they had come charging into the
+stables to carry Sam off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them
+on, his voice roaring in the stable so that the horses jumped about in
+their stalls. Into the house they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of
+four, sitting astride his back and beating on his head with a woollen
+cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern and giving an occasional helpful
+push with his hand.
+
+A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of
+the big dining room in Freedom’s house came back into the mind of
+the boy now sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted,
+badly-cooked food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great
+dishes heaped with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had
+always been just enough food for the single meal. The thing was nicely
+calculated, when you had finished the table was bare.
+
+How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a
+flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and
+passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh
+supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the
+children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the
+tomboy girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of
+the boy.
+
+“My mother never knew anything like that,” he thought.
+
+The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking
+loudly--some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he talked
+of the cost of school books.
+
+“They change the books in the school too often,” he declared in a loud
+voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an
+audience. “It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I
+will not stand it.”
+
+Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a
+message upon it.
+
+“Be silent,” he wrote. “If you say another word or make another sound to
+disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the
+street.”
+
+Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a
+fork taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under
+the lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a
+desire to spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had
+brought his mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking
+at her very death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared
+about the kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.
+
+Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not
+understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his
+pocket.
+
+“A dog is dead, eh?” he shouted. “Well you’re getting too big and smart,
+lad. What do I care for a dead dog?”
+
+Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put
+his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.
+
+“I must not kill,” he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a
+stranger. “I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill.”
+
+In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise,
+struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at
+him and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a
+start that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly
+it stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had
+become.
+
+“I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub
+by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with
+so little extra pressure,” he thought.
+
+The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the
+forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon
+of drunken carousing.
+
+“If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it
+looks now all the days of my life,” thought the boy.
+
+In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman
+speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the
+sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and
+went carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down
+upon him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind,
+shaking loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it
+against his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before
+the house he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into
+the road. Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the
+street.
+
+“I will go for Mary Underwood,” he thought, his mind returning to the
+friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose
+friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer’s tirades against all
+women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his
+bare head.
+
+“We need a woman in our house,” he kept saying over and over to himself.
+“We need a woman in our house.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Leaning against the wall under the veranda of Mary Underwood’s house,
+Sam tried to get in his mind a remembrance of what had brought him
+there. He had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along a
+country road. Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He
+had forgotten the purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The
+unexpected and terrible hatred of his father that had come upon him in
+the tense silence of the kitchen had so paralysed his brain that he now
+felt light-headed and wonderfully happy and carefree.
+
+“I have been doing something,” he thought; “I wonder what it is.”
+
+The house faced a grove of pine trees and was reached by climbing a
+little rise and following a winding road out beyond the graveyard and
+the last of the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled
+on the tin roof overhead, and Sam, his back closely pressed against the
+front of the house, fought to regain control of his mind.
+
+For an hour he stood there staring into the darkness and watched with
+delight the progress of the storm. He had--an inheritance from his
+mother--a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a boy
+and his mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the
+house singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did
+not hear, and in his bed upstairs Sam had lain awake listening to the
+noises--the rain on the roof, the occasional crash of thunder, the
+snoring of Windy, and the unusual and, he thought, beautiful sound of
+the mother singing in the storm.
+
+Now, lifting up his head, he looked about with delight. Trees in the
+grove in front of him bent and tossed in the wind. The inky blackness of
+the night was relieved by the flickering oil lamp in the road beyond
+the graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the
+windows of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which
+he stood made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees
+through which the raindrops fell gleaming and sparkling. An occasional
+flash of lightning lit up the trees and the winding road, and the
+cannonry of the skies rolled and echoed overhead. A kind of wild song
+sang in Sam’s heart.
+
+“I wish it would last all night,” he thought, his mind fixed on the
+singing of his mother in the dark house when he was a boy.
+
+The door opened and a woman stepped out upon the veranda and stood
+before him facing the storm, the wind tossing the soft kimono in which
+she was clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air
+was filled with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted
+her head and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her
+fine contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and
+going on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover
+riding through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the
+song--
+
+  “He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,”
+
+sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch
+and leaning forward into the storm.
+
+Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who
+had been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind
+had turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman
+standing singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother
+singing on the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on,
+seeing pictures as he used to see them when a boy walking under
+the stars and listening to the talk of John Telfer. He saw a
+broad-shouldered man shouting defiance to the storm as he rode down a
+mountain path.
+
+“And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak,” went on the voice of
+the singer.
+
+Mary Underwood’s singing there in the rain made her seem near and
+likeable as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.
+
+“John Telfer was wrong about her,” he thought.
+
+She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down
+across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating
+the spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon
+his clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation
+of surprise broke from her lips:
+
+“Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the
+rain.”
+
+“I like it here,” replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at
+the storm.
+
+Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary
+looked into the darkness.
+
+“You have been a long time coming to see me,” she said, “come in.”
+
+Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the
+veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon
+a table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the
+shelves along the walls. On a table burned a student’s lamp and in the
+corners of the room lay heavy shadows.
+
+Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes.
+
+Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned
+clad in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began
+moving about the room picking up odds and ends of woman’s clothing
+scattered on the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks
+piled in an open grate at the side of the room.
+
+“It was the storm made me want to sing,” she said self-consciously, and
+then briskly, “we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in
+the road and got yourself covered with mud.”
+
+From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into
+his mind.
+
+“I have come here courting,” he thought; “I have come to ask Mary
+Underwood to be my wife and live in my house.”
+
+The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused
+something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore,
+falling away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by
+the kimono, wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the
+soft grey hair and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks
+caused a jumping of his heart.
+
+“We are needing a woman in our house,” he said heavily, repeating the
+words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept
+streets and along the mud-covered roads. “We are needing a woman in our
+house, and I have come to take you there.
+
+“I intend to marry you,” he added, lurching across the room and grasping
+her roughly by the shoulders. “Why not? I am needing a woman.”
+
+Mary Underwood was dismayed and frightened by the face looking down at
+her, and by the strong hands clenched upon her shoulders. In his youth
+she had conceived a kind of maternal passion for the newsboy and had
+planned a future for him. Her plans if followed would have made him a
+scholar, a man living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had
+chosen to live his life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about
+the country like Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen
+him driving at evening through the street to Freedom’s house, going in
+and out of Wildman’s, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim
+way she knew that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from
+the things of which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John
+Telfer, the talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had
+come back to her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of
+the road, and talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother,
+of marriage and of coming to live with him in his house. She stood,
+chilled, looking into the eager, strong face and the eyes with the
+pained, dazed look in them.
+
+Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to
+Sam, and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.
+
+“It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you,” he began, “it was
+because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired
+of them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little
+schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew
+tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks
+and looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to
+get out of there and into the streets myself.”
+
+Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and
+stared into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from
+his trousers legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to
+reconstruct an old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer’s,
+that had years before come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and
+Telfer had made of the ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central
+figure, a stoop-shouldered, feeble old man stumbling along the street,
+muttering to himself and poking in a gutter with a stick. The picture
+was a caricature of puttering old Frank Huntley, superintendent of the
+Caxton schools.
+
+Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood’s house, become, for the
+moment, a boy, facing a boy’s problems, Sam did not want to be such a
+man. He wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the
+kind of man he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of
+the world and making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get
+expressed when he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind,
+he felt that he must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that
+the schools were not giving him what he wanted. His brain worked on the
+problem of how to tell her about it.
+
+Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: “I am going to quit the
+schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same.”
+
+Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the
+chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the
+door opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called
+sharply, “Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here.”
+
+A startled, trembling voice answered from above, “Who is it?”
+
+Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her
+hand gently on his shoulder, said, “It is your mother and you are only a
+sick, half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it.”
+
+Sam shook his head. “She is still there in the bed, coughing.” He roused
+himself and stood up. “I have just killed my father,” he announced. “I
+choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the
+house. He made horrible noises in the kitchen and mother was tired and
+wanted to sleep.”
+
+Mary Underwood began running about the room. From a little alcove under
+a stairway she took clothes, throwing them upon the floor about the
+room. She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam’s presence,
+raised her skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the
+stockinged foot and the other on the bare one, she turned to him. “We
+will go back to your house. I think you are right. You need a woman
+there.”
+
+In the street she walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall
+fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over
+Sam. He felt he had accomplished something--something he had set out to
+accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion
+that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith’s, began planning
+the evening he would spend with her.
+
+“I will tell her of the letter from the Chicago company and of what I
+will do when I go to the city,” he thought.
+
+At the gate before the McPherson house Mary looked into the road below
+the grassy bank that ran down from the fence, but in the darkness she
+could see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and
+shouted as it rushed through the bare branches of the trees. Sam went
+through the gate and around the house to the kitchen door intent upon
+getting to his mother’s bedside.
+
+In the house the neighbour woman sat asleep in a chair before the
+kitchen stove. The daughter had gone.
+
+Sam went through the house to the parlour and sat down in a chair beside
+his mother’s bed, picking up her hand and holding it in his own. “She
+must be asleep,” he thought.
+
+At the kitchen door Mary Underwood stopped, and, turning, ran away into
+the darkness along the street. By the kitchen fire the neighbour
+woman still slept. In the parlour Sam, sitting on the chair beside his
+mother’s bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little
+stand beside the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a
+tall, aristocratic-looking woman with rings on her fingers, that hung
+upon the wall. The picture belonged to Windy and was claimed by him as a
+portrait of his mother, and it had once brought on a quarrel between Sam
+and his sister.
+
+Kate had taken the portrait of the lady seriously, and the boy had come
+upon her sitting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands
+lying in her lap in imitation of the pose maintained so haughtily by the
+great lady who looked down at her.
+
+“It is a fraud,” he had declared, irritated by what he believed his
+sister’s devotion to one of the father’s pretensions. “It is a fraud
+he has picked up somewhere and now claims as his mother to make people
+believe he is something big.”
+
+The girl, ashamed at having been caught in the pose, and furious because
+of the attack upon the authenticity of the portrait, had gone into a
+spasm of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the
+floor with her foot. Then she had run across the room and dropped upon
+her knees before a little couch, buried her face in a pillow and shook
+with anger and grief.
+
+Sam had turned and walked out of the room. The emotions of the sister
+had seemed to him to have the flavour of one of Windy’s outbreaks.
+
+“She likes it,” he had thought, dismissing the incident. “She likes
+believing in lies. She is like Windy and would rather believe in them
+than not.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer’s house and beat on
+the door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, holding a lamp
+above her head, appeared at the door. With Telfer she went back through
+the streets to the front of Sam’s house thinking of the terrible choked
+and disfigured man they should find there. She went along clinging to
+Telfer’s arm as she had clung to Sam’s, unconscious of her bare head
+and scanty attire. In his hand Telfer carried a lantern secured from the
+stable.
+
+In the road before the house they found nothing. Telfer went up and down
+swinging the lantern and peering into gutters. The woman walked beside
+him, her skirts lifted and the mud splashing upon her bare leg.
+
+Suddenly Telfer threw back his head and laughed. Taking her hand he led
+Mary with a rush up the bank and through the gate.
+
+“What a muddle-headed old fool I am!” he cried. “I am getting old and
+addle-pated! Windy McPherson is not dead! Nothing could kill that old
+war horse! He was in at Wildman’s grocery after nine o’clock to-night
+covered with mud and swearing he had been in a fight with Art Sherman.
+Poor Sam and you--to have come to me and to have found me a stupid ass!
+Fool! Fool! What a fool I have become!”
+
+In at the kitchen door ran Mary and Telfer, frightening the woman by
+the stove so that she sprang to her feet and began nervously making the
+false teeth rattle with her tongue. In the parlour they found Sam, his
+head upon the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand
+of Jane McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood stooped
+over and kissed his wet hair as the neighbour woman came in at the
+doorway bearing the kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, holding his finger to
+his lips, commanded silence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He
+thought that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become
+coarsened--she looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had
+an air of having quarrelled with her husband when they came out of
+their bedroom in the morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the
+parlour, astonished and irritated by the endless number of women that
+crowded into the house. They were everywhere, in the kitchen, the
+sleeping room back of the parlour; and in the parlour, where the
+dead woman lay in her coffin, they were massed. When the thin-lipped
+minister, holding a book in his hand, held forth upon the virtues of
+the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the floor and thought that thus
+they would have wept over the body of the dead Windy, had his fingers
+but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister would have talked
+in the same way--blatantly and without knowledge--of the virtues of the
+dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved husband, in new
+black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious undertaker kept
+moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his trade.
+
+During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the
+floor at Sam’s feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to
+distract his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of
+the weeping women, none of whom had before been in the house and all
+of whom he thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of
+privacy. The note was from John Telfer.
+
+“I will not come to your mother’s funeral,” he wrote. “I respected your
+mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she
+is dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in
+Wildman’s, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the
+moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore’s shop, I will
+go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If
+he or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their
+friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know
+that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take
+them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of
+the dead.”
+
+The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something
+that had slipped from him.
+
+“It is good sense, after all,” he thought, and realised that even in the
+days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the
+fact that Jane McPherson’s long, hard role was just being played out
+to the end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore
+was beating upon his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with
+a flourish. He arose, interrupting the minister’s discourse. Mary
+Underwood had come in just as the minister began talking and had dropped
+into an obscure corner near the door leading into the street. Sam
+crowded past the women who stared and the minister who frowned and the
+baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands and, dropping the note into
+her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking and listening with
+breathless curiosity, “It is from John Telfer. Read it. Even he, hating
+women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door.”
+
+In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their
+heads together and their hands before their faces, nodded toward
+the school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had
+created, went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting
+until the talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the
+streets should be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book.
+
+“I have become older than all of these people here,” thought the youth.
+“They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of
+my hand.”
+
+Mary Underwood, lacking Sam’s unconsciousness of the people, looked
+about with burning cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and putting their
+heads together, a chill of fear ran through her. Into the room had been
+thrust the face of an old enemy to her--the scandal of a small town.
+Picking up the note she slipped out at the door and stole away along
+the street. The old maternal love for Sam had returned strengthened and
+ennobled by the terror through which she had passed with him that night
+in the rain. Going to her house she whistled the collie dog and set out
+along a country road. At the edge of a grove of trees she stopped, sat
+down on a log, and read Telfer’s note. From the soft ground into which
+her feet sank there came the warm pungent smell of the new growth. Tears
+came into her eyes. She thought that in a few days much had come to her.
+She had got a boy upon whom she could pour out the mother love in her
+heart, and she had made a friend of Telfer, whom she had long regarded
+with fear and doubt.
+
+For a month Sam lingered in Caxton. It seemed to him there was something
+that wanted doing there. He sat with the men at the back of Wildman’s,
+and walked aimlessly through the streets and out of the town along the
+country roads, where men worked all day in the fields behind sweating
+horses, ploughing the land. The thrill of spring was in the air, and
+in the evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree below his bedroom
+window. Sam walked and loitered in silence, looking at the ground.
+In his mind was the dread of people. The talk of the men in the store
+wearied him and when he went alone into the country he found himself
+accompanied by the voices of all of those he had come out of town to
+escape. On the street corner the thin-lipped, brown-bearded minister
+stopped him and talked of the future life as he had stopped and talked
+to a bare-legged newsboy.
+
+“Your mother,” he said, “has but gone before. It is for you to get into
+the narrow path and follow her. God has sent this sorrow as a warning
+to you. He wants you also to get into the way of life and in the end to
+join her. Begin coming to our church. Join in the work of the Christ.
+Find truth.”
+
+Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The
+minister’s talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of
+which he got but one thought.
+
+“Find truth,” he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his
+mind play with the idea. “The best men are all trying to do that. They
+spend their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth.”
+
+He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the
+interpretation he had put upon the minister’s words. The terrible
+moments in the kitchen followed by his mother’s death had put a new
+look of seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of
+responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the
+street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become
+public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public
+affairs.
+
+“He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour’s wife,” said
+John Telfer.
+
+Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken
+him to its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had
+encouraged him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father,
+and patronised him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was
+a boy, scurrying between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a
+Saturday night, there was always some one to speak a word to him of his
+morals and to shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected
+to remain there, with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the
+Savings Bank--built to that during his years with Freedom Smith--he
+might soon become one of the town’s solid men.
+
+He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and
+that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the
+train and be off.
+
+One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences,
+hearing the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the
+smell of the new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town
+and sat down on a low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the
+railroad station, to wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken
+on a new meaning to him since any day might see him on such a train
+bound into his new life.
+
+A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed
+by two women.
+
+“Here, watch these,” he said to the women, setting the bags upon
+the platform; “I will go for the tickets,” and disappeared into the
+darkness.
+
+The two women resumed their interrupted talk.
+
+“Ed’s wife has been poorly these ten years,” said one of them. “It will
+be better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long
+ride. I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to
+be train-sick.”
+
+Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John
+Telfer’s old talks with him.
+
+“They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away
+from here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain.”
+
+He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending
+shoes on a side street back of Geiger’s drug store and the two women,
+one short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery
+shop and were Eleanor Telfer’s only competitors.
+
+“Well, the town knows her now for what she is,” said the tall woman.
+“Milly Peters says she won’t rest until she has put that stuck-up Mary
+Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house and
+it was her told Milly. I never heard such a story. To think of Jane
+McPherson working all these years and then having such goings-on in her
+house when she lay dying, Milly says that Sam went away early in the
+evening and came home late with that Underwood thing, half dressed,
+hanging on his arm. Milly’s mother looked out of the window and saw
+them. Then she ran out by the kitchen stove and pretended to be asleep.
+She wanted to see what was up. And the bold hussy came right into the
+house with Sam. Then she went away, and after a while back she came with
+that John Telfer. Milly is going to see that Eleanor Telfer finds it
+out. I guess it will bring her down, too. And there is no telling
+how many other men in this town Mary Underwood is running with. Milly
+says----”
+
+The two women turned as out of the darkness came a tall figure roaring
+and swearing. Two hands flashed out and sank into their hair.
+
+“Stop it!” growled Sam, beating the two heads together, “stop your dirty
+lies!--you ugly she-beasts!”
+
+Hearing the two women screaming the man who had gone for the railroad
+tickets came running down the station platform followed by Jerry Donlin.
+Springing forward Sam knocked the shoemaker over the iron fence into a
+newly spaded flower bed and then turned to the baggage man.
+
+“They were telling lies about Mary Underwood,” he shouted. “She tried to
+save me from killing my father and now they are telling lies about her.”
+
+The two women picked up the bags and ran whimpering away along
+the station platform. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and
+confronted the surprised and frightened shoemaker.
+
+“What the Hell are you doing in my flower bed?” he growled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hurrying through the streets Sam’s mind was in a ferment. Like the Roman
+emperor he wished that all the world had but one head that he might cut
+it off with a slash. The town that had seemed so paternal, so cheery, so
+intent upon wishing him well, now seemed horrible. He thought of it as a
+great, crawling, slimy thing lying in wait amid the cornfields.
+
+“To be saying that of her, of that white soul!” he exclaimed aloud in
+the empty street, all of his boyish loyalty and devotion to the woman
+who had put out a hand to him in his hour of trouble aroused and burning
+in him.
+
+He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a
+swinging blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to
+his own house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing
+meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets
+past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone
+and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and
+quiet. He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane
+McPherson’s funeral.
+
+“It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another,” he
+thought.
+
+For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy
+he saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with
+coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They
+were the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers.
+He remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the
+papers and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational
+murder cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive
+and the details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain
+their curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing
+the newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and
+over on their tongues.
+
+In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the
+thought of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small,
+unaired, unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and
+clothes--only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no
+clean thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in
+a darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such
+a yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these
+women come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat
+hurriedly and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of
+utter physical exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in
+stockinged feet before crawling away to sleep and oblivion.
+
+In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed
+ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the
+man they have snatched from society they cling also with a tenacity
+to be measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the
+craving for food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the
+despair of reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put
+the black dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, “The female of
+the species is more deadly than the male.” At their worst they are to be
+seen drunk with emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution
+or immersed in the secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious
+persecution. At their best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth
+coming to them, they throw themselves into garish display of it and
+flash upon the sight of Newport or Palm Beach. In their native lair in
+the close little houses, they sleep in the bed of the man who has put
+clothes upon their backs and food into their mouths because that is the
+usage of their kind and give him of their bodies grudgingly or willingly
+as the laws of their physical needs direct. They do not love, they sell,
+instead, their bodies in the market place and cry out that man shall
+witness their virtue because they had had the joy of finding one buyer
+instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce animalism in them
+makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the days of its
+softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch again
+an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy, no
+longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite. Having
+passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of emotions
+and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the eloquence of
+evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell--the call to the one being
+brother to the call of the other--crying upon the troubled air of hot
+little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of vulgarity, “The
+weight of my sins is heavy on my soul.” Along streets they go lifting
+heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel to roll
+upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the life
+of a Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its
+offal. Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air,
+dream dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of
+animal youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door
+to kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has
+found a carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it
+forward to the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the
+fine emotion of achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having
+hysteria rather than reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of
+femininity--and none of it. For the most part they live and die unseen,
+unknown, eating rank food, sleeping overmuch, and sitting through
+summer afternoons rocking in chairs and looking at people passing in the
+street. In the end they die full of faith, hoping for a life to come.
+
+Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making
+on Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields
+that lay beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness
+and he thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that
+had been marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and
+shivered as he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air
+aggravating the dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the
+assurance of the days before his mother’s illness and to get again the
+strong belief in his own destiny that had kept him at the money making
+and saving and had urged him to the efforts to rise above the level of
+the man who bred him. He didn’t succeed. The feeling of age that had
+settled upon him in the midst of the people mourning over the body of
+his mother came back, and, turning, he went along the road toward the
+town, saying to himself: “I will go and talk to Mary Underwood.”
+
+While he waited on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided
+that after all a marriage with her might lead to happiness. The half
+spiritual, half physical love of woman that is the glory and mystery of
+youth was gone from him. He thought that if he could only drive from her
+presence the fear of the faces that had been coming and going in his own
+mind he would, for his own part, be content to live his life as a worker
+and money maker, one without dreams.
+
+Mary Underwood came to the door wearing the same heavy long coat she had
+worn on that other night and taking her by the hand Sam led her to the
+edge of the veranda. He looked with content at the pine trees before
+the house, thinking that some benign influence must have guided the hand
+that planted them there to stand clothed and decent amid the barrenness
+of the land at the end of winter.
+
+“What is it, boy?” asked the woman, and her voice was filled with
+anxiety. The maternal passion again glowing in her had for days coloured
+all her thoughts, and with all the ardour of an intense nature she had
+thrown herself into her love of Sam. Thinking of him, she felt in fancy
+the pangs of birth, and in her bed at night relived with him his boyhood
+in the town and built again her plans for his future. In the day time
+she laughed at herself and said tenderly, “You are an old fool.”
+
+Brutally and frankly Sam told her of the thing he had heard on the
+station platform, looking past her at the pine trees and gripping the
+veranda rail. From the dead land there came again the smell of the new
+growth as it had come to him on the road before the revelation at the
+railroad station.
+
+“Something kept telling me not to go away,” he said. “It must have been
+in the air--this thing. Already these evil crawling things were at work.
+Oh, if only all the world, like you and Telfer and some of the others
+here, had an appreciation of the sense of privacy.”
+
+Mary Underwood laughed quietly.
+
+“I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making
+you a man at work upon the things of the mind,” she said. “The sense of
+privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer’s method was
+better than my own. He has given you the knack of saying things with a
+flourish.”
+
+Sam shook his head.
+
+“Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh,” he said
+stoutly. “Here is something at you--it is tearing at you--it has got to
+be met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter over
+in their minds. To-morrow they will be at you again. There is but one
+way and we must take it. You and I will have to marry.”
+
+Mary looked at the serious new lines of his face.
+
+“What a proposal!” she cried.
+
+On an impulse she began singing, her voice fine and strong running
+through the quiet night.
+
+  “He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,”
+
+she sang, and laughed again.
+
+“You should come like that,” she said, and then, “you poor muddled boy.
+Don’t you know that I am your new mother?” she added, taking hold of
+his two arms and turning him about facing her. “Don’t be absurd. I don’t
+want a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him.
+I adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick
+and covered with mud. As for these women--away with them--I’ll face them
+down--I did it once before and I’ll do it again. Go to your city and
+make your fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman’s fight.”
+
+“It is horrible. You don’t understand,” Sam protested.
+
+A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood’s face.
+
+“I understand,” she said. “I have been on that battlefield. It is to be
+won only by silence and tireless waiting. Your very effort to help would
+make the matter worse.”
+
+The woman and the tall boy, suddenly become a man, stood in thought.
+She was thinking of the end toward which her life was drifting.
+How differently she had planned it. She thought of the college in
+Massachusetts and of the men and women walking under the elm trees
+there.
+
+“But I have got me a son and I am going to keep him,” she said aloud,
+putting her hand on Sam’s arm.
+
+Very serious and troubled, Sam went down the gravel path toward the
+road. He felt there was something cowardly in the part she had given him
+to play, but he could see no alternative.
+
+“After all,” he reflected, “it is sensible--it is a woman’s battle.”
+
+Half way to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his
+arms and gave her a great hug.
+
+“Good-bye, little Mother,” he cried and kissed her upon the lips.
+
+And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was
+overcome with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning
+against the house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling
+through her tears she called after him.
+
+“Did you crack their heads hard, boy?” she asked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From Mary’s house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had
+come to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen
+table with pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the
+parlour he could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and
+writing again. Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read
+over and over what he had written, and putting on his coat went through
+the dawn to the house of Tom Comstock, editor of the _Caxton Argus_, and
+roused him out of bed.
+
+“I’ll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won’t cost you anything,”
+ Comstock promised. “But why run it? Let the matter drop.”
+
+“I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago,”
+ Sam thought.
+
+Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at
+Valmore’s suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter’s jewelry store. For an
+hour they bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When
+the choice was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a
+box on the counter Telfer made a speech.
+
+“I will talk straight to that boy,” he declared, laughing. “I am not
+going to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have
+him fail me. I shall tell him that if he doesn’t make money in that
+Chicago I shall come and take the watch from him.”
+
+Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along
+the street to Eleanor’s shop. He strutted through the display room and
+into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.
+
+“What am I going to do, Eleanor?” he demanded, standing with legs spread
+apart and frowning down upon her, “what am I going to do without Sam?”
+
+A freckle-faced boy opened the shop door and threw a newspaper on the
+floor. The boy had a ringing voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer went
+again through the display room, touching with his cane the posts upon
+which hung the finished hats, and whistling. Standing before the shop,
+with the cane hooked upon his arm, he rolled a cigarette and watched the
+boy running from door to door along the street.
+
+“I shall have to be adopting a new son,” he said musingly.
+
+After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood in his white nightgown and re-read
+the statement just given him. He read it over and over, and then, laying
+it on the kitchen table, filled and lighted a corncob pipe. A draft of
+wind blew into the room under the kitchen door chilling his thin shanks
+so that he drew his bare feet, one after the other, up behind the
+protective walls of his nightgown.
+
+“On the night of my mother’s death,” ran the statement, “I sat in the
+kitchen of our house eating my supper when my father came in and began
+shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother who was asleep. I
+put my hand at his throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, and
+carried him around the house and threw him into the road. Then I ran to
+the house of Mary Underwood, who was once my schoolteacher, and told her
+what I had done. She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went
+to look for the body of my father, who was not dead after all. John
+McPherson knows this is true, if he can be made to tell the truth.”
+
+Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous woman with red cheeks,
+who set up type in the shop, did her own housework, and gathered most of
+the news and advertising for _The Argus_.
+
+“Ain’t that a slasher?” he asked, handing her the statement Sam had
+written.
+
+“Well, it ought to stop the mean things they are saying about Mary
+Underwood,” she snapped. Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and
+looking at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her much help
+with _The Argus_, was the best checker player in Caxton and had once
+been to a state tournament of experts in that sport, she added, “Poor
+Jane McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better father for him
+than that liar Windy. Choked him, eh? Well, if the men of this town had
+any spunk they would finish the job.”
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns
+in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like
+Freedom Smith, bought the farmers’ products. On Sundays he sat in chairs
+before country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or,
+getting back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown
+streets and among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on
+the road. From time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with
+the men in Wildman’s, stealing away later for an evening with Mary
+Underwood.
+
+In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the
+farmer’s widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In
+the store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose--the same John Telfer
+had watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show
+Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker
+barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging
+cane and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer
+had not got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad
+station and make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the
+loss of that opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and
+thinking of many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour
+to the speech he had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam,
+while the gift had touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind
+the essential solid goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he
+lost much of the bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood,
+had been able to make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his
+room in Chicago he had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting
+in and taking out flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of
+thanks.
+
+Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now
+that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom
+Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in
+the wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore’s shop as the blacksmith
+walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.
+
+“What has happened to Sam--he has changed so much?” he asked, dropping
+a foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel. “Already the
+city has changed him,” he added regretfully.
+
+Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.
+
+“He bites off his words,” continued Valmore; “he sits for an hour in the
+store and then goes away, and doesn’t come back to say good-bye when he
+leaves town. What has got into him?”
+
+Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust
+of the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had
+been hurled at him.
+
+“If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all
+right,” he exploded. “He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes
+to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like
+it.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing,
+hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy
+from the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the
+money-maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems
+of life and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great
+game in which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited
+patiently until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would
+possess. With the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they
+pounced and Sam felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with
+country buyers used it ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look
+that came into the eyes of unsuccessful business men at critical moments
+and watched for it and took advantage of it as a successful prize
+fighter watches for a similar vague, uncertain look in the eyes of an
+opponent.
+
+He had found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that
+comes with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the
+successful business men about him is the stroke also of the master
+painter, scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of
+Whistler, Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been
+in him when as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook,
+and now and then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road.
+In the city where men of wealth and power in affairs rubbed elbows with
+him in the street cars and walked past him in hotel lobbies he watched
+and waited saying to himself, “I also will be such a one.”
+
+Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked
+on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of
+himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a
+knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of
+vast work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but
+for the most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about
+him, keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.
+
+During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton
+family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but
+that still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer
+vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed
+him during the month after his mother’s death, and letters regarding him
+had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down
+to dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and
+talk of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.
+
+“I was thinking of old John Moore to-day--does he still drive that
+team of black ponies?” the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman
+of thirty, would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a
+conversation of baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new
+office building to be erected in the Loop.
+
+“No, he don’t,” Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in
+a machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake
+been the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that
+he looked upon Sam as an intruder. “John told me last summer when I was
+home that he intended to sell the blacks and buy mules,” he would add,
+looking at the youth challengingly.
+
+The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar
+and bustle of Chicago’s vast west side, it still turned with hungry
+heart toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for
+Jake, its mainstay, could be found in that paradise.
+
+Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey
+moustache, and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so
+that they stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of
+a lawn, worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night,
+going to bed at nine o’clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling,
+from room to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers,
+or sitting in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the
+habits formed in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home
+with his pay in his pocket, settled with the two sisters for the
+week’s living, sat down to dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then
+disappeared upon the troubled waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening
+he re-appeared, with empty pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and
+a noisy attempt at self-possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl
+into bed in preparation for another week of toil and respectability. The
+man had a certain Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new
+ladies met on his weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall.
+He once took Sam upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half
+around the room.
+
+Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of
+thirty-five who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and
+blessed with a remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical
+student in the front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired
+woman stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer
+from a wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little
+Southern wife.
+
+The women in the Pergrin house seemed to Sam tremendously concerned
+about their health and each evening talked of the matter, he thought,
+more than his mother had talked during her illness. While Sam lived with
+them they were all under the influence of a strange sort of faith healer
+and took what they called “Health Suggestion” treatments. Twice each
+week the faith healer came to the house, laid his hands upon their backs
+and took their money. The treatment afforded Jake a never-ending source
+of amusement and in the evening he went through the house putting his
+hands upon the backs of the women and demanding money from them, but
+the dry-goods buyer’s wife, who for years had coughed at night, slept
+peacefully after some weeks of the treatment and the cough did not
+return while Sam remained in the house.
+
+In the house Sam had a standing. Glowing tales of his shrewdness in
+business, his untiring industry, and the size of his bank account, had
+preceded him from Caxton, and these tales the Pergrins, in their loyalty
+to the town and to all the products of the town, did not allow to shrink
+in the re-telling. The housekeeping sister, a kindly woman, became fond
+of Sam, and in his absence would boast of him to chance callers or to
+the boarders gathered in the living room in the evening. She it was who
+laid the foundation of the medical student’s belief that Sam was a kind
+of genius in money matters, a belief that enabled him later to make a
+successful assault upon a legacy which came to that young man.
+
+Frank Eckardt, the medical student, Sam took as a friend. On Sunday
+afternoons they went to walk in the streets, or, taking two girl friends
+of Frank’s, who were also students at the medical school, on their arms,
+they went to the park and sat upon benches under the trees.
+
+For one of these young women Sam conceived a regard that approached
+tenderness. Sunday after Sunday he spent with her, and once, walking
+through the park on an evening in the late fall, the dry brown leaves
+rustling under their feet and the sun going down in red splendour before
+their eyes, he took her hand and walked in silence, feeling tremendously
+alive and vital as he had felt on that other night walking under the
+trees of Caxton with the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker.
+
+That nothing came of the affair and that after a time he did not see
+the girl again was due, he thought, to his own growing interest in money
+making and to the fact that there was in her, as in Frank Eckardt, a
+blind devotion to something that he could not himself understand.
+
+Once he had a talk with Eckardt of the matter. “She is fine and
+purposeful like a woman I knew in my home town,” he said, thinking of
+Eleanor Telfer, “but she will not talk to me of her work as sometimes
+she talks to you. I want her to talk. There is something about her that
+I do not understand and that I want to understand. I think that she
+likes me and once or twice I have thought she would not greatly mind my
+making love to her, but I do not understand her just the same.”
+
+One day in the office of the company for which he worked Sam became
+acquainted with a young advertising man named Jack Prince, a brisk, very
+much alive young fellow who made money rapidly, spent it lavishly, and
+had friends and acquaintances in every office, every hotel lobby, every
+bar room and restaurant in the down-town section of the city. The chance
+acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. The clever, witty Prince made
+a kind of hero of Sam, admiring his reserve and good sense and boasting
+of him far and wide through the town. With Prince, Sam occasionally went
+on mild carouses, and, once, in the midst of thousands of people sitting
+about tables and drinking beer at the Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, he and
+Prince got into a fight with two waiters, Prince declaring he had been
+cheated and Sam, although he thought his friend in the wrong, striking
+out with his fist and dragging Prince through the door and into a
+passing street car in time to avoid a rush of other waiters hurrying to
+the aid of the one who lay dazed and sputtering on the sawdust floor.
+
+After these evenings of carousal, carried on with Jack Prince and with
+young men met on trains and about country hotels, Sam spent hour after
+hour walking about town absorbed in his own thoughts and getting his own
+impressions of what he saw. In the affairs with the young men he played,
+for the most part, a passive rôle, going with them from place to place
+and drinking until they became loud and boisterous, or morose and
+quarrelsome, and then slipping away to his own room, amused or irritated
+as the circumstances, or the temperament of his companions, had made
+or marred the joviality of the evening. On his nights alone, he put his
+hands into his pockets and walked for endless miles through the lighted
+streets, getting in a dim way a realisation of the hugeness of life. All
+of the faces going past him, the women in their furs, the young men
+with cigars in their mouths going to the theatres, the bald old men with
+watery eyes, the boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and
+the slim prostitutes lurking in the hallways, should have interested him
+deeply. In his youth, and with the pride of sleeping power in him, he
+saw them only as so many individuals that might some day test their
+ability against his own. And if he peered at them closely and marked
+down face after face in the crowds it was as a sitter in the great game
+of business that he looked, exercising his mind by imagining this or
+that one arrayed against him in deals, and planning the method by which
+he would win in the imaginary struggle.
+
+There was at that time in Chicago a place, to be reached by a bridge
+above the Illinois Central Railroad track, that Sam sometimes visited
+on stormy nights to watch the lake lashed by the wind. Great masses
+of water moving swiftly and silently broke with a roar against wooden
+piles, backed by hills of stone and earth, and the spray from the broken
+waves fell upon Sam’s face and on winter nights froze on his coat. He
+had learned to smoke, and leaning upon the railing of the bridge would
+stand for hours with a pipe in his mouth looking at the moving water,
+filled with awe and admiration of the silent power of it.
+
+One night in September, when he was walking alone in the streets, an
+incident happened that showed him also a silent power within himself,
+a power that startled and for the moment frightened him. Walking into
+a little street back of Dearborn, he was suddenly aware of the faces of
+women looking out at him through small square windows cut in the fronts
+of the houses. Here and there, before and behind him, were the faces;
+voices called, smiles invited, hands beckoned. Up and down the street
+went men looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their
+necks, their hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces
+of the women pressed against the little squares of glass and then,
+turning, suddenly, sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued.
+Among the walkers on the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats
+whose feet scuffled as they hurried along, and young boys with the pink
+of virtue in their cheeks. In the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It
+got into Sam’s brain and he stood hesitating and uncertain, startled,
+nerveless, afraid. He remembered a story he had once heard from John
+Telfer, a story of the disease and death that lurks in the little side
+streets of cities, and ran into Van Buren Street and from that into
+lighted State. He climbed up the stairway of the elevated railroad and
+jumping on the first train went away south to walk for hours on a gravel
+roadway at the edge of the lake in Jackson Park. The wind from the lake
+and the laughter and talk of people passing under the lights cooled
+the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the eloquence of John
+Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his voice marshalling
+the armies of the standing corn.
+
+Into Sam’s mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great
+masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there
+was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of,
+moving always forward, silent, powerful--the force of sex. He wondered
+how the force would be broken in his own case, against what breakwater
+it would spend itself. At midnight, he went home across the city and
+crept into his alcove in the Pergrin house, puzzled and for the time
+utterly tired. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and
+resolutely closing his eyes tried to sleep. “There are things not to
+be understood,” he told himself. “To live decently is a matter of good
+sense. I will keep thinking of what I want to do and not go into such a
+place again.”
+
+One day, when he had been in Chicago two years, there happened an
+incident of another sort, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, so full
+of youth, that for days after it happened he thought of it with delight,
+and walked in the streets or sat in a passenger train laughing joyfully
+at the remembrance of some new detail of the affair.
+
+Sam, who was the son of Windy McPherson and who had more than once
+ruthlessly condemned all men who put liquor into their mouths, got
+drunk, and for eighteen hours went shouting poetry, singing songs, and
+yelling at the stars like a wood god on the bend.
+
+Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in
+DeJonge’s restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before
+him on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers,
+talked to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.
+
+“He will be late, of course,” he exclaimed, refilling Sam’s glass. “The
+man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would
+take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from
+the cheeks of a maiden.”
+
+Sam had already seen the man for whom they waited. He was thirty-five,
+small and narrow-shouldered, with a little wrinkled face, a huge nose,
+and a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. Sam had seen him in
+a Michigan Avenue club with Prince solemnly pitching silver dollars at a
+chalk mark on the floor with a group of serious, solid-looking old men.
+
+“They are the crowd that have just put through the big deal in Kansas
+oil stock and the little one is Morris, who handled the publicity for
+them,” Prince had explained.
+
+Later, when they were walking down Michigan Avenue, Prince talked at
+length of Morris, whom he admired immensely. “He is the best advertising
+and publicity man in America,” he declared. “He isn’t a four-flusher,
+as I am, and does not make as much money, but he can take another man’s
+ideas and express them so simply and forcibly that they tell the
+man’s story better than he knew it himself. And that’s all there is to
+advertising.”
+
+He began laughing.
+
+“It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the
+man for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every
+pat phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He
+will howl like a beast at paying Tom’s bill, and then the next time he
+will try to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so
+that he has to send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like
+shelling corn off the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him.”
+
+Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge
+pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. “I am on my way
+to the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company,” he
+explained to Prince. “I can’t stop at all. I have here the layout of
+a circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common
+stock of theirs that hasn’t paid a dividend for ten years.”
+
+Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. “Never mind
+the Biscuit Machine people and their stock,” he commanded; “they will
+always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to
+meet McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help
+him with.”
+
+Morris reached across the table and took Sam’s hand; his own was small
+and soft like that of a woman. “I am worked to death,” he complained;
+“I have my eye on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am going down there to
+live.”
+
+For an hour the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked of
+a place in Wisconsin where the fish should be biting. “A man has told me
+of the place twenty times,” he declared; “I am sure I could find it on
+a railroad folder. I have never been fishing nor have you, and Sam here
+comes from a place to which they carry water in wagons over the plains.”
+
+The little man who had been drinking copiously of the wine looked from
+Prince to Sam. From time to time he took off his glasses and wiped them
+with a handkerchief. “I don’t understand your being in such society,” he
+announced; “you have the solid, substantial look of a bucket-shop man.
+Prince here will get nowhere. He is honest, sells wind and his charming
+society, and spends the money that he gets, instead of marrying and
+putting it in his wife’s name.”
+
+Prince arose. “It is useless to waste time in persiflage,” he began
+and then turning to Sam, “There is a place in Wisconsin,” he said
+uncertainly.
+
+Morris picked up the portfolio and with a grotesque effort at steadiness
+started for the door followed by Prince and Sam walking with wavering
+steps. In the street Prince took the portfolio out of the little man’s
+hand. “Let your mother carry it, Tommy,” he said, shaking his finger
+under Morris’s nose. He began singing a lullaby. “When the bough bends
+the cradle will fall.”
+
+The three men walked out of Monroe and into State Street, Sam’s head
+feeling strangely light. The buildings along the street reeled against
+the sky. A sudden fierce longing for wild adventure seized him. On a
+corner Morris stopped, took the handkerchief from his pocket and again
+wiped his glasses. “I want to be sure that I see clearly,” he said; “it
+seems to me that in the bottom of that last glass of wine I saw three
+of us in a cab with a basket of life oil on the seat between us going
+to the station to catch the train for that place Jack’s friend told fish
+lies about.”
+
+The next eighteen hours opened up a new world to Sam. With the fumes of
+liquor rising in his brain, he rode for two hours on a train, tramped
+in the darkness along dusty roads and, building a bonfire in a woods,
+danced in the light of it upon the grass, holding the hands of Prince
+and the little man with the wrinkled face. Solemnly he stood upon a
+stump at the edge of a wheatfield and recited Poe’s “Helen,” taking on
+the voice, the gestures and even the habit of spreading his legs apart,
+of John Telfer. And then overdoing the last, he sat down suddenly on the
+stump, and Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand said, “Fill
+the lamp, man--the light of reason has gone out.”
+
+From the bonfire in the woods and Sam’s recital from the stump, the
+three friends emerged again upon the road, and a belated farmer driving
+home half asleep on the seat of his wagon caught their attention. With
+the skill of an Indian boy the diminutive Morris sprang upon the wagon
+and thrust a ten dollar bill into the farmer’s hand. “Lead us, O man of
+the soil!” he shouted, “Lead us to a gilded palace of sin! Take us to a
+saloon! The life oil gets low in the can!”
+
+Beyond the long, jolting ride in the wagon Sam never became quite clear.
+In his mind ran vague notions of a wild carousal in a country tavern, of
+himself acting as bartender, and a huge red-faced woman rushing here and
+there under the direction of a tiny man, dragging reluctant rustics to
+the bar and commanding them to keep on drinking the beer that Sam drew
+until the last of the ten dollars given to the man of the wagon should
+have gone into her cash drawer. Also, he thought that Jack Prince
+had put a chair upon the bar and that he sat on it explaining to the
+hurrying drawer of beer that although the Egyptian kings had built great
+pyramids to celebrate themselves they never built anything more gigantic
+than the jag Tom Morris was building among the farm hands in the room.
+
+Later Sam thought that he and Jack Prince tried to sleep under a pile of
+grain sacks in a shed and that Morris came to them weeping because every
+one in the world was asleep and most of them lying under tables.
+
+And then, his head clearing, Sam found himself with the two others
+walking again upon the dusty road in the dawn and singing songs.
+
+On the train, with the help of a Negro porter, the three men tried
+to efface the dust and the stains of the wild night. The pasteboard
+portfolio containing the circular for the Biscuit Machine Company was
+still under Jack Prince’s arm and the little man, wiping and re-wiping
+his glasses, peered at Sam.
+
+“Did you come with us or are you a child we have adopted here in these
+parts?” he asked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street in Chicago where Sam
+came to make his business start in the city, and it was proof of the dry
+unresponsiveness in him that he did not sense more fully its meaning and
+its message. All day the food stuff of a vast city flowed through the
+narrow streets. Blue-shirted, broad-shouldered teamsters from the tops
+of high piled wagons bawled at scurrying pedestrians. On the sidewalks
+in boxes, bags, and barrels, lay oranges from Florida and California,
+figs from Arabia, bananas from Jamaica, nuts from the hills of Spain and
+the plains of Africa, cabbages from Ohio, beans from Michigan, corn
+and potatoes from Iowa. In December, fur-coated men hurried through the
+forests of northern Michigan gathering Christmas trees that found
+their way to warm firesides through the street. And summer and winter a
+million hens laid the eggs that were gathered there, and the cattle on
+a thousand hills sent their yellow butter fat packed in tubs and piled
+upon trucks to add to the confusion.
+
+Into this street Sam walked, thinking little of the wonder of these
+things and thinking haltingly, getting his sense of the bigness of it in
+dollars and cents. Standing in the doorway of the commission house for
+which he was to work, strong, well clad, able and efficient, he looked
+through the streets, seeing and hearing the hurry and the roar and the
+shouting of voices, and then with a smile upon his lips went inside. In
+his brain was an unexpressed thought. As the old Norse marauders looked
+at the cities sitting in their splendour on the Mediterranean so looked
+he. “What loot!” a voice within him said, and his brain began devising
+methods by which he should get his share of it.
+
+Years later, when Sam was a man of big affairs, he drove one day in
+a carriage through the streets and turning to his companion, a
+grey-haired, dignified Boston man who sat beside him, said, “I worked
+here once and used to sit on a barrel of apples at the edge of the
+sidewalk thinking how clever I was to make more money in one month than
+the man who raised the apples made in a year.”
+
+The Boston man, stirred by the sight of so much foodstuff and moved to
+epigram by his mood, looked up and down the street.
+
+“The foodstuff of an empire rattling o’er the stones,” he said.
+
+“I should have made more money here,” answered Sam dryly.
+
+The commission firm for which Sam worked was a partnership, not a
+corporation, and was owned by two brothers. Of the two Sam thought that
+the elder, a tall, bald, narrow-shouldered man, with a long narrow face
+and a suave manner, was the real master, and represented most of the
+ability in the partnership. He was oily, silent, tireless. All day he
+went in and out of the office and warehouses and up and down the crowded
+street, sucking nervously at an unlighted cigar. He was a great worker
+in a suburban church, but a shrewd and, Sam suspected, an unscrupulous
+business man. Occasionally the minister or some of the women of the
+suburban church came into the office to talk with him, and Sam was
+amused at the thought that Narrow Face, when he talked of the affairs of
+the church, bore a striking resemblance to the brown-bearded minister of
+the church in Caxton.
+
+The other brother was a far different sort, and, in business, Sam
+thought, a much inferior man. He was a heavy, broad-shouldered,
+square-faced man of about thirty, who sat in the office dictating
+letters and who stayed out two or three hours to lunch. He sent out
+letters signed by him on the firm’s stationery with the title of
+General Manager, and Narrow Face let him do it. Broad Shoulders had
+been educated in New England and even after several years away from
+his college seemed more interested in it than in the welfare of the
+business. For a month or more in the spring he took most of the time
+of one of the two stenographers employed by the firm writing letters to
+graduates of Chicago high schools to induce them to go East to finish
+their education; and when a graduate of the college came to Chicago
+seeking employment, he closed his desk and spent entire days going from
+place to place, introducing, urging, recommending. Sam noticed, however,
+that when the firm employed a new man in their own office or on the road
+it was Narrow-Face who chose the man.
+
+Broad-shoulders had been a famous football player in his day and wore
+an iron brace on his leg. The offices, like most of the offices on the
+street, were dark and narrow, and smelled of decaying vegetables
+and rancid butter. Noisy Greek and Italian hucksters wrangled on the
+sidewalk in front, and among these went Narrow-Face hurrying about
+making deals.
+
+In South Water Street Sam did well, multiplying his thirty-six hundred
+dollars by ten during the three years that he stayed there, or went out
+from there to towns and cities directing a part of the great flowing
+river of foodstuff through his firm’s front door.
+
+With almost his first day on the street he began seeing on all sides of
+him opportunity for gain, and set himself industriously at work to get
+his hand upon money with which to take advantage of the chances that
+he thought lay so invitingly about. Within a year he had made much
+progress. From a woman on Wabash Avenue he got six thousand dollars, and
+he planned and executed a coup that gave him the use of twenty thousand
+dollars that had come as a legacy to his friend, the medical student,
+who lived at the Pergrin house.
+
+Sam had eggs and apples lying in warehouse against a rise; game,
+smuggled across the state line from Michigan and Wisconsin, lay frozen
+in cold storage tagged with his name and ready to be sold at a long
+profit to hotels and fashionable restaurants; and there were even secret
+bushels of corn and wheat lying in other warehouses along the Chicago
+River ready to be thrown on the market at a word from him, or, the
+margins by which he kept his hold on the stuff not being forthcoming, at
+a word from a LaSalle Street broker.
+
+Getting the twenty thousand dollars out of the hands of the medical
+student was a turning point in Sam’s life. Sunday after Sunday he walked
+with Eckardt in the streets or loitered with him in the parks thinking
+of the money lying idle in the bank and of the deals he might be turning
+with it in the street or on the road. Daily he saw more clearly the
+power of cash. Other commission merchants along South Water Street came
+running into the office of his firm with tense, anxious faces asking
+Narrow-Face to help them over rough spots in the day’s trading.
+Broad-Shoulders, who had no business ability but who had married a rich
+woman, went on month after month taking half the profits brought in by
+the ability of his tall, shrewd brother, and Narrow-Face, who had taken
+a liking for Sam and who occasionally stopped for a word with him, spoke
+of the matter often and eloquently.
+
+“Spend your time with no one who hasn’t money to help you,” he said; “on
+the road look for the men with money and then try to get it. That’s all
+there is to business--money-getting.” And then looking across to the
+desk of his brother he would add, “I would kick half the men in business
+out of it if I could, but I myself must dance to the tune that money
+plays.”
+
+One day Sam went to the office of an attorney named Webster, whose
+reputation for the shrewd drawing of contracts had come to him from
+Narrow-Face.
+
+“I want a contract drawn that will give me absolute control of twenty
+thousand dollars with no risk on my part if I lose the money and no
+promise to pay more than seven per cent if I do not lose,” he said.
+
+The attorney, a slender, middle-aged man with a swarthy skin and black
+hair, put his hands on the desk before him and looked at the tall young
+man.
+
+“What collateral?” he asked.
+
+Sam shook his head. “Can you draw such a contract that will be legal and
+what will it cost me?” he asked.
+
+The lawyer laughed good naturedly. “I can draw it of course. Why not?”
+
+Sam, taking a roll of bills from his pocket, counted the amount upon the
+table.
+
+“Who are you anyway?” asked Webster. “If you can get twenty thousand and
+without collateral you’re worth knowing. I might be getting up a gang to
+rob a mail train.”
+
+Sam did not answer. He put the contract in his pocket and went home to
+his alcove at the Pergrins. He wanted to get by himself and think. He
+did not believe that he would by any chance lose Frank Eckardt’s money,
+but he knew that Eckardt himself would draw back from the kind of deals
+that he expected to make with the money, that they would frighten and
+alarm him, and he wondered if he was being honest.
+
+In his own room after dinner Sam studied carefully the agreement drawn
+by Webster. It seemed to him to cover what he wanted covered, and
+having got it well fixed in his mind he tore it up. “There is no use his
+knowing I have been to a lawyer,” he thought guiltily.
+
+Getting into bed, he began building plans for the future. With more than
+thirty thousand dollars at his command he thought that he should be able
+to make headway rapidly. “In my hands it will double itself every year,”
+ he told himself and getting out of bed he drew a chair to the window and
+sat down, feeling strangely alive and awake like a young man in love. He
+saw himself going on and on, directing, managing, ruling men. It seemed
+to him that there was nothing he could not do. “I will run factories
+and banks and maybe mines and railroads,” he thought and his mind leaped
+forward so that he saw himself, grey, stern, and capable, sitting at
+a broad desk high in a great stone building, a materialisation of John
+Telfer’s word picture--“You will be a big man of dollars--it is plain.”
+
+And then into Sam’s mind came another picture. He remembered a Saturday
+afternoon when a young man had come running into the office on South
+Water Street, a young man who owed Narrow-Face a sum of money and could
+not pay it. He remembered the unpleasant tightening of the mouth and the
+sudden shrewd hard look in his employer’s long narrow face. He had not
+heard much of the talk, but he was aware of a strained pleading quality
+in the voice of the young man who had said over and over slowly and
+painfully, “But, man, my honour is at stake,” and of a coldness in the
+answering voice replying persistently, “With me it is not a matter of
+honour but of dollars, and I am going to get them.”
+
+From the alcove window Sam looked out upon a vacant lot covered
+with patches of melting snow. Beyond the lot facing him stood a flat
+building, and the snow, melting on the roof, made a little stream that
+ran down some hidden pipe and rattled out upon the ground. The noise
+of the falling water and the sound of distant footsteps going homeward
+through the sleeping city brought back thoughts of other nights when as
+a boy in Caxton he had sat thus, thinking disconnected thoughts.
+
+Without knowing it Sam was fighting one of the real battles of his life,
+a battle in which the odds were very much against the quality in him
+that got him out of bed to look at the snow-clad vacant lot.
+
+There was in the youth much of the brute trader, blindly intent
+upon gain; much of the quality that has given America so many of its
+so-called great men. It was the quality that had sent him in secret
+to Lawyer Webster to protect himself without protecting the simple
+credulous young medical student, and that had made him say as he came
+home with the contract in his pocket, “I will do what I can,” when in
+truth he meant, “I will get what I can.”
+
+There may be business men in America who do not get what they can, who
+simply love power. One sees men here and there in banks, at the heads of
+great industrial trusts, in factories and in great mercantile houses of
+whom one would like to think thus. They are the men who one dreams have
+had an awakening, who have found themselves; they are the men hopeful
+thinkers try to recall again and again to the mind.
+
+To these men America is looking. It is asking them to keep the faith,
+to stand themselves up against the force of the brute trader, the dollar
+man, the man who with his one cunning wolf quality of acquisitiveness
+has too long ruled the business of the nation.
+
+I have said that the sense of equity in Sam fought an unequal battle.
+He was in business, and young in business, in a day when all America was
+seized with a blind grappling for gain. The nation was drunk with it,
+trusts were being formed, mines opened; from the ground spurted oil and
+gas; railroads creeping westward opened yearly vast empires of new land.
+To be poor was to be a fool; thought waited, art waited; and men at
+their firesides gathered their children around them and talked glowingly
+of men of dollars, holding them up as prophets fit to lead the youth of
+the young nation.
+
+Sam had in him the making of the new, the commanding man of business. It
+was that quality in him that made him sit by the window thinking before
+going to the medical student with the unfair contract, and the same
+quality had sent him forth night after night to walk alone in the
+streets when other young men went to theatres or to walk with girls in
+the park. He had, in truth, a taste for the lonely hours when thought
+grows. He was a step beyond the youth who hurries to the theatre or
+buries himself in stories of love or adventure. He had in him something
+that wanted a chance.
+
+In the flat building across the vacant lot a light appeared at a window
+and through the lighted window he saw a man clad in pajamas who propped
+a sheet of music against a dressing-table and who had a shining silver
+horn in his hand. Sam watched, filled with mild curiosity. The man,
+not reckoning on an onlooker at so late an hour, began an elaborate and
+amusing schedule of personation. He opened the window, put the horn to
+his lips and then turning bowed before the lighted room as before an
+audience. He put his hand to his lips and blew kisses about, then put
+the horn to his lips and looked again at the sheet of music.
+
+The note that came out of the window on the still air was a failure,
+it flattened into a squawk. Sam laughed and pulled down the window. The
+incident had brought back to his mind another man who bowed to a crowd
+and blew upon a horn. Getting into bed he pulled the covers about him
+and went to sleep. “I will get Frank’s money if I can,” he told himself,
+settling the matter that had been in his mind. “Most men are fools and
+if I do not get his money some other man will.”
+
+On the next afternoon Eckardt had lunch down town with Sam. Together
+they went to a bank where Sam showed the profits of deals he had made
+and the growth of his bank account, going afterward into South Water
+Street where Sam talked glowingly of the money to be made by a shrewd
+man who knew the ways of the street and had a head upon his shoulders.
+
+“That’s just it,” said Frank Eckardt, falling quickly into the trap
+Sam had set, and hungering for profits; “I have money but no head on my
+shoulders for using it. I wish you would take it and see what you can
+do.”
+
+With a thumping heart Sam went home across the city to the Pergrin
+house, Eckardt beside him in the elevated train. In Sam’s room the
+agreement was written out by Sam and signed by Eckardt. At dinner time
+they had the drygoods buyer in to sign as witness.
+
+And the agreement turned out to Eckardt’s advantage. In no year did
+Sam return him less than ten per cent, and in the end gave back the
+principal more than doubled so that Eckardt was able to retire from
+the practice of medicine and live upon the interest of his capital in a
+village near Tiffin, Ohio.
+
+With the thirty thousand dollars in his hands Sam began to reach out
+and extend the scope of his ventures. He bought and sold constantly, not
+only eggs, butter, apples, and grain, but also houses and building lots.
+Through his head marched long rows of figures. Deals worked themselves
+out in detail in his brain as he went about town drinking with young
+men, or sat at dinner in the Pergrin house. He even began working over
+in his head various schemes for getting into the firm by which he was
+employed, and thought that he might work upon Broad-Shoulders, getting
+hold of his interest and forcing himself into control. And then, the
+fear of Narrow-Face holding him back and his growing success in deals
+keeping his mind occupied, he was suddenly confronted by an opportunity
+that changed entirely the plans he was making for himself.
+
+Through Jack Prince’s suggestion Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey
+Arms Company sent for him and offered him a position as buyer of all the
+materials used in their factories.
+
+It was the kind of connection Sam had unconsciously been seeking--a
+company, strong, old, conservative, known throughout the world. There
+was, in the talk with Colonel Tom, a hint of future opportunities to get
+stock in the company and perhaps to become eventually an official--these
+things were of course remote--to be dreamed of and worked toward--the
+company made it a part of its policy.
+
+Sam said nothing, but already he had decided to accept the place, and
+was thinking of a profitable arrangement touching percentages on the
+amount saved in buying that had worked out so well for him during his
+years with Freedom Smith.
+
+Sam’s work for the firearms company took him off the road and confined
+him to an office all day long. In a way he regretted this. The
+complaints he had heard among travelling men in country hotels with
+regard to the hardship of travel meant nothing to his mind. Any kind of
+travel was a keen pleasure to him. Against the hardships and discomforts
+he balanced the tremendous advantages of seeing new places and faces
+and getting a look into many lives, and he looked back with a kind of
+retrospective joy on the three years of hurrying from place to place,
+catching trains, and talking with chance acquaintances met by the way.
+Also, the years on the road had given him many opportunities for secret
+and profitable deals of his own.
+
+Over against these advantages the place at Rainey’s threw him into close
+and continuous association with men of big affairs. The offices of the
+Arms Company occupied an entire floor of one of Chicago’s newest and
+biggest skyscrapers and millionaire stockholders and men high in the
+service of the state and of the government at Washington came in and
+went out at the door. Sam looked at them closely. He wanted to have a
+tilt with them and try if his Caxton and South Water Street shrewdness
+would keep the head upon his shoulders in LaSalle Street. The
+opportunity seemed to him a big one and he went about his work quietly
+and ably, intent upon making the most of it.
+
+The Rainey Arms Company, at the time of Sam’s coming with it, was still
+largely owned by the Rainey family, father and daughter. Colonel Rainey,
+a grey-whiskered military looking man with a paunch, was the president
+and largest individual stockholder. He was a pompous, swaggering old
+fellow with a habit of making the most trivial statement with the air
+of a judge pronouncing the death sentence, and sat dutifully at his desk
+day after day looking very important and thoughtful, smoking long black
+cigars and signing personally piles of letters brought him by the heads
+of various departments. He looked upon himself as a silent but very
+important spoke in the government at Washington and every day issued
+many orders which the men at the heads of departments received with
+respect and disregarded in secret. Twice he had been prominently
+mentioned in connection with cabinet positions in the national
+government, and in talks with his cronies at clubs and restaurants he
+gave the impression of having actually refused an offer of appointment
+on both occasions.
+
+Having got himself established as a factor in the management of the
+business, Sam found many things that surprised him. In every company of
+which he knew there was some one man to whom all looked for guidance,
+who at critical moments became dominant, saying “Do this, or that,” and
+making no explanations. In the Rainey Company he found no such man, but,
+instead, a dozen strong departments, each with its own head and each
+more or less independent of the others.
+
+Sam lay in his bed at night and went about in the evening thinking of
+this and of its meaning. Among the department heads there was a great
+deal of loyalty and devotion to Colonel Tom, and he thought that among
+them were a few men who were devoted to other interests than their own.
+
+At the same time he told himself there was something wrong. He himself
+had no such feeling of loyalty and although he was willing to give
+lip service to the resounding talk of the colonel about the fine old
+traditions of the company, he could not bring himself to a belief in the
+idea of conducting a vast business on a system founded upon lip service
+to traditions, or upon loyalty to an individual.
+
+“There must be loose ends lying about everywhere,” he thought and
+followed the thought with another. “A man will come along, pick up these
+loose ends, and run the whole shop. Why not I?”
+
+The Rainey Arms Company had made its millions for the Rainey and
+Whittaker families during the Civil War. Whittaker had been an inventor,
+making one of the first practical breech-loading guns, and the original
+Rainey had been a dry-goods merchant in an Illinois town who backed the
+inventor.
+
+It proved itself a rare combination. Whittaker developed into a
+wonderful shop manager for his day, and, from the first, stayed at home
+building rifles and making improvements, enlarging the plant, getting
+out the goods. The drygoods merchant scurried about the country, going
+to Washington and to the capitals of the individual states, pulling
+wires, appealing to patriotism and state pride, taking big orders at fat
+prices.
+
+In Chicago there is a tradition that more than once he went south of the
+Dixie line and that following these trips thousands of Rainey-Whittaker
+rifles found their way into the hands of Confederate soldiers, but this
+story which increased Sam’s respect for the energetic little drygoods
+merchant, Colonel Tom, his son, indignantly denied. In reality Colonel
+Tom would have liked to think of the first Rainey as a huge, Jove-like
+god of arms. Like Windy McPherson of Caxton, given a chance, he would
+have invented a new ancestor.
+
+After the Civil War, and Colonel Tom’s growing to manhood, the Rainey
+and Whittaker fortunes were merged into one through the marriage of Jane
+Whittaker, the last of her line, to the only surviving Rainey, and upon
+her death her fortune, grown to more than a million, stood in the name
+of Sue Rainey, twenty-six, the only issue of the marriage.
+
+From the first day, Sam began to forge ahead in the Rainey Company. In
+the buying end he found a rich field for spectacular money saving and
+money making and made the most of it. The position as buyer had for
+ten years been occupied by a distant cousin to Colonel Tom, now dead.
+Whether the cousin was a fool or a knave Sam could never quite decide
+and did not greatly care, but after he had got the situation in hand
+he felt that the man must have cost the company a tremendous sum, which
+_he_ intended to save.
+
+Sam’s arrangement with the company gave him, besides a fair salary, half
+he saved in the fixed prices of standard materials. These prices had
+stood fixed for years and Sam went into them, cutting right and left,
+and making for himself during his first year twenty-three thousand
+dollars. At the end of the year, when the directors asked to have an
+adjustment made and the percentage contract annulled, he got a generous
+slice of company stock, the respect of Colonel Tom Rainey and the
+directors, the fear of some of the department heads, the loyal devotion
+of others, and the title of Treasurer of the company.
+
+The Rainey Arms Company was in truth living largely upon the reputation
+built up for it by the first pushing energetic Rainey, and the inventive
+genius of his partner, Whittaker. Under Colonel Tom it had found
+new conditions and new competition which he had ignored, or met in a
+half-hearted way, standing on its reputation, its financial strength,
+and on the glory of its past achievements. Dry rot ate at its heart.
+The damage done was not great, but was growing greater. The heads of the
+departments, in whose hands so much of the running of the business lay,
+were many of them incompetent men with nothing to commend them but long
+years of service. And in the treasurer’s office sat a quiet young man,
+barely turned twenty, who had no friends, wanted his own way, and who
+shook his head over the office traditions and was proud of his unbelief.
+
+Seeing the absolute necessity of working through Colonel Tom, and having
+a head filled with ideas of things he wanted done, Sam began working
+to get suggestions into the older man’s mind. Within a month after his
+elevation the two men were lunching together daily and Sam was spending
+many extra hours behind closed doors in Colonel Tom’s office.
+
+Although American business and manufacturing had not yet achieved the
+modern idea of efficiency in shop and office management, Sam had many of
+these ideas in his mind and expounded them tirelessly to Colonel Tom. He
+hated waste; he cared nothing for company tradition; he had no idea, as
+did the heads of other departments, of getting into a comfortable berth
+and spending the rest of his days there, and he was bent on managing the
+great Rainey Company, if not directly, then through Colonel Tom, who, he
+felt, was putty in his hands.
+
+From his new position as treasurer Sam did not drop his work as buyer,
+but, after a talk with Colonel Tom, merged the two departments, put in
+capable assistants of his own, and went on with his work of effacing
+the tracks of the cousin. For years the company had been overpaying for
+inferior material. Sam put his own material inspectors into the west
+side factories and brought several big Pennsylvania steel companies
+scurrying to Chicago to make restitution. The restitution was stiff, but
+when Colonel Tom was appealed to, Sam went to lunch with him, bought a
+bottle of wine, and stiffened his back.
+
+One afternoon in a room in the Palmer House a scene was played out that
+for days stayed in Sam’s mind as a kind of realisation of the part he
+wanted to play in the business world. The president of a lumber company
+took Sam into the room, and, laying five one thousand dollar bills upon
+a table, walked to the window and stood looking out.
+
+For a moment Sam stood looking at the money on the table and at the
+back of the man by the window, burning with indignation. He felt that
+he should like to take hold of the man’s throat and press as he had once
+pressed on the throat of Windy McPherson. And then a cold gleam coming
+into his eyes he cleared his throat and said, “You are short here; you
+will have to build this pile higher if you expect to interest me.”
+
+The man by the window shrugged his shoulders--he was a slender,
+young-looking man in a fancy waistcoat--and then turning and taking a
+roll of bills from his pocket he walked to the table, facing Sam.
+
+“I shall expect you to be reasonable,” he said, as he laid the bills on
+the table.
+
+When the pile had reached twenty thousand, Sam reached out his hand and
+taking it up put it in his pocket. “You will get a receipt for this
+when I get back to the office,” he said; “it is about what you owe our
+company for overcharges and crooked material. As for our business, I
+made a contract with another company this morning.”
+
+Having got the buying end of the Rainey Arms Company straightened out
+to his liking, Sam began spending much time in the shops and, through
+Colonel Tom, forced big changes everywhere. He discharged useless
+foremen, knocked out partitions between rooms, pushed everywhere for
+more and better work. Like the modern efficiency man, he went about with
+a watch in his hand, cutting out lost motion, rearranging, getting his
+own way.
+
+It was a time of great agitation. The offices and shops buzzed like bees
+disturbed and black looks followed him about. But Colonel Tom rose to
+the situation and went about at Sam’s heels, swaggering, giving orders,
+throwing back his shoulders like a man remade. All day long he was at
+it, discharging, directing, roaring against waste. When a strike broke
+out in one of the shops because of innovations Sam had forced upon the
+workmen there, he got upon a bench and delivered a speech--written by
+Sam--on a man’s place in the organisation and conducting of a great
+modern industry and his duty to perfect himself as a workman.
+
+Silently, the men picked up their tools and started again for their
+benches and when he saw them thus affected by his words Colonel Tom
+brought what threatened to be a squally affair to a hurrahing climax by
+the announcement of a five per cent increase in the wage scale--that was
+Colonel Tom’s own touch and the rousing reception of it brought a glow
+of pride to his cheeks.
+
+Although the affairs of the company were still being handled by Colonel
+Tom, and though he daily more and more asserted himself, the officers
+and shops, and later the big jobbers and buyers as well as the rich
+LaSalle Street directors, knew that a new force had come into the
+company. Men began dropping quietly into Sam’s office, asking questions,
+suggesting, seeking favours. He felt that he was getting hold. Of the
+department heads, about half fought him and were secretly marked for
+slaughter; the others came to him, expressed approval of what was going
+on and asked him to look over their departments and to make suggestions
+for improvements through them. This Sam did eagerly, getting by it their
+loyalty and support which later stood him in good stead.
+
+In choosing the new men that came into the company Sam also took a hand.
+The method used was characteristic of his relations with Colonel Tom. If
+a man applying for a place suited him, he got admission to the colonel’s
+office and listened for half an hour to a talk anent the fine old
+traditions of the company. If a man did not suit Sam, he did not get to
+the colonel. “You can’t have your time taken up by them,” Sam explained.
+
+In the Rainey Company, the various heads of departments were
+stockholders in the company, and selected from among themselves two men
+to sit upon the board, and in his second year Sam was chosen as one of
+these employee directors. During the same year five heads of departments
+resigning in a moment of indignation over one of Sam’s innovations--to
+be replaced later by two--their stock by a prearranged agreement came
+back into the company’s hands. This stock and another block, secured for
+him by the colonel, got into Sam’s hands through the use of Eckardt’s
+money, that of the Wabash Avenue woman, and his own snug pile.
+
+Sam was a growing force in the company. He sat on the board of
+directors, the recognised practical head of the business among its
+stockholders and employees; he had stopped the company’s march toward a
+second place in its industry and had faced it about. All about him, in
+offices and shops, there was the swing and go of new life and he felt
+that he was in a position to move on toward real control and had begun
+laying lines with that end in view. Standing in the offices in LaSalle
+Street or amid the clang and roar of the shops he tilted up his chin
+with the same odd little gesture that had attracted the men of Caxton
+to him when he was a barefoot newsboy and the son of the town drunkard.
+Through his head went big ambitious projects. “I have in my hand a great
+tool,” he thought; “with it I will pry my way into the place I mean to
+occupy among the big men of this city and this nation.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Sam McPherson, who stood in the shops among the thousands of employees
+of the Rainey Arms Company, who looked with unseeing eyes at the faces
+of the men intent upon the operation of machines and saw in them but so
+many aids to the ambitious projects stirring in his brain, who, while
+yet a boy, had because of the quality of daring in him, combined with a
+gift of acquisitiveness, become a master, who was untrained, uneducated,
+knowing nothing of the history of industry or of social effort, walked
+out of the offices of his company and along through the crowded streets
+to the new apartment he had taken on Michigan Avenue. It was Saturday
+evening at the end of a busy week and as he walked he thought of things
+he had accomplished during the week and made plans for the one to come.
+Through Madison Street he went and into State, seeing the crowds of men
+and women, boys and girls, clambering aboard the cable cars, massed upon
+the pavements, forming in groups, the groups breaking and reforming, and
+the whole making a picture intense, confusing, awe-inspiring. As in
+the shops among the men workers, so here, also, walked the youth with
+unseeing eyes. He liked it all; the mass of people; the clerks in their
+cheap clothing; the old men with young girls on their arms going to dine
+in restaurants; the young man with a wistful look in his eyes waiting
+for his sweetheart in the shadow of the towering office building. The
+eager, straining rush of the whole, seemed no more to him than a kind of
+gigantic setting for action; action controlled by a few quiet, capable
+men--of whom he intended to be one--intent upon growth.
+
+In State Street he stopped at a shop and buying a bunch of roses came
+out again upon the crowded street. In the crowd before him walked a
+woman--tall, freewalking, with a great mass of reddish-brown hair on
+her head. As she passed through the crowd men stopped and looked back at
+her, their eyes ablaze with admiration. Seeing her, Sam sprang forward
+with a cry.
+
+“Edith!” he called, and running forward thrust the roses into her hand.
+“For Janet,” he said, and lifting his hat walked beside her along State
+to Van Buren Street.
+
+Leaving the woman at a corner Sam came into a region of cheap theatres
+and dingy hotels. Women spoke to him; young men in flashy overcoats and
+with a peculiar, assertive, animal swing to their shoulders loitered
+before the theatres or in the doorways of the hotels; from an upstairs
+restaurant came the voice of another young man singing a popular song of
+the street. “There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night,” sang the
+voice.
+
+Over a cross street Sam went into Michigan Avenue, faced by a long
+narrow park and beyond the railroad tracks by the piles of new earth
+where the city was trying to regain its lake front. In the cross
+street, standing in the shadow of the elevated railroad, he had passed
+a whining, intoxicated old woman who lurched forward and put a hand
+upon his coat. Sam had flung her a quarter and passed on shrugging his
+shoulders. Here also he had walked with unseeing eyes; this too was
+a part of the gigantic machine with which the quiet, competent men of
+growth worked.
+
+From his new quarters in the top floor of the hotel facing the lake, Sam
+walked north along Michigan Avenue to a restaurant where Negro men went
+noiselessly about among white-clad tables, serving men and women who
+talked and laughed under the shaded lamps had an assured, confident air.
+Passing in at the door of the restaurant, a wind, blowing over the
+city toward the lake, brought the sound of a voice floating with it.
+“There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night,” again insisted the
+voice.
+
+After dining Sam got on a grip car of the Wabash Avenue Cable, sitting
+on the front seat and letting the panorama of the town roll up to him.
+From the region of cheap theatres he passed through streets in which
+saloons stood massed, one beside another, each with its wide garish
+doorway and its dimly lighted “Ladies’ Entrance,” and into a region of
+neat little stores where women with baskets upon their arms stood by the
+counters and Sam was reminded of Saturday nights in Caxton.
+
+The two women, Edith and Janet Eberly, met through Jack Prince, to one
+of whom Sam had sent the roses at the hands of the other, and from whom
+he had borrowed the six thousand dollars when he was new in the city,
+had been in Chicago for five years when Sam came to know them. For all
+of the five years they had lived in a two-story frame building that had
+been a residence in Wabash Avenue near Thirty-ninth Street and that
+was now both a residence and a grocery store. The apartment upstairs,
+reached by a stairway at the side of the grocery, had in the five years,
+and under the hand of Janet Eberly, become a thing of beauty, perfect in
+the simplicity and completeness of its appointment.
+
+The two women were the daughters of a farmer who had lived in one of the
+middle western states facing the Mississippi River. Their grandfather
+had been a noted man in the state, having been one of its first
+governors and later serving it in the senate in Washington. There was a
+county and a good-sized town named for him and he had once been talked
+of as a vice-presidential possibility but had died at Washington before
+the convention at which his name was to have been put forward. His one
+son, a youth of great promise, went to West Point and served brilliantly
+through the Civil War, afterward commanding several western army posts
+and marrying the daughter of another army man. His wife, an army belle,
+died after having borne him the two daughters.
+
+After the death of his wife Major Eberly began drinking, and to get away
+from the habit and from the army atmosphere where he had lived with his
+wife, whom he loved intensely, took the two little girls and returned to
+his home state to settle on a farm.
+
+About the county where the two girls grew to womanhood, their father,
+Major Eberly, got the name of a character, seeing people but seldom and
+treating rudely the friendly advances of his farmer neighbours. He would
+sit in the house for days poring over books, of which he had a great
+many, and hundreds of which were now on open shelves in the apartment
+of the two girls. These days of study, during which he would brook no
+intrusion, were followed by days of fierce industry during which he led
+team after team to the field, ploughing or reaping day and night with no
+rest except to eat.
+
+At the edge of the Eberly farm there was a little wooden country church
+surrounded by a hay field, and on Sunday mornings during the summer the
+ex-army man was always to be found in the field, running some noisy,
+clattering agricultural implement up and down under the windows of the
+church and disturbing the worship of the country folk; in the winter he
+drew a pile of logs there and went on Sunday mornings to split firewood
+under the church windows. While his daughters were small he was several
+times haled into court and fined for cruel neglect of his animals. Once
+he locked a great herd of fine sheep in a shed and went into the house
+and stayed for days intent upon his books so that many of them suffered
+cruelly for want of food and water. When he was taken into court
+and fined, half the county came to the trial and gloated over his
+humiliation.
+
+To the two girls the father was neither cruel nor kind, leaving them
+largely to themselves but giving them no money, so that they went about
+in dresses made over from those of the mother, that lay piled in trunks
+in the attic. When they were small, an old Negro woman, an ex-servant of
+the army belle, lived with and mothered them, but when Edith was a girl
+of ten this woman went off home to Tennessee, so that the girls were
+thrown on their own resources and ran the house in their own way.
+
+Janet Eberly was, at the beginning of her friendship with Sam, a slight
+woman of twenty-seven with a small expressive face, quick nervous
+fingers, black piercing eyes, black hair and a way of becoming so
+absorbed in the exposition of a book or the rush of a conversation
+that her little intense face became transfigured and her quick fingers
+clutched the arm of her listener while her eyes looked into his and she
+lost all consciousness of his presence or of the opinions he may have
+expressed. She was a cripple, having fallen from the loft of a barn in
+her youth injuring her back so that she sat all day in a specially made
+reclining wheeled chair.
+
+Edith was a stenographer, working in the office of a publisher down
+town, and Janet trimmed hats for a milliner a few doors down the street
+from the house in which they lived. In his will the father left the
+money from the sale of the farm to Janet, and Sam used it, insuring his
+life for ten thousand dollars in her name while it was in his possession
+and handling it with a caution entirely absent from his operations with
+the money of the medical student. “Take it and make money for me,”
+ the little woman had said impulsively one evening shortly after the
+beginning of their acquaintance and after Jack Prince had been talking
+flamboyantly of Sam’s ability in affairs. “What is the good of having a
+talent if you do not use it to benefit those who haven’t it?”
+
+Janet Eberly was an intellect. She disregarded all the usual womanly
+points of view and had an attitude of her own toward life and people. In
+a way she had understood her hard-driven, grey-haired father and during
+the time of her great physical suffering they had built up a kind of
+understanding and affection for each other. After his death she wore a
+miniature of him, made in his boyhood, on a chain about her neck. When
+Sam met her the two immediately became close friends, sitting for hours
+in talk and coming to look forward with great pleasure to the evenings
+spent together.
+
+In the Eberly household Sam McPherson was a benefactor, a wonder-worker.
+In his hands the six thousand dollars was bringing two thousand a year
+into the house and adding immeasurably to the air of comfort and good
+living that prevailed there. To Janet, who managed the house, he was
+guide, counsellor, and something more than friend.
+
+Of the two women it was the strong, vigorous Edith, with the
+reddish-brown hair and the air of physical completeness that made men
+stop to look at her on the street, who first became Sam’s friend.
+
+Edith Eberly was strong of body, given to quick flashes of anger, stupid
+intellectually and hungry to the roots of her for wealth and a place in
+the world. She had heard, through Jack Prince, of Sam’s money making
+and of his ability and prospects and, for a time, had designs upon his
+affections. Several times when they were alone together she gave his
+hand a characteristically impulsive squeeze and once upon the stairway
+beside the grocery store offered him her lips to kiss. Later there
+sprang up between her and Jack Prince a passionate love affair, dropped
+finally by Prince through fear of her violent fits of anger. After Sam
+had met Janet Eberly and had become her loyal friend and henchman all
+show of affection or even of interest between him and Edith was at an
+end and the kiss upon the stairs was forgotten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Going up the stairway after the ride in the cable car Sam stood beside
+Janet’s wheel chair in the room at the front of the apartment facing
+Wabash Avenue. The chair was by the window and faced an open coal
+fire in a grate she had had built into the wall of the house. Outside,
+through an open arched doorway, Edith moved noiselessly about taking
+dishes from a little table. He knew that after a time Jack Prince would
+come and take her to the theatre, leaving Janet and him to finish their
+talk.
+
+Sam lighted his pipe and between puffs began talking, making a statement
+that he knew would arouse her, and Janet, putting her hand impulsively
+on his shoulder, began tearing the statement to bits.
+
+“You talk!” she broke out. “Books are not full of pretence and lies; you
+business men are--you and Jack Prince. What do you know of books? They
+are the most wonderful things in the world. Men sit writing them and
+forget to lie, but you business men never forget. You and books! You
+haven’t read books, not real ones. Didn’t my father know; didn’t he save
+himself from insanity through books? Do I not, sitting here, get the
+real feel of the movement of the world through the books that men
+write? Suppose I saw those men. They would swagger and strut and take
+themselves seriously just like you or Jack or the grocer down stairs.
+You think you know what’s going on in the world. You think you are doing
+things, you Chicago men of money and action and growth. You are blind,
+all blind.”
+
+The little woman, a light, half scorn, half amusement in her eyes,
+leaned forward and ran her fingers through Sam’s hair, laughing down
+into the astonished face he turned up to her.
+
+“Oh, I’m not afraid, in spite of what Edith and Jack Prince say of you,”
+ she went on impulsively. “I like you all right and if I were a well
+woman I should make love to you and marry you and then see to it there
+was something in this world for you besides money and tall buildings and
+men and machines that make guns.”
+
+Sam grinned. “You are like your father, driving the mowing machine up
+and down under the church windows on Sunday mornings,” he declared; “you
+think you could remake the world by shaking your fist at it. I should
+like to go and see you fined in a court room for starving sheep.”
+
+Janet, closing her eyes and lying back in her chair, laughed with
+delight and declared that they would have a splendid quarrelsome
+evening.
+
+After Edith had gone out, Sam sat through the evening with Janet,
+listening to her exposition of life and what she thought it should mean
+to a strong capable fellow like himself, as he had been listening ever
+since their acquaintanceship began. In the talk, and in the many talks
+they had had together, talks that rang in his ears for years, the little
+black-eyed woman gave him a glimpse into a whole purposeful universe of
+thought and action of which he had never dreamed, introducing him to a
+new world of men: methodical, hard-thinking Germans, emotional, dreaming
+Russians, analytical, courageous Norwegians, Spaniards and Italians with
+their sense of beauty, and blundering, hopeful Englishmen wanting so
+much and getting so little; so that at the end of the evening he went
+out of her presence feeling strangely small and insignificant against
+the great world background she had drawn for him.
+
+Sam did not understand Janet’s point of view. It was all too new and
+foreign to everything life had taught him, and in his mind he fought
+her ideas doggedly, clinging to his own concrete, practical thoughts and
+hopes, but on the train homeward bound, and in his own room later, he
+turned over and over in his mind the things she had said and tried in a
+dim way to grasp the bigness of the conception of human life she had got
+sitting in a wheel chair and looking down into Wabash Avenue.
+
+Sam loved Janet Eberly. No word of that had ever passed between them
+and he had seen her hand flash out and grasp the shoulder of Jack Prince
+when she was laying down to him some law of life as she saw it, as it
+had so often shot out and grasped his own, but had she been able to
+spring out of the wheel chair he should have taken her hand and gone
+with her to the clergyman within the hour and in his heart he knew that
+she would have gone with him gladly.
+
+Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam’s work for the gun
+company without a direct declaration of affection from him, but during
+the years when they were much together he thought of her as in a sense
+his wife and when she died he was desolate, overdrinking night after
+night and wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets during hours
+when he should have been asleep. She was the first woman who ever got
+hold of and stirred his manhood, and she awoke something in him that
+made it possible for him later to see life with a broadness and scope of
+vision that was no part of the pushing, energetic young man of dollars
+and of industry who sat beside her wheeled chair during the evenings on
+Wabash Avenue.
+
+After Janet’s death, Sam did not continue his friendship with Edith, but
+turned over to her the ten thousand dollars to which the six thousand of
+Janet’s money had grown in his hands and did not see her again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+One night in April Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey Arms Company
+and his chief lieutenant, young Sam McPherson, treasurer and chairman of
+the board of directors of the company, slept together in a room in a St.
+Paul hotel. It was a double room with two beds, and Sam, lying on his
+pillow, looked across the bed to where the colonel’s paunch protruding
+itself between him and the light from a long narrow window, made a round
+hill above which the moon just peeped. During the evening the two men
+had sat for several hours at a table in the grill down stairs while Sam
+discussed a proposition he proposed making to a St. Paul jobber the
+next day. The account of the jobber, a large one, had been threatened by
+Lewis, the Jew manager of the Edwards Arms Company, the Rainey Company’s
+only important western rival, and Sam was full of ideas to checkmate the
+shrewd trade move the Jew had made. At the table, the colonel had been
+silent and taciturn, an unusual attitude of mind for him, and Sam lay in
+bed and looked at the moon gradually working its way over the undulating
+abdominal hill, wondering what was in his mind. The hill dropped,
+showing the full face of the moon, and then rose again obliterating it.
+
+“Sam, were you ever in love?” asked the colonel, with a sigh.
+
+Sam turned and buried his face in the pillow and the white covering
+of his bed danced up and down. “The old fool, has it come to that with
+him?” he asked himself. “After all these years of single life is he
+going to begin running after women now?”
+
+He did not answer the colonel’s question. “There are breakers ahead for
+you, old boy,” he thought, the figure of quiet, determined, little Sue
+Rainey, the colonel’s daughter, as he had seen her on the rare occasions
+when he had dined at the Rainey home or she had come into the LaSalle
+Street offices, coming into his mind. With a quiver of enjoyment of the
+mental exercise, he tried to imagine the colonel as a swaggering blade
+among women.
+
+The colonel, oblivious of Sam’s mirth and of his silence regarding his
+experience in the field of love, began talking, making amends for the
+silence in the grill. He told Sam that he had decided to take to himself
+a new wife, and confessed that the view of the matter his daughter might
+take worried him. “Children are so unfair,” he complained; “they forget
+about a man’s feelings and can’t realise that his heart is still young.”
+
+With a smile on his lips, Sam began trying to picture a woman’s lying in
+his place and looking at the moon over the pulsating hill. The colonel
+continued talking. He grew franker, telling the name of his beloved and
+the circumstances of their meeting and courtship. “She is an actress, a
+working girl,” he said feelingly. “I met her at a dinner given by Will
+Sperry one evening and she was the only woman there who did not drink
+wine. After the dinner we went for a drive together and she told me of
+her hard life, of her fight against temptations, and of her brother, an
+artist, she is trying to get started in the world. We have been together
+a dozen times and have written letters, and, Sam, we have discovered an
+affinity for each other.”
+
+Sam sat up in bed. “Letters!” he muttered. “The old dog is going to get
+himself involved.” He dropped again upon the pillow. “Well, let him. Why
+need I bother myself?”
+
+The colonel, having begun talking, could not stop. “Although we have
+seen each other only a dozen times, a letter has passed between us every
+day. Oh, if you could see the letters she writes. They are wonderful.”
+
+A worried sigh broke from the colonel. “I want Sue to invite her to
+the house, but I am afraid,” he complained; “I am afraid she will be
+wrong-headed about it. Women are such determined creatures. She and my
+Luella should meet and know each other, but if I go home and tell her
+she may make a scene and hurt Luella’s feelings.”
+
+The moon had risen, shedding its light in Sam’s eyes, and he turned his
+back to the colonel and prepared to sleep. The naive credulity of the
+older man had touched a spring of mirth in him and from time to time the
+covering of his bed continued to quiver suggestively.
+
+“I would not hurt her feelings for anything. She is the squarest little
+woman alive,” the voice of the colonel announced. The voice broke
+and the colonel, who habitually roared forth his sentiments, began to
+dither. Sam wondered if his feelings had been touched by the thoughts of
+his daughter or of the lady from the stage. “It is a wonderful thing,”
+ half sobbed the colonel, “when a young and beautiful woman gives her
+whole heart into the keeping of a man like me.”
+
+It was a week later before Sam heard more of the affair. Looking up
+from his desk in the offices in LaSalle Street one morning, he found Sue
+Rainey standing before him. She was a small athletic looking woman with
+black hair, square shoulders, cheeks browned by the sun and wind, and
+quiet grey eyes. She stood facing Sam’s desk and pulled off a glove
+while she looked down at him with amused, quizzical eyes. Sam rose, and
+leaning over the flat-topped desk, took her hand, wondering what had
+brought her there.
+
+Sue Rainey did not mince matters, but plunged at once into an
+explanation of the purpose of her visit. From birth she had lived in an
+atmosphere of wealth. Although she was not counted a beautiful woman,
+she had, because of her wealth and the charm of her person, been much
+courted. Sam, who had talked briefly with her a half dozen times, had
+long had a haunting curiosity to know more of her personality. As she
+stood there before him looking so wonderfully well-kept and confident he
+thought her baffling and puzzling.
+
+“The colonel,” she began, and then hesitated and smiled. “You, Mr.
+McPherson, have become a figure in my father’s life. He depends upon
+you very much. He tells me that he has talked with you concerning a Miss
+Luella London from the theatre, and that you have agreed with him that
+the colonel and she should marry.”
+
+Sam watched her gravely. A flicker of mirth ran through him, but his
+face was grave and disinterested.
+
+“Yes?” he said, looking into her eyes. “Have you met Miss London?”
+
+“I have,” answered Sue Rainey. “Have you?”
+
+Sam shook his head.
+
+“She is impossible,” declared the colonel’s daughter, clutching the
+glove held in her hand and staring at the floor. A flush of anger rose
+in her cheeks. “She is a crude, hard, scheming woman. She colours her
+hair, she cries when you look at her, she hasn’t even the grace to be
+ashamed of what she is trying to do, and she has got the colonel into a
+fix.”
+
+Sam looked at the brown of Sue Rainey’s cheek and thought the texture of
+it beautiful. He wondered why he had heard her called a plain woman.
+The heightened colour brought to her face by her anger had, he thought,
+transfigured her. He liked her direct, forceful way of putting the
+matter of the colonel’s affair, and felt keenly the compliment implied
+by her having come to him. “She has self-respect,” he told himself, and
+felt a thrill of pride in her attitude as though it had been inspired by
+himself.
+
+“I have been hearing of you a great deal,” she continued, glancing up
+at him and smiling. “At our house you are brought to the table with the
+soup and taken away with the liqueur. My father interlards his
+table talk, and introduces all of his wise new axioms on economy and
+efficiency and growth, with a constant procession of ‘Sam says’ and
+‘Sam thinks.’ And the men who come to the house talk of you also.
+Teddy Foreman says that at directors’ meetings they all sit about like
+children waiting for you to tell them what to do.”
+
+She threw out her hand with an impatient little gesture. “I am in a
+hole,” she said. “I might handle my father but I cannot handle that
+woman.”
+
+While she had been talking to him Sam looked past her and out at a
+window. When her eyes wandered from his face he looked again at her
+brown firm cheeks. From the beginning of the interview he had been
+intending to help her.
+
+“Give me the lady’s address,” he said; “I’ll go look her over.”
+
+Three evenings later Sam took Miss Luella London to a midnight supper
+at one of the town’s best restaurants. She knew the motive of his taking
+her, as he had been quite frank in the few minutes’ talk near the stage
+door of the theatre when the engagement was made. As they ate, they
+talked of the plays at the Chicago theatres, and Sam told her a story
+of an amateur performance that had once taken place in the hall over
+Geiger’s drug store in Caxton when he was boy. In the performance Sam
+had taken the rôle of a drummer boy killed on the field of battle by a
+swaggering villain in a grey uniform, and John Telfer, in the rôle of
+villain, had become so in earnest that, a pistol not exploding at a
+critical moment, he had chased Sam about the stage trying to hit him
+with the butt of the weapon while the audience roared with delight
+at the realism of Telfer’s rage and at the frightened boy begging for
+mercy.
+
+Luella London laughed heartily at Sam’s story and then, the coffee being
+served, she fingered the handle of the cup and a shrewd look came into
+her eyes.
+
+“And now you are a big business man and have come to see me about
+Colonel Rainey,” she said.
+
+Sam lighted a cigar.
+
+“Just how much are you counting on this marriage between yourself and
+the colonel?” he asked bluntly.
+
+The actress laughed and poured cream into her coffee. A line came and
+went on her forehead between her eyes. Sam thought she looked capable.
+
+“I have been thinking of what you told me at the stage door,” she
+said, and a childlike smile played about her lips. “Do you know, Mr.
+McPherson, I can’t just figure you. I can’t just see how you get into
+this. Where are your credentials, anyway?”
+
+Sam, keeping his eyes upon her face, took a jump into the dark.
+
+“It’s this way,” he said, “I’m something of an adventurer myself. I fly
+the black flag. I come from where you do. I had to reach out my hand and
+take what I wanted. I do not blame you in the least, but it just happens
+that I saw Colonel Tom Rainey first. He is my game and I do not propose
+to have you fooling around. I am not bluffing. You have got to get off
+him.”
+
+Leaning forward, he stared at her intently, and then lowered his voice.
+“I’ve got your record. I know the man you used to live with. He’s going
+to help me get you if you do not drop it.”
+
+Sitting back in his chair Sam watched her gravely. He had taken the odd
+chance to win quickly by a bluff and had won. But Luella London was not
+to be defeated without a struggle.
+
+“You lie,” she cried, half springing from her chair. “Frank has never--”
+
+“Oh yes, Frank has,” answered Sam, turning as though to call a waiter;
+“I will have him here in ten minutes if you wish to be shown.”
+
+Picking up a fork the woman began nervously picking holes in the table
+cloth and a tear appeared upon her cheek. She took a handkerchief from
+a bag that hung hooked over the back of a chair at the side of the table
+and wiped her eyes.
+
+“All right! All right!” she said, bracing herself, “I’ll drop it. If
+you’ve dug up Frank Robson you’ve got me. He’ll do anything you say for
+a piece of money.”
+
+For some minutes the two sat in silence. A tired look had come into the
+woman’s eyes.
+
+“I wish I was a man,” she said. “I get whipped at everything I tackle
+because I’m a woman. I’m getting past my money-making days in the
+theatre and I thought the colonel was fair game.”
+
+“He is,” answered Sam dispassionately, “but you see I beat you to it.
+He’s mine.”
+
+Glancing cautiously about the room, he took a roll of bills from his
+pocket and began laying them one at a time upon the table.
+
+“Look here,” he said, “you’ve done a good piece of work. You should have
+won. For ten years half the society women of Chicago have been trying
+to marry their daughters or their sons to the Rainey fortune. They
+had everything to help them, wealth, good looks, and a standing in the
+world. You have none of these things. How did you do it?
+
+“Anyway,” he went on, “I’m not going to see you trimmed. I’ve got ten
+thousand dollars here, as good Rainey money as ever was printed. You
+sign this paper and then put the roll in your purse.”
+
+“That’s square,” said Luella London, signing, and with the light coming
+back into her eyes.
+
+Sam beckoned to the proprietor of the restaurant whom he knew and had
+him and a waiter sign as witnesses.
+
+Luella London put the roll of bills into her purse.
+
+“What did you give me that money for when you had me beat anyway?” she
+asked.
+
+Sam lighted a fresh cigar and folding the paper put it in his pocket.
+
+“Because I like you and I admire your skill,” he said, “and anyway I did
+not have you beaten until right now.”
+
+They sat studying the people getting up from the tables and going
+through the door to waiting carriages and automobiles, the well-dressed
+women with assured airs serving Sam’s mind to make a contrast for the
+woman who sat with him.
+
+“I presume you are right about women,” he said musingly, “it must be a
+stiff game for you if you like winning on your own hook.”
+
+“Winning! We don’t win.” The lips of the actress drew back showing her
+white teeth. “No woman ever won who tried to play a straight fighting
+game for herself.”
+
+Her voice grew tense and the lines upon her forehead reappeared.
+
+“Woman can’t stand alone,” she went on, “she is a sentimental fool. She
+reaches out her hand to some man and that in the end beats her. Why,
+even when she plays the game as I played it against the colonel some rat
+of a man like Frank Robson, for whom she has given up everything worth
+while to a woman, sells her out.”
+
+Sam looked at her hand, covered with rings, lying on the table.
+
+“Let’s not misunderstand each other,” he said quietly, “do not blame
+Frank for this. I never knew him. I just imagined him.”
+
+A puzzled look came into the woman’s eyes and a flush rose in her
+cheeks.
+
+“You grafter!” she sneered.
+
+Sam called to a passing waiter and ordered a fresh bottle of wine.
+
+“What’s the use being sore?” he asked. “It’s simple enough. You staked
+against a better mind. Anyway you have the ten thousand, haven’t you?”
+
+Luella reached for her purse.
+
+“I don’t know,” she said, “I’ll look. Haven’t you decided to steal it
+back yet?”
+
+Sam laughed.
+
+“I’m coming to that,” he said, “don’t hurry me.”
+
+For several minutes they sat eyeing each other, and then, with an
+earnest ring in his voice and a smile on his lips, Sam began talking
+again.
+
+“Look here!” he said, “I’m no Frank Robson and I do not like giving
+a woman the worst of it. I have been studying you and I can’t see you
+running around loose with ten thousand dollars of real money on you. You
+do not fit into the picture and the money will not last a year in your
+hands.
+
+“Give it to me,” he urged; “let me invest it for you. I’m a winner. I’ll
+double it for you in a year.”
+
+The actress stared past Sam’s shoulder to where a group of young men sat
+about a table drinking and talking loudly. Sam began telling an anecdote
+of an Irish baggage man in Caxton. When he had finished he looked at her
+and laughed.
+
+“As that shoemaker looked to Jerry Donlin so you, as the colonel’s wife,
+looked to me,” he said. “I had to make you get out of my flower bed.”
+
+A gleam of resolution came into the wandering eyes of Luella London and
+she took the purse from the back of the chair and brought out the roll
+of bills.
+
+“I’m a sport,” she said, “and I’m going to lay a bet on the best horse I
+ever saw. You may trim me, but I always would take a chance.”
+
+Turning, she called a waiter and, handing him a bill from her purse,
+threw the roll on the table.
+
+“Take the pay for the spread and the wine we have had out of that,” she
+said, handing him the loose bill and then turning to Sam. “You ought to
+beat the world. Anyway your genius gets recognition from me. I pay for
+this party and when you see the colonel say good-bye to him for me.”
+
+The next day, at his request, Sue Rainey called at the offices of the
+Arms Company and Sam handed her the paper signed by Luella London. It
+was an agreement on her part to divide with Sam, half and half, any
+money she might be able to blackmail out of Colonel Rainey.
+
+The colonel’s daughter glanced from the paper to Sam’s face.
+
+“I thought so,” she said, and a puzzled look came into her eyes. “But I
+do not understand this. What does this paper do and what did you pay for
+it?”
+
+“The paper,” Sam answered, “puts her in a hole and I paid ten thousand
+dollars for it.”
+
+Sue Rainey laughed and taking a checkbook from her handbag laid it on
+the desk and sat down.
+
+“Do you get your half?” she asked.
+
+“I get it all,” answered Sam, and then leaning back in his chair
+launched into an explanation. When he had told her of the talk in the
+restaurant she sat with the checkbook lying before her and with the
+puzzled look still in her eyes.
+
+Without giving her time for comment, Sam plunged into the midst of what
+had been in his mind to say to her.
+
+“The woman will not bother the colonel any more,” he declared; “if that
+paper won’t hold her something else will. She respects me and she is
+afraid of me. We had a talk after she had signed the paper and she gave
+me the ten thousand dollars to invest for her. I promised to double it
+for her within a year and I want to make good. I want you to double it
+now. Make the check for twenty thousand.”
+
+Sue Rainey wrote the check, making it payable to bearer, and pushed it
+across the table.
+
+“I cannot say that I understand yet,” she confessed. “Did you also fall
+in love with her?”
+
+Sam grinned. He was wondering whether he would be able to get into words
+just what he wanted to tell her of the actress soldier of fortune. He
+looked across the table at her frank grey eyes and then on an impulse
+decided that he would tell it straight out as though she had been a man.
+
+“It’s like this,” he said. “I like ability and good brains and that
+woman has them. She isn’t a good woman, but nothing in her life has made
+her want to be good. All her life she has been going the wrong way, and
+now she wants to get on her feet and squared around. That’s what she was
+after the colonel for. She did not want to marry him, she wanted to
+make him give her the start she was after. I got the best of her because
+somewhere there is a snivelling little whelp of a man who has taken all
+the good and the fineness out of her and who now stands ready to sell
+her out for a few dollars. I imagined there would be such a man when I
+saw her and I bluffed my way through to him. But I do not want to whip a
+woman, even in such an affair, through the cheapness of some man. I want
+to do the square thing by her. That’s why I asked you to make that check
+for twenty thousand.”
+
+Sue Rainey rose and stood by the desk looking down at him. He was
+thinking how wonderfully clear and honest her eyes.
+
+“And what about the colonel?” she asked. “What will he think of all
+this?”
+
+Sam walked around the desk and took her hand.
+
+“We’ll have to agree not to consider him,” he said. “We really did that
+you know when we started this thing. I think we can depend upon Miss
+London’s putting the finishing touches on the job.”
+
+And Miss London did. She sent for Sam a week later and put tweny-five
+hundred dollars into his hand.
+
+“That’s not to invest for me,” she said, “that’s for yourself. By the
+agreement I signed with you we were to split anything I got out of the
+colonel. Well, I went light. I only got five thousand dollars.”
+
+With the money in his hand Sam stood by the side of a little table in
+her room looking at her.
+
+“What did you tell the colonel?” he asked.
+
+“I called him up here to my room last night and lying here in bed I told
+him that I had just discovered I was the victim of an incurable disease.
+I told him that within a month I would be in bed for keeps and asked
+him to marry me at once and to take me away with him to some quiet place
+where I could die in his arms.”
+
+Coming over to Sam, Luella London put a hand upon his arm and laughed.
+
+“He began to beg off and make excuses,” she went on, “and then I brought
+out his letters to me and talked straight. He wilted at once and paid
+the five thousand dollars I asked for the letters without a murmur. I
+might have made it fifty and with your talent you ought to get all he
+has in six months.”
+
+Sam shook hands with her and told her of his success in doubling the
+money she had put into his hands. Then putting the twenty-five hundred
+dollars in his pocket he went back to his desk. He did not see her
+again and when, through a lucky market turn, he had increased the twenty
+thousand dollars she had left with him to twenty-five, he placed it
+in the hands of a trust company for her and forgot the incident.
+Years later he heard that she was running a fashionable dressmaking
+establishment in a western city.
+
+And Colonel Tom Rainey, who had for months talked of nothing but factory
+efficiency and of what he and young Sam McPherson were going to do
+in the way of enlarging the business, began the next morning a tirade
+against women that lasted the rest of his life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Sue Rainey had long touched the fancy of the youths of Chicago society
+who, while looking at her trim little figure and at the respectable
+size of the fortune behind it, were yet puzzled and disconcerted by her
+attitude toward themselves. On the wide porches at golf clubs, where
+young men in white trousers lounged and smoked cigarettes, and in
+the down-town clubs, where the same young men spent winter afternoons
+playing Kelly pool, they spoke of her, calling her an enigma. “She’ll
+end by being an old maid,” they declared, and shook their heads at the
+thought of so good a connection dangling loosely in the air just without
+their reach. From time to time, one of the young men tore himself loose
+from the group that contemplated her, and, with an opening volley of
+books, candy, flowers and invitations to theatres, charged down upon
+her, only to have the youthful ardour of his attack cooled by her
+prolonged attitude of indifference. When she was twenty-one, a young
+English cavalry officer, who came to Chicago to ride in the horse show
+had, for some weeks, been seen much in her company and a report of their
+engagement had been whispered through the town and talked of about the
+nineteenth hole at the country clubs. The rumour proved to be without
+foundation, the attraction to the cavalry officer having been a certain
+brand of rare old wine the colonel had stored in his cellar and a
+feeling of brotherhood with the swaggering old gun maker, rather than
+the colonel’s quiet little daughter.
+
+After the beginning of his acquaintanceship with her, and all during
+the days when he stirred things up in the offices and shops of the
+gun company, tales of the assiduous and often needy young men who were
+camped on her trail reached Sam’s ears. They would be in at the office
+to see and talk with the colonel, who had several times confided to Sam
+that his daughter Sue was already past the age at which right-minded
+young women should marry, and in the absence of the father two or three
+of them had formed a habit of stopping for a word with Sam, whom they
+had met through the colonel or Jack Prince. They declared that they were
+“squaring themselves with the colonel.” Not a difficult thing to do, Sam
+thought, as he drank the wine, smoked the cigars, and ate the dinners
+of all without prejudice. Once, at luncheon, Colonel Tom discussed
+these young men with Sam, pounding on a table so that the glasses jumped
+about, and calling them damned upstarts.
+
+For his own part, Sam did not feel that he knew Sue Rainey, and
+although, after their first meeting one evening at the Rainey house, he
+had been pricked by a mild curiosity concerning her, no opportunity
+to satisfy it had presented itself. He knew that she was athletic,
+travelled much, rode, shot, and sailed a boat; and he had heard Jack
+Prince speak of her as a woman of brains, but, until the incident of
+the colonel and Luella London threw them for the moment into the same
+enterprise and started him thinking of her with real interest, he had
+seen and talked with her for but brief passing moments brought about by
+their mutual interest in the affairs of her father.
+
+After Janet Eberly’s sudden death, and while he was yet in the midst of
+his grief at her loss, Sam had his first long talk with Sue Rainey. It
+was in Colonel Tom’s office, and Sam, walking hurriedly in, found her
+sitting at the colonel’s desk and staring out of the window at a broad
+expanse of flat roofs. A man, climbing a flag pole to replace a slipped
+rope, caught his attention and standing by the window looking at the
+minute figure clinging to the swaying pole, he began talking of the
+absurdity of human endeavour.
+
+The colonel’s daughter listened respectfully to his rather obvious
+banalities and getting up from her chair came to stand beside him. Sam
+turned slyly to look at her firm brown cheeks as he had looked on the
+morning when she had come to see him about Luella London and was struck
+by the thought that she in some faint way reminded him of Janet Eberly.
+In a moment, and rather to his own surprise, he burst into a long speech
+telling of Janet, of the tragedy of her loss and something of the beauty
+of her life and character.
+
+The nearness of his loss and the nearness also of what he thought might
+be a sympathetic listener spurred him and he found himself getting a
+kind of relief for the aching sense of loss for his dead comrade by
+heaping praises upon her life.
+
+When he had finished saying what was in his mind, he stood by the window
+feeling awkward and embarrassed. The man who climbed the flag pole
+having put the rope through the ring at the top slid suddenly down the
+pole and thinking for the moment that he had fallen Sam made a quick
+clutch at the air with his hand. His gripping fingers closed over Sue
+Rainey’s hand.
+
+He turned, amused by the incident, and began making a halting
+explanation. There were tears in Sue Rainey’s eyes.
+
+“I wish I had known her,” she said and drew her hand from between his
+fingers. “I wish you had known me better that I also might have known
+your Janet. They are rare--such women. They are worth much to know. Most
+women like most men--”
+
+She made an impatient gesture with her hand and Sam, turning, walked
+toward the door. He felt that he might not trust himself to answer her.
+For the first time since coming to manhood he felt that tears might
+at any moment come into his eyes. Grief for the loss of Janet surged
+through him disconcerting and engulfing him.
+
+“I have been doing you an injustice,” said Sue Rainey, looking at the
+floor. “I have thought of you as something different from what you are.
+There is a story I heard of you which gave me a wrong impression.”
+
+Sam smiled. Having conquered the commotion within himself, he laughed
+and explained the incident of the man who had slid down the pole.
+
+“What was the story you heard?” he asked.
+
+“It was a story a young man told at our house,” she explained
+hesitatingly, refusing to be carried away from her mood of seriousness.
+“It was about a little girl you saved from drowning and a purse made up
+and given you. Why did you take the money?”
+
+Sam looked at her squarely. The story was one that Jack Prince had
+delight in telling. It concerned an incident of his early business life
+in the city.
+
+One afternoon, when he was still in the employ of the commission firm,
+he had taken a party of men for a trip on an excursion steamer on the
+lake. He had a project into which he wanted them to go with him and
+had taken them aboard the steamer to get them together and present the
+merits of his scheme. During the trip a little girl had fallen overboard
+and Sam, springing after her, had brought her safely aboard the boat.
+
+On the excursion steamer a cheer had arisen. A young man in a
+broad-brimmed cowboy hat ran about taking up a collection. People
+crowded forward to grasp Sam’s hand and he had accepted the money
+collected and had put it in his pocket.
+
+Among the men aboard the boat were several who, while they did not draw
+back from going into Sam’s project, had thought his taking the money
+not manly. They had told the story, and it had come to the ears of Jack
+Prince, who never tired of repeating it and always ended the story with
+the request that the listener ask Sam why he had taken the money.
+
+Now in Colonel Tom’s office facing Sue Rainey, Sam made the explanation
+that had so delighted Jack Prince.
+
+“The crowd wanted to give me the money,” he said, slightly perplexed.
+“Why shouldn’t I have taken it? I did not save the little girl for the
+money, but because she was a little girl; and the money paid for my
+ruined clothes and the expenses of the trip.”
+
+With his hand on the doorknob he looked steadily at the woman before
+him.
+
+“And I wanted the money,” he announced, a ring of defiance in his voice.
+“I have always wanted money, any money I could get.”
+
+Sam went back to his own office and sat down at his desk. He had been
+surprised by the cordiality and friendliness Sue Rainey had shown toward
+him. On an impulse, he wrote a letter, defending his position in the
+matter of the money taken on the excursion steamer and setting forth
+something of the attitude of his mind toward money and business affairs.
+
+“I cannot see myself believing in the rot most business men talk,” he
+wrote at the end of the letter. “They are full of sentiment and ideals
+which are not true. Having a thing to sell they always say it is the
+best, although it may be third rate. I do not object to that. What I do
+object to is the way they have of nursing a hope within themselves that
+the third rate thing is first rate until the hope becomes a belief. In
+the talk I had with that actress Luella London I told her that I myself
+flew the black flag. Well, I do. I would lie about goods to sell them,
+but I would not lie to myself. I will not stultify my own mind. If a man
+crosses swords with me in a business deal and I come out of the affair
+with the money, it is no sign that I am the greater rascal, rather it is
+a sign that I am the keener man.”
+
+With the note lying before him on the desk Sam wondered why he had
+written it. It seemed to him an accurate and straightforward statement
+of the business creed he had adopted for himself, but a rather absurd
+note to write to a woman. And then, not allowing himself time to
+reconsider his action, he addressed an envelope and going out into the
+general offices dropped it into the mail chute.
+
+“It will let her know where I stand anyway,” he thought, with a return
+of the defiant mood in which he had told her the motive of his action on
+the boat.
+
+Within the next ten days after the talk in Colonel Tom’s office Sam saw
+Sue Rainey several times coming to or going from her father’s office.
+Once, meeting in the little lobby by the office entrance, she stopped
+and put out her hand which Sam took awkwardly. He had a feeling that she
+would not have regretted an opportunity to continue the sudden little
+intimacy that had sprung up between them in the few minutes’ talk of
+Janet Eberly. The feeling did not come from vanity but from a belief in
+Sam that she was in some way lonely and wanting companionship. Although
+she had been much courted she lacked, he thought, the talent for
+comradeship or quick friendliness. “Like Janet she is more than half
+intellect,” he told himself, and felt a pang of regret for the slight
+disloyalty of the further thought that there was in Sue a something more
+substantial and solid than there had been in Janet.
+
+Suddenly Sam began wondering whether or not he would like to marry Sue
+Rainey. His mind played with the idea. He took it with him to bed, and
+it went with him all day in his hurried trips through offices and shops.
+The thought having come to him persisted, and he began seeing her in a
+new light. The odd half awkward little movements of her hands, and their
+expressiveness, the brown fine texture of her cheeks, the clearness and
+honesty of her grey eyes, the quick sympathy and understanding of his
+feeling for Janet, and the subtle flattery of the notion he had got that
+she was interested in him--all of these things came and went in his mind
+while he ran through columns of figures and laid plans for the expansion
+of the business of the Arms Company. Unconsciously he began to make her
+a part of his plans for the future.
+
+Later, Sam discovered that during the days after the first talk together
+the thought of a marriage between them was in Sue’s mind also. After
+the talk she went home and stood for an hour before the glass studying
+herself and she once told Sam that in her bed that night she shed
+tears because she had never been able to arouse in a man the note of
+tenderness that had been in his voice when he talked to her of Janet.
+
+And then two months after the first talk they had another. Sam, who had
+not allowed his grief over the loss of Janet or his nightly efforts
+to drown the sting of it in hard drinking, to check the big forward
+movement that he felt he was getting into the work of the offices and
+shops, sat one afternoon deeply absorbed in a pile of factory cost
+sheets. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his white
+muscular forearms. He was absorbed, intent upon the sheets.
+
+“I stepped in,” said a voice above his head.
+
+Glancing up quickly, Sam sprang to his feet. “She must have been there
+some minutes looking down at me,” he thought, and had a thrill of
+pleasure in the thought.
+
+Into his mind came the contents of the letter he had written her, and he
+wondered if after all he had been a fool, and whether the thoughts of a
+marriage with her were but vagaries. “Perhaps it would not be attractive
+to either her or myself when we came up to it,” he decided.
+
+“I stepped in,” she began again. “I have been thinking. Some things
+you said--in the letter and when you talked of your friend Janet who
+died--some things of men and women and work. You may not remember them.
+I--I got interested. I--are you a socialist?”
+
+“I believe not,” Sam answered, wondering what had given her that
+thought. “Are you?”
+
+She laughed and shook her head.
+
+“Just what are you?” she went on. “What do you believe? I am curious to
+know. I thought your note--you will pardon me--I thought it a kind of
+pretence.”
+
+Sam winced. A shadow of doubt of the sincerity of his business
+philosophy crossed his mind accompanied by the swaggering figure of
+Windy McPherson. He came around the desk and leaning against it looked
+at her. His secretary had gone out of the room and they were alone
+together. Sam laughed.
+
+“There was a man in the town where I was raised used to say that I was a
+little mole working underground, intent upon worms,” he said, and then,
+waving his arms toward the papers on the desk, added, “I am a business
+man. Isn’t that enough? If you could go with me through some of these
+cost sheets you would agree they are needed.”
+
+He turned and faced her again.
+
+“What should I be doing with beliefs?” he asked.
+
+“Well, I think you have them--some kind of beliefs,” she insisted, “you
+must have them. You get things done. You should hear the men talk
+of you. Sometimes at the house they are quite foolish about what a
+wonderful fellow you are and what you are doing here. They say that you
+drive on and on. What drives you? I want to know.”
+
+For the moment Sam half suspected that she was secretly laughing at
+him. Finding her quite serious he started to reply and then stopped,
+regarding her.
+
+The silence between them went on and on. A clock on the wall ticked
+loudly.
+
+Sam stepped nearer to her and stood looking down into the face she
+slowly turned up to his.
+
+“I want to have a talk with you,” he said, and his voice broke. He had
+the illusion of a hand gripping at his throat.
+
+In a flash he had definitely decided that he would try to marry her.
+Her interest in the motives of his life had clinched the sort of half
+decision he had made. In an illuminating moment during the prolonged
+silence between them he had seen her in a new light. The feeling of
+vague intimacy brought to him by his thoughts of her became a fixed
+belief that she belonged to him--was a part of him--and he was charmed
+with her manner, and her person, standing there, as with a gift given
+him.
+
+And then into his mind came a hundred other thoughts, clamouring
+thoughts, come out of the hidden parts of him. He began to think that
+she could lead the way on a road he wanted to travel. He thought of her
+wealth and what it would mean to a man filled with his hunger for power.
+And through these thoughts shot others. Something in her had taken hold
+of him--something that had been also in Janet. He was curious concerning
+her curiosity about his beliefs, and wanted to question her concerning
+her own beliefs. He could see none of Colonel Tom’s blustering
+incompetence in her and thought her filled with truth as a deep spring
+is filled with clear water. He believed she would give him something,
+something that all his life he had been wanting. An old aching hunger
+that had haunted his nights as a boy came back and he thought that at
+her hand it might be fed.
+
+“I--I must read a book about socialism,” he said lamely.
+
+Again they stood in silence, she looking at the floor, he past her head
+and out at the window. He could not bring himself to speak again of the
+proposed talk. He had a boyish dread of having her notice the tremor in
+his voice.
+
+Colonel Tom came into the room, bursting with an idea Sam had given him
+at the lunch hour and which in working its way into his mind had
+become to the colonel’s entirely honest belief an idea of his own. The
+interruption brought to Sam an intense feeling of relief and he began
+talking of the colonel’s idea as though it had taken him unawares.
+
+Sue, walking to a window, began tying and untying the curtain cord. When
+Sam, raising his eyes, looked at her, he caught her eyes watching him
+intently and she smiled, continuing to look at him squarely. It was his
+eyes that first broke away.
+
+From that day Sam’s mind was afire with thoughts of Sue Rainey. In his
+room he sat, or going into Grant Park stood by the lake, looking at the
+silent, moving water as he had looked in the days when he first came to
+the city. He did not dream of having her in his arms or of kissing her
+lips; he thought, instead, with a glowing heart, of a life lived with
+her. He wanted to walk beside her through the streets, to have her come
+suddenly in at his office door, to look into her eyes and to have her
+question him, as she had questioned, concerning his beliefs and his
+hopes. He thought that in the evening he would like to go to a house of
+his own and find her sitting there waiting for him. All the charm of his
+aimless, half-dissolute way of life died in him, and he believed that
+with her he could begin to live more fully and completely. From the
+moment when he had definitely decided that he wanted Sue as a wife, Sam
+stopped overdrinking, going to his room or walking through the streets
+or in the parks instead of seeking his old companions in the clubs and
+drinking places. Sometimes pushing his bed to the window overlooking the
+lake, he would undress immediately after dinner and opening the window
+would spend half the night watching the lights of boats far away over
+the water and thinking of her. He would imagine her in the room, moving
+here and there, and coming occasionally to put her hand in his hair and
+look down at him as Janet had done, helping by her sane talk and quiet
+ways to get his life straightened out for good living.
+
+And when he had fallen asleep the face of Sue Rainey came to visit his
+dreams. One night he thought she had become blind and sat in the room
+with sightless eyes saying over and over like one demented, “Truth,
+truth, give me back the truth that I may see,” and he awoke sick with
+horror at the thought of the look of suffering that had been in her
+face. Never did Sam dream of having her in his arms or of raining kisses
+on her lips and neck as he had dreamed of other women who in the past
+had won his favour.
+
+For all that he thought of her so constantly and built so confidently
+his dream of a life to be spent with her, months passed before he saw
+her again. Through Colonel Tom he learned that she had gone for a visit
+to the East and he went earnestly about his work, keeping his mind on
+his business during the day and only in the evening allowing himself to
+become absorbed in thoughts of her. He had a feeling that although he
+had said nothing she knew of his desire for her and that she wanted time
+to think it over. Several times in the evening in his room he wrote her
+long letters filled with minute, boyish explanations of his thoughts and
+motives, letters which after writing he immediately destroyed. A woman
+of the west side, with whom he had once had an affair, met him one day
+on the street, and put her hand familiarly on his arm and for the moment
+reawakened in him an old desire. After leaving her he did not go back to
+the office, but taking a south-bound car, spent the afternoon walking
+in Jackson Park, watching the children at play on the grass, sitting
+on benches under the trees, getting out of his body and his mind the
+insistent call of the flesh that had come back to him.
+
+Then in the evening, he came suddenly upon Sue riding a spirited black
+horse in a bridle path at the upper end of the park. It was just at the
+grey beginning of night. Stopping the horse, she sat looking at him and
+going to her he put a hand on the bridle.
+
+“We might have that talk,” he said.
+
+She smiled down at him and the colour began to rise in her brown cheeks.
+
+“I have been thinking of it,” she said, the familiar serious look coming
+into her eyes. “After all what have we to say to each other?”
+
+Sam watched her steadily.
+
+“I have a lot of things to say to you,” he announced. “That is to
+say--well--I have, if things are as I hope.” She got off the horse and
+they stood together by the side of the path. Sam never forgot the few
+minutes of silence that followed. The wide prospects of green sward, the
+golf player trudging wearily toward them through the uncertain light,
+his bag upon his shoulder, the air of physical fatigue with which he
+walked, bending slightly forward, the faint, soft sound of waves washing
+over a low beach, and the intense waiting look on the face she turned
+up to him, made an impression on his mind that stayed with him through
+life. It seemed to him that he had arrived at a kind of culmination, a
+starting point, and that all the vague shadowy uncertainties that had,
+in reflective moments, flitted through his mind, were to be brushed
+away by some act, some word, from the lips of this woman. With a rush he
+realised how consistently he had been thinking of her and how enormously
+he had been counting on her falling in with his plans, and the
+realisation was followed by a sickening moment of fear. How little he
+actually knew of her and of her way of thought. What assurance had he
+that she would not laugh, jump back upon the horse, and ride away? He
+was afraid as he had never been afraid before. Dumbly his mind groped
+about for a way to begin. Expressions he had caught and noted in her
+strong serious little face when he had achieved but a mild curiosity
+concerning her came back to visit his mind and he tried desperately to
+build an instant idea of her from these. And then turning his face from
+her he plunged directly into his thoughts of the past months as though
+she had been sharing talking to the colonel.
+
+“I have been thinking we might marry, you and I,” he said, and cursed
+himself for the blundering bluntness of the declaration.
+
+“You do get things done, don’t you?” she replied, smiling.
+
+“Why should you have been thinking anything of the sort?”
+
+“Because I want to live with you,” he said; “I have been talking to the
+colonel.”
+
+“About marrying me?” She seemed about to begin laughing.
+
+He hurried on. “No, not that. We talked about you. I could not let him
+alone. He might have known. I kept making him talk. I made him tell me
+about your ideas. I felt I had to know.”
+
+Sam faced her.
+
+“He thinks your ideas absurd. I do not. I like them. I like you. I think
+you are beautiful. I do not know whether I love you or not, but for
+weeks I have been thinking of you and clinging to you and saying over
+and over to myself, ‘I want to live my life with Sue Rainey.’ I did not
+expect to go at it this way. You know me. What you do not know I will
+tell you.”
+
+“Sam McPherson, you are a wonder,” she said, “and I do not know but that
+I will marry you in the end, but I can’t tell now. I want to know a lot
+of things. I want to know if you are ready to believe what I believe and
+to live for what I want to live.”
+
+The horse, growing restless, began tugging at the bridle and she spoke
+to him sharply. She plunged into a description of a man she had seen on
+the lecture platform during her visit to the East and Sam looked at her
+with puzzled eyes.
+
+“He was beautiful,” she said. “He was past sixty but looked like a boy
+of twenty-five, not in his body, but in an air of youth that hung over
+him. He stood there before the people talking, quiet, able, efficient.
+He was clean. He had lived clean, body and mind. He had been companion
+and co-worker with William Morris, and once he had been a mine boy in
+Wales, but he had got hold of a vision and lived for it. I did not hear
+what he said, but I kept thinking, ‘I want a man like that.’
+
+“Can you accept my beliefs and live for what I want to live?” she
+persisted.
+
+Sam looked at the ground. It seemed to him that he was going to lose
+her, that she would not marry him.
+
+“I am not accepting beliefs or ends in life blindly,” he said stoutly,
+“but I want them. What are your beliefs? I want to know. I think I
+haven’t any myself. When I reach for them they are gone. My mind shifts
+and changes. I want something solid. I like solid things. I want you.”
+
+“When can we meet and talk everything over thoroughly?”
+
+“Now,” answered Sam bluntly, some look in her face changing his whole
+viewpoint. Suddenly it seemed as though a door had been opened, letting
+in a strong light upon the darkness of his mind. His confidence had come
+back to him. He wanted to strike and keep on striking. The blood rushed
+through his body and his brain began working rapidly. He felt sure of
+ultimate success.
+
+Taking her hand, and leading the horse, he began walking with her along
+the path. Her hand trembled in his and as though answering a thought in
+his mind she looked up at him and said,
+
+“I am not different from other women, although I do not accept your
+offer. This is a big moment for me, perhaps the biggest moment of my
+life. I want you to know that I feel that, though I do want certain
+things more than I want you or any other man.”
+
+There was a suggestion of tears in her voice and Sam had a feeling that
+the woman in her wanted him to take her into his arms, but something
+within him told him to wait and to help her by waiting. Like her he
+wanted something more than the feel of a woman in his arms. Ideas rushed
+through his head; he thought that she was going to give him some bigger
+idea than he had known. The figure she had drawn for him of the old man
+who stood on the platform, young and beautiful, the old boyish need of
+a purpose in life, the dreams of the last few weeks--all of these were a
+part of the eager curiosity in him. They were like hungry little animals
+waiting to be fed. “We must have it all out here and now,” he told
+himself. “I must not let myself be swept away by a rush of feeling and I
+must not let her be.
+
+“Do not think,” he said, “that I haven’t tenderness for you. I am filled
+with it. But I want to have our talk. I want to know what you expect me
+to believe and how you want me to live.”
+
+He felt her hand stiffen in his.
+
+“Whether or not we are worth while to each other,” she added.
+
+“Yes,” he said.
+
+And then she began to talk, telling him in a quiet steady voice that
+steadied something in him what she wanted to make out of her life. Her
+idea was one of service to mankind through children. She had seen girl
+friends of hers, with whom she had gone to school, grow up and marry.
+They had wealth and education, fine well-trained bodies, and they had
+been married only to live lives more fully devoted to pleasure. One or
+two who had married poor men had only done so to satisfy a passion
+in themselves, and after marriage had joined the others in the hungry
+pursuit of pleasure.
+
+“They do nothing at all,” she said, “to repay the world for the things
+given them, the wealth and well-trained bodies and the disciplined
+minds. They go through life day after day and year after year wasting
+themselves and come in the end to nothing but indolent, slovenly
+vanity.”
+
+She had thought it all out and had tried to plan for herself a life with
+other ends, and wanted a husband in accord with her ideas.
+
+“That isn’t so difficult,” she said, “I can find a man whom I can
+control and who will believe as I believe. My money gives me that power.
+But I want him to be a real man, a man of ability, a man who does things
+for himself, one fitted by his life and his achievements to be the
+father of children who do things. And so I began thinking about you. I
+got the men who come to the house to talk of you.”
+
+She hung her head and laughed like a bashful boy.
+
+“I know much of the story of your early life out in that Iowa town,” she
+said. “I got the story of your life and your achievements out there from
+some one who knew you well.”
+
+The idea seemed wonderfully simple and beautiful to Sam. It seemed to
+add tremendously to the dignity and nobility of his feeling for her. He
+stopped in the path and swung her about facing him. They were alone in
+that end of the park. The soft darkness of the summer night had settled
+over them. In the grass at their feet a cricket sang loudly. He made a
+movement to take her into his arms.
+
+“It is wonderful,” he said.
+
+“Wait,” she demanded, putting her hand against his shoulder. “It isn’t
+so simple. I am wealthy. You are able and you have a kind of undying
+energy in you. I want to give both my wealth and your ability to
+children--our children. That will not be easy for you. It means giving
+up your dreams of power. Perhaps I shall lose courage. Women do after
+two or three have come. You will have to furnish that. You will have to
+make a mother of me and keep making a mother of me. You will have to be
+a new kind of father with something maternal in you. You will have to be
+patient and studious and kind. You will have to think of these things at
+night instead of thinking of your own advancement. You will have to live
+wholly for me because I am to be their mother, giving me your strength
+and courage and your good sane outlook on things. And then when they
+come you will have to give all these things to them day after day in a
+thousand little ways.”
+
+Sam took her into his arms and for the first time in his memory the hot
+tears stood in his eyes.
+
+The horse, unattended, wheeled, threw up his head and trotted off down
+the path. They let him go, walking along after him hand in hand like two
+happy children. At the entrance to the park they came up to him, held by
+a park policeman. She got on the horse and Sam stood beside her looking
+up.
+
+“I’ll tell the colonel in the morning,” he said.
+
+“What will he say?” she murmured, musingly.
+
+“Damned ingrate,” Sam mimicked the colonel’s blustering throat tones.
+
+She laughed and picked up the reins. Sam laid his hand on hers.
+
+“How soon?” he asked.
+
+She put her head down near his.
+
+“We’ll waste no time,” she said, blushing.
+
+And then in the presence of a park policeman, in the street by the
+entrance to the park with the people passing up and down, Sam had his
+first kiss from Sue Rainey’s lips.
+
+After she rode away Sam walked. He had no sense of the passing of time,
+wandering through street after street, rearranging and readjusting his
+outlook on life. What she had said had stirred every vestige of sleeping
+nobility in him. He thought that he had got hold of the thing he had
+unconsciously been seeking all his life. His dreams of control of the
+Rainey Arms Company and the other big things he had planned in business
+seemed, in the light of their talk, so much nonsense and vanity. “I will
+live for this! I will live for this!” he kept saying over and over to
+himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue’s
+arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish
+together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting
+in the darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and
+thought they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the
+earth.
+
+At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame
+houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his
+boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving
+forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the
+arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.
+
+“I must go to her--I must go to her at her house--now--tonight--and tell
+her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me,” he thought.
+
+And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.
+
+“It cleanses me! this cleanses me!” he said to himself.
+
+He remembered the men who had sat about the stove in Wildman’s grocery
+when he was a boy and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered how
+he, as a boy in the city, had run through the crowded streets fleeing
+from the terror of lust. He began to understand how distorted, how
+strangely perverted, his whole attitude toward women and sex had been.
+“Sex is a solution, not a menace--it is wonderful,” he told himself
+without knowing fully the meaning of the word that had sprung to his
+lips.
+
+When, at last, he turned into Michigan Avenue and went toward his
+apartment, the late moon was just mounting the sky and a clock in one of
+the sleeping houses was striking three.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+One evening, six weeks after the talk in the gathering darkness in
+Jackson Park, Sue Rainey and Sam McPherson sat on the deck of a Lake
+Michigan steamer watching the lights of Chicago blink out in the
+distance. They had been married that afternoon in Colonel Tom’s big
+house on the south side; and now they sat on the deck of the boat, being
+carried out into darkness, vowed to motherhood and to fatherhood, each
+more or less afraid of the other. They sat in silence, looking at
+the blinking lights and listening to the low voices of their fellow
+passengers, also sitting in the chairs along the deck or strolling
+leisurely about, and to the wash of the water along the sides of the
+boat, eager to break down a little reserve that the solemnity of the
+marriage service had built up between them.
+
+A picture floated in Sam’s mind. He saw Sue, all in white, radiant and
+wonderful, coming toward him down a broad stairway, toward him, the
+newsboy of Caxton, the smuggler of game, the roisterer, the greedy
+moneygetter. All during those six weeks he had been waiting for this
+hour when he should sit beside the little grey-clad figure, getting from
+her the help he wanted in the reconstruction of his life. Without being
+able to talk as he had thought of talking, he yet felt assured and easy
+in his mind. In the moment when she had come down the stairway he had
+been half overcome by a feeling of intense shame, a return of the shame
+that had swept over him that night when she had given her word and he
+had walked hour after hour through the streets. It had seemed to him
+that from among the guests standing about should arise a voice crying,
+“Stop! Do not go on! Let me tell you of this fellow--this McPherson!”
+ And then he had seen her holding to the arm of swaggering, pretentious
+Colonel Tom and he had taken her hand to become one with her, two
+curious, feverish, strangely different human beings, taking a vow in the
+name of their God, with the flowers banked about them and the eyes of
+people upon them.
+
+When Sam had gone to Colonel Tom the morning after that evening in
+Jackson Park, there had been a scene. The old gun maker had blustered
+and roared and forbidden, pounding on his desk with his fist. When Sam
+remained cool and unimpressed, he had stormed out of the room slamming
+the door and shouting, “Upstart! Damned upstart!” and Sam had gone
+smiling back to his desk, mildly disappointed. “I told Sue he would say
+‘Ingrate,’” he thought, “I am losing my skill at guessing just what he
+will do and say.”
+
+The colonel’s rage had been short-lived. Within a week he was boasting
+of Sam to chance callers as “the best business man in America,” and
+in the face of a solemn promise given Sue was telling news of the
+approaching marriage to every newspaper man he knew. Sam suspected
+him of secretly calling on the telephone those newspapers whose
+representatives had not crossed his trail.
+
+During the six waiting weeks there had been little of love making
+between Sue and Sam. They had talked instead, or, going into the country
+or to the parks, had walked under the trees consumed with a curious
+eager passion of suspense. The idea she had given him in the park grew
+in Sam’s brain. To live for the young things that would presently come
+to them, to be simple, direct, and natural, like the trees or the
+beasts of the field, and then to have the native honesty of such a life
+illuminated and ennobled by a mutual intelligent purpose to make their
+young something finer and better than the things in Nature by the
+intelligent use of their own good minds and bodies. In the shops and
+on the streets the hurrying men and women took on a new significance to
+him. He wondered what secret mighty purpose might be in their lives,
+and read a newspaper report of an engagement or a marriage with a little
+jump of the heart. He looked at the girls and the women at work over
+the typewriting machines in the office, with questioning eyes, asking
+himself why they did not seek marriage openly and determinedly, and
+saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material, as a machine
+for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in the great
+workshop of the universe. “Marriage is a port, a beginning, a point of
+departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage of
+life,” he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. “All that
+goes before is but a preparation, a building. The pains and the triumphs
+of all unmarried people are but the good oak planks being driven into
+place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage.” Or, again, one night
+when they were in a rowboat on the lagoon in the park and all about
+them in the darkness was the plash of oars in the water, the screams of
+excited girls, and the sound of voices calling, he let the boat float in
+against the shores of a little island and crept along the boat to kneel,
+with his head in her lap and whisper, “It is not the love of a woman
+that grips me, Sue, but the love of life. I have had a peep into the
+great mystery. This--this is why we are here--this justifies us.”
+
+Now that she sat beside him, her shoulder against his own, being carried
+away with him into darkness and privacy, the personal side of his love
+for her ran through Sam like a flame and, turning, he drew her head down
+upon his shoulder.
+
+“Not yet, Sam,” she whispered, “not with these hundreds of people
+sleeping and drinking and thinking and going about their affairs almost
+within touch of our hands.”
+
+They got up and walked along the swaying deck. Out of the north the
+clean wind called to them, the stars looked down upon them, and in the
+darkness in the bow of the boat they parted for the night silently,
+speechless with happiness and with a dear, unmentioned secret between
+them.
+
+At dawn they landed at a little lumbering town, where boat, blankets,
+and camping kit had gone before. A river flowed down out of the woods
+passing the town, going under a bridge and turning the wheel of a
+sawmill that stood by the shore of the river facing the lake. The clean
+sweet smell of the new-cut logs, the song of the saws, the roar of
+the water tumbling over a dam, the cries of the blue-shirted lumbermen
+working among the floating logs above the dam, filled the morning air,
+and above the song of the saws sang another song, a breathless, waiting
+song, the song of love and of life singing in the hearts of husband and
+wife.
+
+In a little roughly-built lumberman’s hotel they ate breakfast in a room
+overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced
+woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the
+breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing
+the door behind her. Through the open window they looked at the cold
+swiftly-flowing river and at a freckled-faced boy who carried packages
+wrapped in blankets and put them in a long canoe tied to a little
+wharf beside the hotel. They ate and sat staring at each other like two
+strange boys, saying nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his
+breast.
+
+On the river he sank his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the
+current. During the six weeks’ waiting in Chicago she had taught him the
+essentials of the canoeist’s art and, now, as he shot the canoe under
+the bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a
+superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the
+prow of the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and
+straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine
+trees, and piles of cut logs lay at the foot of the hills along the
+shore.
+
+At sunset they landed in a little cleared space at the foot of a hill
+and on the top of the hill, with the wind blowing across it, they
+made their first camp. Sam brought boughs and spread them, lapped like
+feathers in the wings of a bird, and carried blankets up the hill, while
+Sue, at the foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared
+their first cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out
+her rifle and gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness
+making the lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the
+young night, with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold
+wind blowing into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under
+the trees to where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the
+stormy waters of a great sea before their eyes, and lay down together
+for their first long tender embrace.
+
+There is a special kind of fine pleasure in getting one’s first
+knowledge of the great outdoors in the company of a woman a man loves
+and to have that woman an expert, with a keen appetite for the life,
+adds point and flavour to the experience. In his busy striving,
+nickel-seeking boyhood in the town surrounded by hot cornfields, and in
+his young manhood of scheming and money hunger in the city, Sam had not
+thought of vacations and resting places. He had walked on country roads
+with John Telfer and Mary Underwood, listening to their talk, absorbing
+their ideas, blind and deaf to the little life in the grass, in the
+leafy branches of the trees and in the air about him. In clubs, and
+about hotels and barrooms in the city, he had heard men talk of life
+in the open, and had said to himself, “When my time comes I will taste
+these things.”
+
+And now he did taste them, lying on his back on the grass along the
+river, floating down quiet little side streams in the moonlight,
+listening to the night call of birds, or watching the flight of
+frightened wild things as he pushed the canoe into the quiet depths of
+the great forest about them.
+
+At night, under the little tent they had brought, or beneath the
+blankets under the stars, he slept lightly, awakening often to look at
+Sue lying beside him. Perhaps the wind had blown a wisp of hair across
+her face and her breath played with it, tossing it about; perhaps just
+the quiet of her expressive little face charmed and held him, so that he
+turned reluctantly to sleep again thinking that he might, with pleasure,
+go on looking at her all night.
+
+For Sue the days also passed lightly. She also awoke in the night and
+lay looking at the man sleeping beside her, and once she told Sam that
+when he awoke she feigned sleep dreading to rob him of the pleasure that
+she knew these secret love passages gave to both.
+
+They were not alone in those northern woods. Everywhere along the rivers
+and on the shores of little lakes they found people, to Sam a new kind
+of people, who dropped all the ordinary things of life, and ran away
+to the woods and the streams to spend long happy months in the open.
+He discovered with surprise that these adventurers were men of modest
+fortunes, small manufacturers, skilled workingmen, retail merchants. One
+with whom he talked was a grocer from a town in Ohio, and when Sam asked
+him if the coming to the woods with his family for an eight-weeks stay
+did not endanger the success of his business he agreed with Sam that it
+did, nodding his head and laughing.
+
+“But there would be a lot more danger in not leaving it,” he said, “the
+danger of having my boys grow up to be men without my having any real
+fun with them.”
+
+Among all of the people they met Sue passed with a sort of happy freedom
+that confounded Sam, as he had formed a habit of thinking of her always
+as one shut within herself. Many of the people they saw she knew, and
+he came to believe that she had chosen the place for their love making
+because she admired and held in high favour the lives of these people of
+the out-of-doors and wanted her lover to be in some way like them. Out
+of the solitude of the woods, along the shores of little lakes, they
+called to her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show
+her husband, and among them she sat talking of other seasons and of the
+inroads of the lumber men upon their paradise. “The Burnhams were
+this year on the shores of Grant Lake, the two school teachers from
+Pittsburgh would come early in August, the Detroit man with the crippled
+son was building a cabin on the shores of Bone River.”
+
+Sam sat among them in silence, renewing constantly his admiration for
+the wonder of Sue’s past life. She, the daughter of Colonel Tom, the
+woman rich in her own right, to have made her friends among these
+people; she, who had been pronounced an enigma by the young men of
+Chicago, to have been secretly all of these years the companion and
+fellow spirit of these campers by the lakes.
+
+For six weeks they led a wandering, nomadic life in that half wild land,
+for Sue six weeks of tender love making, and of the expression of
+every thought and impulse of her fine nature, for Sam six weeks of
+readjustment and freedom, during which he learned to sail a boat, to
+shoot, and to get the fine taste of that life into his being.
+
+And then one morning they came again to the little lumber town at the
+mouth of the river and sat upon the pier waiting for the Chicago boat.
+They were bound once more into the world, and to that life together that
+was the foundation of their marriage and that was to be the end and aim
+of their two lives.
+
+If Sam’s life from boyhood had been, on the whole, barren and empty of
+many of the sweeter things, his life during the next year was strikingly
+full and complete. In the office he had ceased being the pushing upstart
+tramping on the toes of tradition and had become the son of Colonel Tom,
+the voter of Sue’s big stock holdings, the practical, directing head and
+genius of the destinies of the company. Jack Prince’s loyalty had been
+rewarded, and a huge advertising campaign made the name and merits of
+the Rainey Arms Company’s wares known to all reading Americans. The
+muzzles of Rainey-Whittaker rifles, revolvers, and shotguns looked
+threateningly out at one from the pages of the great popular magazines,
+brown fur-clad hunters did brave deeds before one’s eyes, kneeling upon
+snow-topped crags preparing to speed winged death to waiting mountain
+sheep; huge open-mouthed bears rushed down from among the type at the
+top of the pages and seemed about to devour cool deliberate sportsmen
+who stood undaunted, swinging their trusty Rainey-Whittakers into place,
+and presidents, explorers, and Texas gun fighters loudly proclaimed the
+merits of Rainey-Whittakers to a gun-buying world. It was for Sam
+and for Colonel Tom a time of big dividends, mechanical progress, and
+contentment.
+
+Sam stayed diligently at work in the offices and in the shops, but kept
+within himself a reserve of strength and resolution that might have gone
+into the work. With Sue he took up golf and morning rides on horseback,
+and with Sue he sat during the long evenings, reading aloud, absorbing
+her ideas and her beliefs. Sometimes for days they were like two
+children, going off together to walk on country roads and to sleep in
+country hotels. On these walks they went hand in hand or, bantering each
+other, raced down long hills to lie panting in the grass by the roadside
+when they were out of breath.
+
+Near the end of the first year she told him one night of the realisation
+of their hopes and they sat through the evening alone by the fire in her
+room, filled with the white wonder of it, renewing to each other all the
+fine vows of their early love-making days.
+
+Sam never succeeded in recapturing the flavour of those days. Happiness
+is a thing so vague, so indefinite, so dependent on a thousand little
+turns of the events of the day, that it only visits the most fortunate
+and at rare intervals, but Sam thought that he and Sue touched almost
+ideal happiness constantly during that time. There were weeks and even
+months of their first year together that later passed out of Sam’s
+memory entirely, leaving only a sense of completeness and well being.
+He could remember, perhaps, a winter walk in the moonlight by the frozen
+lake, or a visitor who sat and talked an evening away by their fire. But
+at the end he had to come back to this: that something sang in his
+heart all day long and that the air tasted better, the stars shone more
+brightly, and the wind and the rain and the hail upon the window panes
+sang more sweetly in his ears. He and the woman who lived with him had
+wealth, position, and infinite delight in the presence and the persons
+of each other, and a great idea burned like a lamp in a window at the
+end of the road they travelled.
+
+Meanwhile, in the world about him events came and went. A president
+was elected, the grey wolves were being hunted out of the Chicago city
+council, and a strong rival to his company flourished in his own
+city. In other days he would have been down upon this rival fighting,
+planning, working for its destruction. Now he sat at Sue’s feet,
+dreaming and talking to her of the brood that under their care should
+grow into wonderful reliant men and women. When Lewis, the talented
+sales manager of the Edwards Arms Company, got the business of a
+Kansas City jobber, he smiled, wrote a sharp letter to his man in that
+territory, and went for an afternoon of golf with Sue. He had completely
+and wholly accepted Sue’s conception of life. “We have wealth for any
+emergency,” he said to himself, “and we will live our lives for service
+to mankind through the children that will presently come into our
+house.”
+
+After their marriage Sam found that Sue, for all her apparent coldness
+and indifference, had in Chicago, as in the northern woods, her own
+little circle of men and women. Some of these people Sam had met during
+the engagement, and now they began gradually coming to the house for an
+evening with the McPhersons. Sometimes there would be several of them
+for a quiet dinner at which there was much good talk, and after which
+Sue and Sam sat for half the night, continuing some vein of thought
+brought to them. Among the people who came to them, Sam shone
+resplendent. In some indefinable way he thought they paid court to him
+and the thought flattered him immensely. The college professor who had
+talked brilliantly through an evening turned to Sam for approval of his
+conclusions, a writer of tales of cowboy life asked him to help him over
+a difficulty in the stock market, and a tall black-haired painter paid
+him the rare compliment of repeating one of Sam’s remarks as his own. It
+was as though, in spite of their talk, they thought him the most gifted
+of them all, and for a time he was puzzled by their attitude. Jack
+Prince came, sat at one of the dinner parties, and explained.
+
+“You have got what they want and cannot get--the money,” he said.
+
+After the evening when Sue told him the great news they gave a dinner.
+It was a sort of welcoming party for the coming guest, and, while the
+people at the table ate and talked, Sue and Sam, from opposite ends
+of the table, lifted high their glasses and, looking into each other’s
+eyes, drank off the health of him who was to come, the first of the
+great family, the family that was to have two lives lived for its
+success.
+
+At the table sat Colonel Tom with his broad white shirt front, his
+white, pointed beard, and his grandiloquent flow of talk; at Sue’s side
+sat Jack Prince, pausing in his open admiration of Sue to cast an eye
+on the handsome New York girl at Sam’s end of the table or to puncture,
+with a flash of his terse common sense, some balloon of theory launched
+by Williams of the University, who sat on the other side of Sue; the
+artist, who hoped for a commission to paint Colonel Tom, sat opposite
+him bewailing the dying out of fine old American families; and a
+serious-faced little German scientist sat beside Colonel Tom smiling
+as the artist talked. The man, Sam fancied, was laughing at them both,
+perhaps at all of them. He did not mind. He looked at the scientist and
+at the other faces up and down the table and then at Sue. He saw her
+directing and leading the talk; he saw the play of muscles about her
+strong neck and the fine firmness of her straight little body, and his
+eyes grew moist and a lump came into his throat at the thought of the
+secret that lay between them.
+
+And then his mind ran back to another night in Caxton when first he sat
+eating among strange people at Freedom Smith’s table. He saw again the
+tomboy girl and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom’s
+hand in the close little stable; he saw the absurd housepainter trying
+to blow the bugle in the street; and the mother talking to her boy of
+death through the summer evening; the fat foreman making the record
+of his loves on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commission man
+rubbing his hands before a group of Greek hucksters, and then this--this
+home with its safety and its secret high aim and him sitting there at
+the head of it all. Like the novelist, it seemed to him that he should
+admire and bow his head before the romance of destiny. He thought his
+station, his wife, his country, his end in life, when rightly seen, the
+very apex of life on the earth, and to him in his pride it seemed that
+he was in some way the master and maker of it all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Late one evening, some weeks after the McPhersons had given the dinner
+party in secret celebration of the future arrival of what was to be the
+first of the great family, they came together down the steps of a north
+side house to their waiting carriage. They had spent, Sam thought, a
+delightful evening. The Grovers were people of whose friendship he was
+particularly proud and since his marriage with Sue he had taken her
+often for an evening to the house of the venerable surgeon. Doctor
+Grover was a scholar, a man of note in the medical world, and a rapid
+and absorbing talker and thinker on any subject that aroused his
+interest. A certain youthful enthusiasm in his outlook on life had
+attracted to him the devotion of Sue, who, since meeting him through
+Sam, had counted him a marked addition to their little group of friends.
+His wife, a white-haired, plump little woman, was, though apparently
+somewhat diffident, in reality his intellectual equal and companion,
+and Sue in a quiet way had taken her as a model in her own effort toward
+complete wifehood.
+
+During the evening, spent in a rapid exchange of opinions and ideas
+between the two men, Sue had sat in silence. Once when he looked at her
+Sam thought that he had surprised an annoyed look in her eyes and was
+puzzled by it. During the remainder of the evening her eyes refused
+to meet his and she looked instead at the floor, a flush mounting her
+cheeks.
+
+At the door of the carriage Frank, Sue’s coachman, stepped on the hem
+of her gown and tore it. The tear was slight, the incident Sam thought
+entirely unavoidable, and as much due to a momentary clumsiness on the
+part of Sue as to the awkwardness of Frank. The man had for years been a
+loyal servant and a devoted admirer of Sue’s.
+
+Sam laughed and taking Sue by the arm started to help her in at the
+carriage door.
+
+“Too much gown for an athlete,” he said, pointlessly.
+
+In a flash Sue turned and faced the coachman.
+
+“Awkward brute,” she said, through her teeth.
+
+Sam stood on the sidewalk dumb with astonishment as Frank turned and
+climbed to his seat without waiting to close the carriage door. He felt
+as he might have felt had he, as a boy, heard profanity from the lips
+of his mother. The look in Sue’s eyes as she turned them on Frank struck
+him like a blow and in a moment his whole carefully built-up conception
+of her and of her character had been shaken. He had an impulse to slam
+the carriage door after her and walk home.
+
+They drove home in silence, Sam feeling as though he rode beside a new
+and strange being. In the light of passing street lamps he could see her
+face held straight ahead and her eyes staring stonily at the curtain in
+front. He didn’t want to reproach her; he wanted to take hold of her arm
+and shake her. “I should like to take the whip from in front of Frank’s
+seat and give her a sound beating,” he told himself.
+
+At the house Sue jumped out of the carriage and, running past him in at
+the door, closed it after her. Frank drove off toward the stables and
+when Sam went into the house he found Sue standing half way up the
+stairs leading to her room and waiting for him.
+
+“I presume you do not know that you have been openly insulting me all
+evening,” she cried. “Your beastly talk there at the Grovers--it was
+unbearable--who are these women? Why parade your past life before me?”
+
+Sam said nothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at
+her and then, turning, just as she, running up the stairs, slammed the
+door of her own room, he went into the library. A wood fire burned in
+the grate and he sat down and lighted his pipe. He did not try to think
+the thing out. He felt that he was in the presence of a lie and that the
+Sue who had lived in his mind and in his affections no longer existed,
+that in her place there was this other woman, this woman who had
+insulted her own servant and had perverted and distorted the meaning of
+his talk during the evening.
+
+Sitting by the fire filling and refilling his pipe, Sam went carefully
+over every word, gesture, and incident of the evening at the Grovers and
+could get hold of no part of it that he thought might in fairness serve
+as an excuse for the outburst. In the upper part of the house he could
+hear Sue moving restlessly about and he had satisfaction in the thought
+that her mind was punishing her for so strange a seizure. He and Grover
+had perhaps been somewhat carried away, he told himself; they had talked
+of marriage and its meaning and had both declared somewhat hotly against
+the idea that the loss of virginity in women was in any sense a bar to
+honourable marriage, but he had said nothing that he thought could have
+been twisted into an insult to Sue or to Mrs. Grover. He had thought the
+talk rather good and clearly thought out and had come out of the house
+exhilarated and secretly preening himself with the thought that he had
+talked unusually forcefully and well. In any event what had been said
+had been said before in Sue’s presence and he thought that he could
+remember her having, in the past, expressed similar ideas with
+enthusiasm.
+
+Hour after hour he sat in the chair before the dying fire. He dozed and
+his pipe dropped from his hand and fell upon the stone hearth. A kind
+of dumb misery and anger was in him as over and over endlessly his mind
+kept reviewing the events of the evening.
+
+“What has made her think she can do that to me?” he kept asking himself.
+
+He remembered certain strange silences and hard looks from her eyes
+during the past weeks, silences and looks that in the light of the
+events of the evening became pregnant with meaning.
+
+“She has a temper, a beast of a temper. Why shouldn’t she have been
+square and told me?” he asked himself.
+
+The clock had struck three when the library door opened quietly and Sue,
+clad in a dressing gown through which the new roundness of her lithe
+little figure was plainly apparent, came into the room. She ran across
+to him and putting her head down on his knee wept bitterly.
+
+“Oh, Sam!” she said, “I think I am going insane. I have been hating you
+as I have not hated since I was an evil-tempered child. A thing I worked
+years to suppress in me has come back. I have been hating myself and the
+baby. For days I have been fighting the feeling in me, and now it has
+come out and perhaps you have begun hating me. Can you love me again?
+Will you ever forget the meanness and the cheapness of it? You and poor
+innocent Frank--Oh, Sam, the devil was in me!”
+
+Reaching down, Sam took her into his arms and cuddled her like a child.
+A story he had heard of the vagaries of women at such times came back to
+him and was as a light illuminating the darkness of his mind.
+
+“I understand now,” he said. “It is a part of the burden you carry for
+us both.”
+
+For some weeks after the outbreak at the carriage door events ran
+smoothly in the McPherson house. One day as he stood in the stable door
+Frank came round the corner of the house and, looking up sheepishly from
+under his cap, said to Sam: “I understand about the missus. It is the
+baby coming. We have had four of them at our house,” and Sam, nodding
+his head, turned and began talking rapidly of his plans to replace the
+carriages with automobiles.
+
+But in the house, in spite of the clearing up of the matter of Sue’s
+ugliness at the Grovers, a subtle change had taken place in the
+relationship of the two. Although they were together facing the first
+of the events that were to be like ports-of-call in the great voyage of
+their lives, they were not facing it with the same mutual understanding
+and kindly tolerance with which they had faced smaller things in the
+past--a disagreement over the method of shooting a rapid in a river or
+the entertainment of an undesirable guest. The inclination to fits of
+temper loosens and disarranges all the little wires of life. The
+tune will not get itself played. One stands waiting for the discord,
+strained, missing the harmony. It was so with Sam. He began feeling that
+he must keep a check upon his tongue and that things of which they had
+talked with great freedom six months earlier now annoyed and irritated
+his wife when brought into an after-dinner discussion. To Sam, who,
+during his life with Sue, had learned the joy of free, open talk upon
+any subject that came into his mind and whose native interest in life
+and in the motives of men and women had blossomed in the large leisure
+and independence of the last year, this was trying. It was, he thought,
+like trying to hold free and open communion with the people of an
+orthodox family, and he fell into a habit of prolonged silences, a habit
+that later, he found, once formed, unbelievably hard to break.
+
+One day in the office a situation arose that seemed to demand Sam’s
+presence in Boston on a certain date. For months he had been carrying
+on a trade war with some of the eastern manufacturers in his line and an
+opportunity for the settlement of the trouble in a way advantageous to
+himself had, he thought, arisen. He wanted to handle the matter himself
+and went home to explain to Sue. It was at the end of a day when nothing
+had occurred to irritate her and she agreed with him that he should not
+be compelled to trust so important a matter to another.
+
+“I am no child, Sam. I will take care of myself,” she said, laughing.
+
+Sam wired his New York man asking him to make the arrangements for the
+meeting in Boston and picked up a book to spend the evening reading
+aloud to her.
+
+And then, coming home the next evening he found her in tears and when he
+tried to laugh away her fears she flew into a black fit of anger and ran
+out of the room.
+
+Sam went to the ‘phone and called his New York man, thinking to instruct
+him in regard to the conference in Boston and to give up his own plans
+for the trip. When he had got his man on the wire, Sue, who had
+been standing outside the door, rushed in and put her hand over the
+mouthpiece of the ‘phone.
+
+“Sam! Sam!” she cried. “Do not give up the trip! Scold me! Beat me! Do
+anything, but do not let me go on making a fool of myself and destroying
+your peace of mind! I shall be miserable if you stay at home because of
+what I have said!”
+
+Over the ‘phone came the insistent voice of Central and putting her hand
+aside Sam talked to his man, letting the engagement stand and making
+some detail of the conference answer as his need of calling.
+
+Again Sue was repentant and again after her tears they sat before the
+fire until his train time, talking like lovers.
+
+To Buffalo in the morning came a wire from her.
+
+“Come back. Let business go. Cannot stand it,” she had wired.
+
+While he sat reading the wire the porter brought another.
+
+“Please, Sam, pay no attention to any wire from me. I am all right and
+only half a fool.”
+
+Sam was irritated. “It is deliberate pettiness and weakness,” he
+thought, when an hour later the porter brought another wire demanding
+his immediate return. “The situation calls for drastic action and
+perhaps one good stinging reproof will stop it for all time.”
+
+Going into the buffet car he wrote a long letter calling her attention
+to the fact that a certain amount of freedom of action was due him, and
+saying that he intended to act upon his own judgment in the future and
+not upon her impulses.
+
+Having begun to write Sam went on and on. He was not interrupted, no
+shadow crossed the face of his beloved to tell him he was hurting and
+he said all that was in his mind to say. Little sharp reproofs that had
+come into his mind but that had been left unsaid now got themselves said
+and when he had dumped his overloaded mind into the letter he sealed and
+mailed it at a passing station.
+
+Within an hour after the letter had left his hands Sam regretted it. He
+thought of the little woman bearing the burden for them both, and things
+Grover had told him of the unhappiness of women in her condition came
+back to haunt his mind so that he wrote and sent off to her a wire
+asking her not to read the letter he had mailed and assuring her that he
+would hurry through the Boston conference and get back to her at once.
+
+When Sam returned he knew that in an evil moment Sue had opened and
+read the letter sent from the train and was surprised and hurt by the
+knowledge. The act seemed like a betrayal. He said nothing, going about
+his work with a troubled mind and watching with growing anxiety her
+alternate fits of white anger and fearful remorse. He thought her
+growing worse daily and became alarmed for her health.
+
+And, then, after a talk with Grover he began to spend more and more time
+with her, forcing her to take with him daily, long walks in the open
+air. He tried valiantly to keep her mind fixed on cheerful things and
+went to bed happy and relieved when a day ended that did not bring a
+stormy passage between them.
+
+There were days during that period when Sam thought himself near
+insanity. With a light in her grey eyes that was maddening Sue would
+take up some minor thing, a remark he had made or a passage he had
+quoted from some book, and in a dead, level, complaining tone would talk
+of it until his head reeled and his fingers ached from the gripping of
+his hands to keep control of himself. After such a day he would steal
+off by himself and, walking rapidly, would try through pure physical
+fatigue to force his mind to give up the remembrance of the persistent,
+complaining voice. At times he would give way to fits of anger and
+strew impotent oaths along the silent street, or, in another mood, would
+mumble and talk to himself, praying for strength and courage to keep his
+own head during the ordeal through which he thought they were passing
+together. And when he returned from such a walk and from such a struggle
+with himself it often occurred that he would find her waiting in the arm
+chair before the fire in her room, her mind clear and her little face
+wet with the tears of her repentance.
+
+And then the struggle ended. With Doctor Grover it had been arranged
+that Sue should be taken to the hospital for the great event, and they
+drove there hurriedly one night through the quiet streets, the recurring
+pains gripping Sue and her hands clutching his. An exalted cheerfulness
+had hold of them. Face to face with the actual struggle for the new
+life Sue was transfigured. Her voice rang with triumph and her eyes
+glistened.
+
+“I am going to do it,” she cried; “my black fear is gone. I shall give
+you a child--a man child. I shall succeed, my man Sam. You shall see. It
+will be beautiful.”
+
+When the pain gripped she gripped at his hand, and a spasm of
+physical sympathy ran through him. He felt helpless and ashamed of his
+helplessness.
+
+At the entrance to the hospital grounds she put her face down upon his
+knees so that the hot tears ran through his hands.
+
+“Poor, poor old Sam, it has been horrible for you.”
+
+At the hospital Sam walked up and down in the corridor through the
+swinging doors at the end of which she had been taken. Every vestige of
+regret for the trying months now lying behind had passed, and he paced
+up and down the corridor feeling that he had come to one of those huge
+moments when a man’s brain, his grasp of affairs, his hopes and plans
+for the future, all of the little details and trivialities of his life,
+halt, and he waits anxious, breathless, expectant. He looked at a little
+clock on a table at the end of the corridor, half expecting it to stop
+also and wait with him. His marriage hour that had seemed so big and
+vital seemed now, in the quiet corridor, with the stone floor and the
+silent white-clad, rubber-shod nurses passing up and down and in the
+presence of this greater event, to have shrunk enormously. He walked up
+and down peering at the clock, looking at the swinging door and biting
+at the stem of his empty pipe.
+
+And then through the swinging door came Grover.
+
+“We can get the child, Sam, but to get it we shall have to take a chance
+with her. Do you want to do that? Do not wait. Decide.”
+
+Sam sprang past him toward the door.
+
+“You bungler,” he cried, and his voice rang through the long quiet
+corridor. “You do not know what this means. Let me go.”
+
+Doctor Grover, catching him by the arm, swung him about. The two men
+stood facing each other.
+
+“You stay here,” said the doctor, his voice remaining quiet and firm; “I
+will attend to things. Your going in there would be pure folly now. Now
+answer me--do you want to take the chance?”
+
+“No! No!” Sam shouted. “No! I want her--Sue--alive and well, back
+through that door.”
+
+A cold gleam came into his eyes and he shook his fist before the
+doctor’s face.
+
+“Do not try deceiving me about this. By God, I will----”
+
+Turning, Doctor Grover ran back through the swinging door leaving Sam
+staring blankly at his back. A nurse, one whom he had seen in Doctor
+Grover’s office, came out of the door and taking his arm, walked beside
+him up and down the corridor. Sam put his arm around her shoulder and
+talked. An illusion that it was necessary to comfort her came to him.
+
+“Do not worry,” he said. “She will be all right. Grover will take care
+of her. Nothing can happen to little Sue.”
+
+The nurse, a small, sweet-faced, Scotch woman, who knew and admired Sue,
+wept. Some quality in his voice had touched the woman in her and the
+tears ran in a little stream down her cheeks. Sam continued talking, the
+woman’s tears helping him to regain his grip upon himself.
+
+“My mother is dead,” he said, an old sorrow revisiting him. “I wish that
+you, like Mary Underwood, would be a new mother to me.”
+
+When the time came that he could be taken to the room where Sue lay, his
+self-possession had returned to him and his mind had begun blaming the
+little dead stranger for the unhappiness of the past months and for the
+long separation from what he thought was the real Sue. Outside the door
+of the room into which she had been taken he stopped, hearing her voice,
+thin and weak, talking to Grover.
+
+“Unfit--Sue McPherson unfit,” said the voice, and Sam thought it was
+filled with an infinite weariness.
+
+He ran through the door and dropped on his knees by her bed. She turned
+her eyes to him smiling bravely.
+
+“The next time we’ll make it,” she said.
+
+The second child born to the young McPhersons arrived out of time. Again
+Sam walked, this time through the corridor of his own house and without
+the consoling presence of the sweet-faced Scotch woman, and again
+he shook his head at Doctor Grover who came to him consoling and
+reassuring.
+
+After the death of the second child Sue lay for months in bed. In his
+arms, in her own room, she wept openly in the presence of Grover and the
+nurses, crying out against her unfitness. For several days she refused
+to see Colonel Tom, harbouring in her mind the notion that he was in
+some way responsible for her physical inability to bear living children,
+and when she got up from her bed, she remained for months white and
+listless but grimly determined upon another attempt for the little life
+she so wanted to feel in her arms.
+
+During the days of her carrying the second baby she had again the fierce
+ugly attacks of temper that had shattered Sam’s nerves, but having
+learned to understand, he went quietly about his work, trying as far
+as in him lay to close his ears to the stinging, hurtful things she
+sometimes said; and the third time, it was agreed between them that
+if they were again unsuccessful they would turn their minds to other
+things.
+
+“If we do not succeed this time we might as well count ourselves through
+with each other for good,” she said one day in one of the fits of cold
+anger that were a part of child bearing with her.
+
+That second night when Sam walked in the hospital corridor he was beside
+himself. He felt like a young recruit called to face an unseen enemy and
+to stand motionless and inactive in the presence of the singing death
+that ran through the air. He remembered a story, told when he was a
+child by a fellow soldier who had come to visit his father, of the
+prisoners at Andersonville creeping in the darkness past armed sentries
+to a little pool of stagnant water beyond the dead line, and felt that
+he too was creeping unarmed and helpless in the neighbourhood of death.
+In a conference at his house between the three some weeks before, it had
+been decided, after tearful insistence on the part of Sue and a stand
+on the part of Grover, who declared that he would not remain on the case
+unless permitted to use his own judgment, that an operation should be
+performed.
+
+“Take the chances that need be taken,” Sam had said to Grover after the
+conference; “she will never stand another defeat. Give her the child.”
+
+In the corridor it seemed to Sam that hours had passed and still he
+stood motionless waiting. His feet felt cold and he had the impression
+that they were wet although the night was dry and a moon shone outside.
+When, from a distant part of the hospital, a groan reached his ears he
+shook with fright and had an inclination to cry out. Two young interns
+clad in white passed.
+
+“Old Grover is doing a Caesarian section,” said one of them; “he is
+getting out of date. Hope he doesn’t bungle it.”
+
+In Sam’s ears rang the remembrance of Sue’s voice, the Sue who that
+first time had gone into the room behind the swinging doors with the
+determined smile on her face. He thought he could see again the white
+face looking up from the wheeled cot on which they had taken her through
+the door.
+
+“I am afraid, Dr. Grover--I am afraid I am unfit,” he had heard her say
+as the door closed.
+
+And then Sam did a thing for which he cursed himself the rest of his
+life. On an impulse, and maddened by the intolerable waiting, he walked
+to the swinging doors and, pushing them open, stepped into the operating
+room where Grover was at work upon Sue.
+
+The room was long and narrow, with floors, walls and ceiling of white
+cement. A great glaring light, suspended from the ceiling, threw
+its rays directly down on a white-clad figure lying on a white metal
+operating table. On the walls of the room were other glaring lights set
+in shining glass reflectors. And, here and there through an intense,
+expectant atmosphere, moved and stood silently a group of men and women,
+faceless, hairless, with only their strangely vivid eyes showing through
+the white masks that covered their faces.
+
+Sam, standing motionless by the door, looked about with wild,
+half-seeing eyes. Grover worked rapidly and silently, taking from time
+to time little shining instruments from a swinging table close at his
+hand. The nurse standing beside him looked up toward the light and began
+calmly threading a needle. And in a white basin on a little stand at
+the side of the room lay the last of Sue’s tremendous efforts toward new
+life, the last of their dreams of the great family.
+
+Sam closed his eyes and fell. His head, striking against the wall,
+aroused him and he struggled to his feet.
+
+Without stopping his work, Grover began swearing.
+
+“Damn it, man, get out of here.”
+
+Sam groped with his hand for the door. One of the white-clad, ghoulish
+figures started toward him. And then with his head reeling and his eyes
+closed he backed through the door and, running along the corridor and
+down a flight of broad stairs, reached the open air and darkness. He had
+no doubt of Sue’s death.
+
+“She is gone,” he muttered, hurrying bareheaded along the deserted
+streets.
+
+Through street after street he ran. Twice he came out upon the shores
+of the lake, and, then turning, went back into the heart of the city
+through streets bathed in the warm moonlight. Once he turned quickly at
+a corner and stepping into a vacant lot stood behind a high board fence
+as a policeman strolled along the street. Into his head came the idea
+that he had killed Sue and that the blue-clad figure walking with heavy
+tread on the stone pavement was seeking him to take him back to where
+she lay white and lifeless. Again he stopped, before a little frame
+drugstore on a corner, and sitting down on the steps before it cursed
+God openly and defiantly like an angry boy defying his father. Some
+instinct led him to look at the sky through the tangle of telegraph
+wires overhead.
+
+“Go on and do what you dare!” he cried. “I will not follow you now. I
+shall never try to find you after this.”
+
+Presently he began laughing at himself for the instinct that had led
+him to look at the sky and to shout out his defiance and, getting up,
+wandered on. In his wanderings he came to a railroad track where a
+freight train groaned and rattled over a crossing. When he came up to it
+he jumped upon an empty coal car, falling as he climbed, and cutting his
+face upon the sharp pieces of coal that lay scattered about the bottom
+of the car.
+
+The train ground along slowly, stopping occasionally, the engine
+shrieking hysterically.
+
+After a time he got out of the car and dropped to the ground. On all
+sides of him were marshes, the long rank marsh grasses rolling and
+tossing in the moonlight. When the train had passed he followed it,
+walking stumblingly along. As he walked, following the blinking lights
+at the end of the train, he thought of the scene in the hospital and
+of Sue lying dead for that--that ping livid and shapeless on the table
+under the lights.
+
+Where the solid ground ran up to the tracks Sam sat down under a tree.
+Peace came over him. “This is the end of things,” he thought, and
+was like a tired child comforted by its mother. He thought of the
+sweet-faced nurse who had walked with him that other time in the
+corridor of the hospital and who had wept because of his fears, and
+then of the night when he had felt the throat of his father between
+his fingers in the squalid little kitchen. He ran his hands along
+the ground. “Good old ground,” he said. A sentence came into his mind
+followed by the figure of John Telfer striding, stick in hand, along a
+dusty road. “Here is spring come and time to plant out flowers in the
+grass,” he said aloud. His face felt swollen and sore from the fall in
+the freight car and he lay down on the ground under a tree and slept.
+
+When he woke it was morning and grey clouds were drifting across the
+sky. Within sight, down a road, a trolley car went past into the city.
+Before him, in the midst of the marsh, lay a low lake, and a raised
+walk, with boats tied to the posts on which it stood, ran down to the
+water. He went down the walk, bathed his bruised face in the water, and
+boarding a car went back into the city.
+
+In the morning air a new thought took possession of him. The wind ran
+along a dusty road beside the car track, picking up little handfuls of
+dust and playfully throwing them about. He had a strained, eager feeling
+like some one listening for a faint call out of the distance.
+
+“To be sure,” he thought, “I know what it is, it is my wedding day. I am
+to marry Sue Rainey to-day.”
+
+At the house he found Grover and Colonel Tom standing in the breakfast
+room. Grover looked at his swollen, distorted face. His voice trembled.
+
+“Poor devil!” he said. “You have had a night!”
+
+Sam laughed and slapped Colonel Tom on the shoulder.
+
+“We will have to begin getting ready,” he said. “The wedding is at ten.
+Sue will be getting anxious.”
+
+Grover and Colonel Tom took him by the arm and began leading him up the
+stairs, Colonel Tom weeping like a woman.
+
+“Silly old fool,” thought Sam.
+
+When, two weeks later, he again opened his eyes to consciousness Sue sat
+beside his bed in a reclining chair, her little thin white hand in his.
+
+“Get the baby!” he cried, believing anything possible. “I want to see
+the baby!”
+
+She laid her head down on the pillow.
+
+“It was gone when you saw it,” she said, and put an arm about his neck.
+
+When the nurse came back she found them, their heads together upon the
+pillow, crying weakly like two tired children.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The blow given the plan of life so carefully thought out and so eagerly
+accepted by the young McPhersons threw them back upon themselves. For
+several years they had been living upon a hill top, taking themselves
+very seriously and more than a little preening themselves with the
+thought that they were two very unusual and thoughtful people engaged
+upon a worthy and ennobling enterprise. Sitting in their corner immersed
+in admiration of their own purposes and in the thoughts of the vigorous,
+disciplined, new life they were to give the world by the combined
+efficiency of their two bodies and minds they were, at a word and a
+shake of the head from Doctor Grover, compelled to remake the outline of
+their future together.
+
+All about them the rush of life went on, vast changes were impending
+in the industrial life of the people, cities were doubling and tripling
+their population, a war was being fought, and the flag of their country
+flew in the ports of strange seas, while American boys pushed their way
+through the tangled jungles of strange lands carrying in their hands
+Rainey-Whittaker rifles. And in a huge stone house, set in a broad
+expanse of green lawns near the shores of Lake Michigan, Sam McPherson
+sat looking at his wife, who in turn looked at him. He was trying, as
+she also was trying, to adjust himself to the cheerful acceptance of
+their new prospect of a childless life.
+
+Looking at Sue across the dinner table or seeing her straight, wiry body
+astride a horse riding beside him through the parks, it seemed to Sam
+unbelievable that a childless womanhood was ever to be her portion, and
+more than once he had an inclination to venture again upon an effort for
+the success of their hopes. But when he remembered her still white
+face that night in the hospital, her bitter, haunting cry of defeat,
+he turned with a shudder from the thought, feeling that he could not go
+with her again through that ordeal; that he could not again allow her to
+look forward through weeks and months toward the little life that never
+came to lie upon her breast or to laugh up into her face.
+
+And yet Sam, son of that Jane McPherson who had won the admiration of
+the men of Caxton by her ceaseless efforts to keep her family afloat and
+clean handed, could not sit idly by, living upon the income of his own
+and Sue’s money. The stirring, forward-moving world called to him; he
+looked about him at the broad, significant movements in business and
+finance, at the new men coming into prominence and apparently finding a
+way for the expression of new big ideas, and felt his youth stirring in
+him and his mind reaching out to new projects and new ambitions.
+
+Given the necessity for economy and a hard long-drawn-out struggle for
+a livelihood and competence, Sam could conceive of living his life
+with Sue and deriving something like gratification from just her
+companionship, and her partnership in his efforts--here and there during
+the waiting years he had met men who had found such gratification--a
+foreman in the shops or a tobacconist from whom he bought his
+cigars--but for himself he felt that he had gone with Sue too far upon
+another road to turn that way now with anything like mutual zeal or
+interest. At bottom, his mind did not run strongly toward the idea of
+the love of women as an end in life; he had loved, and did love, Sue
+with something approaching religious fervour, but the fervour was more
+than half due to the ideas she had given him and to the fact that with
+him she was to have been the instrument for the realisation of those
+ideas. He was a man with children in his loins and he had given up his
+struggles for business eminence for the sake of preparing himself for
+a kind of noble fatherhood of children, many children, strong children,
+fit gifts to the world for two exceptionally favoured lives. In all
+of his talks with Sue this idea had been present and dominant. He had
+looked about him and in the arrogance of his youth and in the pride
+of his good body and mind had condemned all childless marriages as a
+selfish waste of good lives. With her he had agreed that such lives were
+without point and purpose. Now he remembered that in the days of her
+audacity and daring she had more than once expressed the hope that in
+case of a childless issue to their marriage one or the other of them
+would have the courage to cut the knot that tied them and venture into
+another effort at right living at any cost.
+
+In the months after Sue’s last recovery, and during the long evenings,
+as they sat together or walked under the stars in the park, the thought
+of these talks was often in Sam’s mind and he found himself beginning
+to speculate on her present attitude and to wonder how bravely she
+would meet the idea of a separation. In the end he decided that no such
+thought was in her mind, that face to face with the tremendous
+actuality she clung to him with a new dependence, and a new need of his
+companionship. The conviction of the absolute necessity of children as
+a justification for a man and woman living together had, he thought,
+burned itself more deeply into his brain than into hers; to him it
+clung, coming back again and again to his mind, causing him to turn here
+and there restlessly, making readjustments, seeking new light. The old
+gods being dead he sought new gods.
+
+In the meantime he sat in his house facing his wife, losing himself in
+the books recommended to him years before by Janet, thinking his own
+thoughts. Often in the evening he would look up from his book or from
+his preoccupied staring at the fire to find her eyes looking at him.
+
+“Talk, Sam; talk,” she would say; “do not sit there thinking.”
+
+Or at another time she would come to his room at night and putting her
+head down on the pillow beside his would spend hours planning, weeping,
+begging him to give her again his love, his old fervent, devoted love.
+
+This Sam tried earnestly and honestly to do, going with her for long
+walks when the new call, the business had begun to make to him, would
+have kept him at his desk, reading aloud to her in the evening, urging
+her to shake off her old dreams and to busy herself with new work and
+new interests.
+
+Through the days in the office he went in a kind of half stupor. An old
+feeling of his boyhood coming back to him, it seemed to him, as it had
+seemed when he walked aimlessly through the streets of Caxton after
+the death of his mother, that there remained something to be done, an
+accounting to be made. Even at his desk with the clatter of typewriters
+in his ears and the piles of letters demanding his attention, his mind
+slipped back to the days of his courtship with Sue and to those days in
+the north woods when life had beat strong within him, and every young,
+wild thing, every new growth renewed the dream that filled his being.
+Sometimes on the street, or walking in the park with Sue, the cries of
+children at play cut across the sombre dulness of his mind and he shrank
+from the sound and a kind of bitter resentment took possession of him.
+When he looked covertly at Sue she talked of other things, apparently
+unconscious of his thoughts.
+
+Then a new phase of life presented itself. To his surprise he found
+himself looking with more than passing interest at women in the streets,
+and an old hunger for the companionship of strange women came back to
+him, in some way coarsened and materialised. One evening at the theatre
+a woman, a friend of Sue’s and the childless wife of a business friend
+of his own, sat beside him. In the darkness of the playhouse her
+shoulder nestled down against his. In the excitement of a crisis on the
+stage her hand slipped into his and her fingers clutched and held his
+fingers.
+
+Animal desire seized and shook him, a feeling without sweetness, brutal,
+making his eyes burn. When between the acts the theatre was again
+flooded with light he looked up guiltily to meet another pair of eyes
+equally filled with guilty hunger. A challenge had been given and
+received.
+
+In their car, homeward bound, Sam put the thoughts of the woman away
+from him and taking Sue in his arms prayed silently for some help
+against he knew not what.
+
+“I think I will go to Caxton in the morning and have a talk with Mary
+Underwood,” he said.
+
+After his return from Caxton Sam set about finding some new interest to
+occupy Sue’s mind. He had spent an afternoon talking to Valmore, Freedom
+Smith, and Telfer and thought there was a kind of flatness in their
+jokes and in their ageing comments on each other. Then he had gone from
+them for his talk with Mary. Half through the night they had talked,
+Sam getting forgiveness for not writing and getting also a long friendly
+lecture on his duty toward Sue. He thought she had in some way missed
+the point. She had seemed to suppose that the loss of the children
+had fallen singly upon Sue. She had not counted upon him, and he had
+depended upon her doing just that. He had come as a boy to his mother
+wanting to talk of himself and she had wept at the thought of the
+childless wife and had told him how to set about making her happy.
+
+“Well, I will set about it,” he thought on the train coming home; “I
+will find for her this new interest and make her less dependent upon me.
+Then I also will take hold anew and work out for myself a programme for
+a way of life.”
+
+One afternoon when he came home from the office he found Sue filled
+indeed with a new idea. With glowing cheeks she sat beside him through
+the evening and talked of the beauties of a life devoted to social
+service.
+
+“I have been thinking things out,” she said, her eyes shining. “We must
+not allow ourselves to become sordid. We must keep to the vision. We
+must together give the best in our lives and our fortunes to mankind.
+We must make ourselves units in the great modern movements for social
+uplift.”
+
+Sam looked at the fire and a chill feeling of doubt ran through him. He
+could not see himself as a unit in anything. His mind did not run out
+toward the thought of being one of the army of philanthropists or rich
+social uplifters he had met talking and explaining in the reading rooms
+of clubs. No answering flame burned in his heart as it had burned
+that evening by the bridle path in Jackson Park when she had expounded
+another idea. But the thought of a need of new interest for her coming
+to him, he turned to her smiling.
+
+“It sounds all right but I know nothing of such things,” he said.
+
+After that evening Sue began to get a hold upon herself. The old fire
+came back into her eyes and she went about the house with a smile
+upon her face and talked through the evenings to her silent, attentive
+husband of the life of usefulness, the full life. One day she told him
+of her election to the presidency of a society for the rescue of fallen
+women, and he began seeing her name in the newspapers in connection with
+various charity and civic movements. At the house a new sort of men
+and women began appearing at the dinner table; a strangely earnest,
+feverish, half fanatical people, Sam thought, with an inclination toward
+corsetless dresses and uncut hair, who talked far into the night and
+worked themselves into a sort of religious zeal over what they called
+their movement. Sam found them likely to run to startling statements,
+noticed that they sat on the edges of their chairs when they talked,
+and was puzzled by their tendency toward making the most revolutionary
+statements without pausing to back them up. When he questioned a
+statement made by one of these people, he came down upon him with a rush
+that quite carried him away and then, turning to the others, looked
+at them wisely like a cat that has swallowed a mouse. “Ask us another
+question if you dare,” their faces seemed to be saying, while their
+tongues declared that they were but students of the great problem of
+right living.
+
+With these new people Sam never made any progress toward real
+understanding and friendship. For a time he tried honestly to get some
+of their own fervent devotions to their ideas and to be impressed by
+what they said of their love of man, even going with them to some of
+their meetings, at one of which he sat among the fallen women gathered
+in, and listened to a speech by Sue.
+
+The speech did not make much of a hit, the fallen women moving
+restlessly about. A large woman, with an immense nose, did better.
+She talked with a swift, contagious zeal that was very stirring, and,
+listening to her, Sam was reminded of the evening when he sat before
+another zealous talker in the church at Caxton and Jim Williams, the
+barber, tried to stampede him into the fold with the lambs. While the
+woman talked a plump little member of the _demi monde_ who sat beside
+Sam wept copiously, but at the end of the speech he could remember
+nothing of what had been said and he wondered if the weeping woman would
+remember.
+
+To express his determination to continue being Sue’s companion and
+partner, Sam during one winter taught a class of young men at a
+settlement house in the factory district of the west side. The class in
+his hands was unsuccessful. He found the young men heavy and stupid with
+fatigue after the day of labour in the shops and more inclined to fall
+asleep in their chairs, or wander away, one at a time, to loaf and
+smoke on a nearby corner, than to stay in the room listening to the man
+reading or talking before them.
+
+When one of the young women workers came into the room, they sat up and
+seemed for the moment interested. Once Sam heard a group of them
+talking of these women workers on a landing in a darkened stairway. The
+experience startled Sam and he dropped the class, admitting to Sue
+his failure and his lack of interest and bowing his head before her
+accusation of a lack of the love of men.
+
+Later by the fire in his own room he tried to draw for himself a moral
+from the experience.
+
+“Why should I love these men?” he asked himself. “They are what I might
+have been. Few of the men I have known have loved me and some of the
+best and cleanest of them have worked vigorously for my defeat. Life is
+a battle in which few men win and many are defeated and in which hate
+and fear play their part with love and generosity. These heavy-featured
+young men are a part of the world as men have made it. Why this protest
+against their fate when we are all of us making more and more of them
+with every turn of the clock?”
+
+During the next year, after the fiasco of the settlement house class,
+Sam found himself drifting more and more rapidly away from Sue and her
+new viewpoint of life. The growing gulf between them showed itself in a
+thousand little household acts and impulses, and every time he looked at
+her he thought her more apart from him and less a part of the real
+life that went on within him. In the old days there had been something
+intimate and familiar in her person and in her presence. She had seemed
+like a part of him, like the room in which he slept or the coat he wore
+on his back, and he had looked into her eyes as thoughtlessly and with
+as little fear of what he might find there as he looked at his own
+hands. Now when his eyes met hers they dropped, and one or the other of
+them began talking hurriedly like a person who has a consciousness of
+something he must conceal.
+
+Down town Sam took up anew his old friendship and intimacy with Jack
+Prince, going with him to clubs and drinking places and often spending
+evenings among the clever, money-wasting young men who laughed and made
+deals and talked their way through life at Jack’s side. Among these
+young men a business associate of Jack’s caught his attention and in a
+few weeks an intimacy had sprung up between Sam and this man.
+
+Maurice Morrison, Sam’s new friend, had been discovered by Jack Prince
+working as a sub-editor on a country daily down the state. There was,
+Sam thought, something of the Caxton dandy, Mike McCarthy, in the man,
+combined with prolonged and fervent, although somewhat periodic attacks
+of industry. In his youth he had written poetry and at one time had
+studied for the ministry, and in Chicago, under Jack Prince, he had
+developed into a money maker and led the life of a talented, rather
+unscrupulous man of the world. He kept a mistress, often overdrank, and
+Sam thought him the most brilliant and convincing talker he had ever
+heard. As Jack Prince’s assistant he had charge of the Rainey Company’s
+large advertising expenditure, and the two men being thrown often
+together a mutual regard grew up between them. Sam believed him to be
+without moral sense; he knew him to be able and honest and he found in
+the association with him a fund of odd little sweetnesses of character
+and action that lent an inexpressible charm to the person of his friend.
+
+It was through Morrison that Sam had his first serious misunderstanding
+with Sue. One evening the brilliant young advertising man dined at the
+McPhersons’. The table, as usual, was filled with Sue’s new friends,
+among them a tall, gaunt man who, with the arrival of the coffee,
+began in a high-pitched, earnest voice to talk of the coming social
+revolution. Sam looked across the table and saw a light dancing in
+Morrison’s eyes. Like a hound unleashed he sprang among Sue’s friends,
+tearing the rich to pieces, calling for the onward advance of the
+masses, quoting odds and ends of Shelley and Carlyle, peering earnestly
+up and down the table, and at the end quite winning the hearts of the
+women by a defence of fallen women that stirred the blood of even his
+friend and host.
+
+Sam was amused and a trifle annoyed. The whole thing was, he knew, no
+more than a piece of downright acting with just the touch of sincerity
+in it that was characteristic of the man but that had no depth or real
+meaning. During the rest of the evening he watched Sue, wondering if she
+too had fathomed Morrison and what she thought of his having taken the
+role of star from the long gaunt man, who had evidently been booked
+for that part and who sat at the table and wandered afterward among the
+guests, annoyed and disconcerted.
+
+Late that night Sue came into his room and found him reading and smoking
+by the fire.
+
+“Cheeky of Morrison, dimming your star,” he said, looking at her and
+laughing apologetically.
+
+Sue looked at him doubtfully.
+
+“I came in to thank you for bringing him,” she said; “I thought him
+splendid.”
+
+Sam looked at her and for a moment was tempted to let the matter pass.
+And then his old inclination to be always open and frank with her
+asserted itself and he closed the book and rising stood looking down at
+her.
+
+“The little beast was guying your crowd,” he said, “but I do not want
+him to guy you. Not that he wouldn’t try. He has the audacity for
+anything.”
+
+A flush arose to her cheeks and her eyes gleamed.
+
+“That is not true, Sam,” she said coldly. “You say that because you are
+becoming hard and cold and cynical. Your friend Morrison talked from his
+heart. It was beautiful. Men like you, who have a strong influence over
+him, may lead him away, but in the end a man like that will come to give
+his life to the service of society. You should help him; not assume an
+attitude of unbelief and laugh at him.”
+
+Sam stood upon the hearth smoking his pipe and looking at her. He was
+thinking how easy it would have been in the first year after their
+marriage to have explained Morrison. Now he felt that he was but making
+a bad matter worse, but went on determined to stick to his policy of
+being entirely honest with her.
+
+“Look here, Sue,” he began quietly, “be a good sport. Morrison was
+joking. I know the man. He is the friend of men like me because he
+wants to be and because it pays him to be. He is a talker, a writer, a
+talented, unscrupulous word-monger. He is making a big salary by
+taking the ideas of men like me and expressing them better than we can
+ourselves. He is a good workman and a generous, open-hearted fellow with
+a lot of nameless charm in him, but a man of convictions he is not. He
+could talk tears into the eyes of your fallen women, but he would be a
+lot more likely to talk good women into their state.”
+
+Sam put a hand upon her shoulder.
+
+“Be sensible and do not be offended,” he went on: “take the fellow for
+what he is and be glad for him. He hurts little and cheers a lot. He
+could make a convincing argument in favour of civilisation’s return to
+cannibalism, but really, you know, he spends most of his time thinking
+and writing of washing machines and ladies’ hats and liver pills, and
+most of his eloquence after all only comes down to ‘Send for catalogue,
+Department K’ in the end.”
+
+Sue’s voice was colourless with passion when she replied.
+
+“This is unbearable. Why did you bring the fellow here?”
+
+Sam sat down and picked up his book. In his impatience he lied to her
+for the first time since their marriage.
+
+“First, because I like him and second, because I wanted to see if
+I couldn’t produce a man who could outsentimentalise your socialist
+friends,” he said quietly.
+
+Sue turned and walked out of the room. In a way the action was final and
+marked the end of understanding between them. Putting down his book
+Sam watched her go and some feeling he had kept for her and that had
+differentiated her from all other women died in him as the door closed
+between them. Throwing the book aside he sprang to his feet and stood
+looking at the door.
+
+“The old goodfellowship appeal is dead,” he thought. “From now on we
+will have to explain and apologise like two strangers. No more taking
+each other for granted.”
+
+Turning out the light he sat again before the fire to think his way
+through the situation that faced him. He had no thought that she would
+return. That last shot of his own had crushed the possibility of that.
+
+The fire was getting low in the grate and he did not renew it. He looked
+past it toward the darkened windows and heard the hum of motor cars
+along the boulevard below. Again he was the boy of Caxton hungrily
+seeking an end in life. The flushed face of the woman in the theatre
+danced before his eyes. He remembered with shame how he had, a few days
+before, stood in a doorway and followed with his eyes the figure of a
+woman who had lifted her eyes to him as they passed in the street. He
+wished that he might go out of the house for a walk with John Telfer and
+have his mind filled with eloquence of the standing corn, or sit at the
+feet of Janet Eberly as she talked of books and of life. He got up and
+turning on the lights began preparing for bed.
+
+“I know what I will do,” he said, “I will go to work. I will do some
+real work and make some more money. That’s the place for me.”
+
+And to work he went, real work, the most sustained and clearly
+thought-out work he had done. For two years he was out of the house at
+dawn for a long bracing walk in the fresh morning air, to be followed
+by eight, ten and even fifteen hours in the office and shops; hours in
+which he drove the Rainey Arms Company’s organisation mercilessly
+and, taking openly every vestige of the management out of the hands
+of Colonel Tom, began the plans for the consolidation of the American
+firearms companies that later put his name on the front pages of the
+newspapers and got him the title of a Captain of Finance.
+
+There is a widespread misunderstanding abroad regarding the motives
+of many of the American millionaires who sprang into prominence and
+affluence in the days of change and sudden bewildering growth that
+followed the close of the Spanish War. They were, many of them, not
+of the brute trader type, but were, instead, men who thought and acted
+quickly and with a daring and audacity impossible to the average mind.
+They wanted power and were, many of them, entirely unscrupulous, but
+for the most part they were men with a fire burning within them, men who
+became what they were because the world offered them no better outlet
+for their vast energies.
+
+Sam McPherson had been untiring and without scruples in the first hard,
+quick struggle to get his head above the great unknown body of men there
+in the city. He had turned aside from money getting when he heard what
+he took to be a call to a better way of life. Now with the fires of
+youth still in him and with the training and discipline that had come
+from two years of reading, of comparative leisure and of thought, he was
+prepared to give the Chicago business world a display of that tremendous
+energy that was to write his name in the industrial history of the city
+as one of the first of the western giants of finance.
+
+Going to Sue, Sam told her frankly of his plans.
+
+“I want a free hand in the handling of your stock in the company,” he
+said. “I cannot lead this new life of yours. It may help and sustain you
+but it gets no hold on me. I want to be myself now and lead my own life
+in my own way. I want to run the company, really run it. I cannot stand
+idly by and let life go past. I am hurting myself and you standing here
+looking on. Also I am in a kind of danger of another kind that I want to
+avoid by throwing myself into hard, constructive work.”
+
+Without question Sue signed the papers he brought her. A flash of her
+old frankness toward him came back.
+
+“I do not blame you, Sam,” she said, smiling bravely. “Things have not
+gone right, as we both know, but if we cannot work together at least let
+us not hurt each other.”
+
+When Sam returned to give himself again to affairs, the country was just
+at the beginning of the great wave of consolidation which was finally
+to sweep all of the financial power of the country into a dozen pairs
+of competent and entirely efficient hands. With the sure instinct of the
+born trader Sam had seen this movement coming and had studied it. Now he
+began to act. Going to that same swarthy-faced lawyer who had drawn
+the contract for him to secure control of the medical student’s twenty
+thousand dollars and who had jokingly invited him to become one of a
+band of train robbers, he told him of his plans to begin working toward
+a consolidation of all the firearms companies of the country.
+
+Webster wasted no time in joking now. He laid out the plans, adjusted
+and readjusted them to suit Sam’s shrewd suggestions, and when a fee was
+mentioned shook his head.
+
+“I want in on this,” he said. “You will need me. I am made for this game
+and have been waiting for a chance to get at it. Just count me in as one
+of the promoters if you will.”
+
+Sam nodded his head. Within a week he had formed a pool of his own
+company’s stock controlling, as he thought, a safe majority and had
+begun working to form a similar pool in the stock of his only big
+western rival.
+
+This last job was not an easy one. Lewis, the Jew, had been making
+constant headway in that company just as Sam had made headway in the
+Rainey Company. He was a money maker, a sales manager of rare ability,
+and, as Sam knew, a planner and executor of business coups of the first
+class.
+
+Sam did not want to deal with Lewis. He had respect for the man’s
+ability in driving sharp bargains and felt that he would like to have
+the whip in his own hands when it came to the point of dealing with him.
+To this end he began visiting bankers and the men who were head of big
+western trust companies in Chicago and St. Louis. He went about his work
+slowly, feeling his way and trying to get at each man by some effective
+appeal, buying the use of vast sums of money by a promise of common
+stock, the bait of a big active bank account, and, here and there, by
+the hint of a directorship in the big new consolidated company.
+
+For a time the project moved slowly; indeed there were weeks and months
+when it did not appear to move at all. Working in secret and with
+extreme caution Sam encountered many discouragements and went home in
+the evening day after day to sit among Sue’s guests with a mind filled
+with his own plans and with an indifferent ear turned to the talk
+of revolution, social unrest, and the new class consciousness of the
+masses, that rattled and crackled up and down his dinner table.
+He thought that it must be trying to Sue. He was so evidently not
+interested in her interests. At the same time he thought that he was
+working toward what he wanted out of life and went to bed at night
+believing that he was finding, and would find, a kind of peace in just
+thinking clearly along one line day after day.
+
+One day Webster, who had wanted to be in on the deal, came to Sam’s
+office and gave his project its first great boost toward success. He,
+like Sam, thought he saw clearly the tendencies of the times, and was
+greedy for the block of common stock that Sam had promised should come
+to him with the completion of the enterprise.
+
+“You are not using me,” he said, sitting down before Sam’s desk. “What
+is blocking the deal?”
+
+Sam began to explain and when he had finished Webster laughed.
+
+“Let’s get at Tom Edwards of the Edward Arms Company direct,” he said,
+and then, leaning over the desk, “Edwards is a vain little peacock and a
+second rate business man,” he declared emphatically. “Get him afraid and
+then flatter his vanity. He has a new wife with blonde hair and big soft
+blue eyes. He wants prominence. He is afraid to venture upon big things
+himself but is hungry for the reputation and gain that comes through big
+deals. Use the method the Jew has used; show him what it means to
+the yellow-haired woman to be the wife of the president of the big
+consolidated Arms Company. THE EDWARDS CONSOLIDATED, eh? Get at Edwards.
+Bluff him and flatter him and he is your man.”
+
+Sam wondered. Edwards was a small grey-haired man of sixty with
+something dry and unresponsive about him. Being a silent man, he had
+created an impression of remarkable shrewdness and ability. After a
+lifetime spent in hard labour and in the practice of the most rigid
+economy he had come up to wealth, and had got into the firearms business
+through Lewis, and it was counted one of the brightest stars in that
+brilliant Hebrew’s crown that he had been able to lead Edwards with him
+in his daring and audacious handling of the company’s affairs.
+
+Sam looked at Webster across the desk and thought of Tom Edwards as the
+figurehead of the firearms trust.
+
+“I was saving the frosting on the cake for my own Tom,” he said; “it was
+a thing I wanted to hand the colonel.”
+
+“Let us see Edwards this evening,” said Webster dryly.
+
+Sam nodded, and late that night made the deal that gave him control of
+the two important western companies and put him in position to move
+on the eastern companies with every prospect of complete success. To
+Edwards he went with an exaggerated report of the support he had
+already got for his project, and having frightened him offered him
+the presidency of the new company and promised that it should be
+incorporated under the name of The Edwards Consolidated Firearms Company
+of America.
+
+The eastern companies fell quickly. With Webster Sam tried on them the
+old dodge of telling each that the other two had agreed to come in, and
+it worked.
+
+With the coming in of Edwards and the options given by the eastern
+companies Sam began to get also the support of the LaSalle Street
+bankers. The firearms trust was one of the few big consolidations
+managed wholly in the west, and after two or three of the bankers had
+agreed to help finance Sam’s plan the others began asking to be taken
+into the underwriting syndicate he and Webster had formed. Within thirty
+days after the closing of the deal with Tom Edwards Sam felt that he was
+ready to act.
+
+For several months Colonel Tom had known something of the plans Sam had
+on foot, and had made no protest. He had in fact given Sam to understand
+that his stock would be voted with Sue’s, controlled by Sam, and with
+the stock of the other directors who knew of and hoped to share in the
+profits of Sam’s deal. The old gunmaker had all of his life believed
+that the other American firearms companies were but shadows destined to
+disappear before the rising sun of the Rainey Company, and thought of
+Sam’s project as an act of providence to further this desirable end.
+
+At the moment of his acquiescence in Webster’s plan, for landing Tom
+Edwards, Sam had a moment of doubt, and now, with the success of his
+project in sight, he began to wonder how the blustering old man would
+look upon Edwards as the titular head of the big company and upon the
+name of Edwards in the title of the company.
+
+For two years Sam had seen little of the colonel, who had given up all
+pretence to an active part in the management of the business and who,
+finding Sue’s new friends disconcerting, seldom appeared at the house,
+living at the clubs, playing billiards all day long, or sitting in the
+club windows boasting to chance listeners of his part in the building of
+the Rainey Arms Company.
+
+With a mind filled with doubt Sam went home and put the matter before
+Sue. She was dressed and ready for an evening at the theatre with a
+party of friends and the talk was brief.
+
+“He will not mind,” she said indifferently. “Go ahead and do what you
+want to do.”
+
+Sam rode back to the office and called his lieutenants about him. He
+felt that the thing might as well be done and over, and with the options
+in his hands, and the ability he thought he had to control his own
+company, he was ready to come out into the open and get the deal cleaned
+up.
+
+The morning papers that carried the story of the proposed big new
+consolidation of firearms companies carried also an almost life-size
+halftone of Colonel Tom Rainey, a slightly smaller one of Tom Edwards,
+and grouped about these, small pictures of Sam, Lewis, Prince, Webster,
+and several of the eastern men. By the size of the half-tone, Sam,
+Prince, and Morrison had tried to reconcile Colonel Tom to Edwards’
+name in the title of the new company and to Edwards’ coming election
+as president. The story also played up the past glories of the Rainey
+Company and its directing genius, Colonel Tom. One phrase, written by
+Morrison, brought a smile to Sam’s lips.
+
+“This grand old patriarch of American business, retired now from active
+service, is like a tired giant, who, having raised a brood of young
+giants, goes into his castle to rest and reflect and to count the scars
+won in many a hard-fought battle.”
+
+Morrison laughed as he read it aloud.
+
+“It ought to get the colonel,” he said, “but the newspaper man who
+prints it should be hung.”
+
+“They will print it all right,” said Jack Prince.
+
+And they did print it; going from newspaper office to newspaper office
+Prince and Morrison saw to that, using their influence as big buyers
+of advertising space and even insisting upon reading proof on their own
+masterpiece.
+
+But it did not work. Early the next morning Colonel Tom appeared at the
+offices of the arms company with blood in his eye, and swore that the
+consolidation should not be put through. For an hour he stormed up
+and down in Sam’s office, his outbursts of wrath varied by periods
+of childlike pleading for the retention of the name and glory of the
+Raineys. When Sam shook his head and went with the old man to the
+meeting that was to pass upon his action and sell the Rainey Company, he
+knew that he had a fight on his hands.
+
+The meeting was a stormy one. Sam made a talk telling what had been
+done and Webster, voting some of Sam’s proxies, made a motion that Sam’s
+offer for the old company be accepted.
+
+And then Colonel Tom fired his guns. Walking up and down in the room
+before the men, sitting at a long table or in chairs tilted against the
+walls, he began talking with all of his old flamboyant pomposity of the
+past glories of the Rainey Company. Sam watched him quietly thinking of
+the exhibition as something detached and apart from the business of the
+meeting. He remembered a question that had come into his head when he
+was a schoolboy and had got his first peep into a school history. There
+had been a picture of Indians at the war dance and he had wondered why
+they danced before rather than after battle. Now his mind answered the
+question.
+
+“If they had not danced before they might never have got the chance,” he
+thought, and smiled to himself.
+
+“I call upon you men here to stick to the old colours,” roared the
+colonel, turning and making a direct attack upon Sam. “Do not let this
+ungrateful upstart, this son of a drunken village housepainter, that I
+picked up from among the cabbages of South Water Street, win you away
+from your loyalty to the old leader. Do not let him steal by trickery
+what we have won only by years of effort.”
+
+The colonel, leaning on the table, glared about the room. Sam felt
+relieved and glad of the direct attack.
+
+“It justifies what I am going to do,” he thought.
+
+When Colonel Tom had finished Sam gave a careless glance at the old
+man’s red face and trembling fingers. He had no doubt that the outburst
+of eloquence had fallen upon deaf ears and without comment put Webster’s
+motion to the vote.
+
+To his surprise two of the new employé directors voted their stock with
+Colonel Tom’s, and a third man, voting his own stock as well as that of
+a wealthy southside real estate man, did not vote. On a count the stock
+represented stood deadlocked and Sam, looking down the table, raised his
+eyebrows to Webster.
+
+“Move we adjourn for twenty-four hours,” snapped Webster, and the motion
+carried.
+
+Sam looked at a paper lying before him on the table. During the count
+of the vote he had been writing over and over on the sheet of paper this
+sentence.
+
+“The best men spend their lives seeking truth.”
+
+Colonel Tom walked out of the room like a conqueror, declining to speak
+to Sam as he passed, and Sam looked down the table at Webster and made a
+motion with his head toward the man who had not voted.
+
+Within an hour Sam’s fight was won. Pouncing upon the man representing
+the stock of the south-side investor, he and Webster did not go out of
+the room until they had secured absolute control of the Rainey Company
+and the man who had refused to vote had put twenty-five thousand dollars
+into his pocket. The two employeé directors Sam marked for slaughter.
+Then after spending the afternoon and early evening with the
+representatives of the eastern companies and their attorneys he drove
+home to Sue.
+
+It was past nine o’clock when his car stopped before the house and,
+going at once to his room, he found Sue sitting before his fire, her
+arms thrown above her head and her eyes staring at the burning coals.
+
+As Sam stood in the doorway looking at her a wave of resentment swept
+over him.
+
+“The old coward,” he thought, “he has brought our fight here to her.”
+
+Hanging up his coat he filled his pipe and drawing up a chair sat beside
+her. For five minutes Sue sat staring into the fire. When she spoke
+there was a touch of hardness in her voice.
+
+“When everything is said, Sam, you do owe a lot to father,” she
+observed, refusing to look at him.
+
+Sam said nothing and she went on.
+
+“Not that I think we made you, father and I. You are not the kind of man
+that people make or unmake. But, Sam, Sam, think what you are doing. He
+has always been a fool in your hands. He used to come home here when you
+were new with the company and talk of what he was doing. He had a whole
+new set of ideas and phrases; all that about waste and efficiency and
+orderly working toward a definite end. It did not fool me. I knew the
+ideas, and even the phrases he used to express them, were not his and
+I was not long finding out they were yours, that it was simply you
+expressing yourself through him. He is a big helpless child, Sam, and
+he is old. He hasn’t much longer to live. Do not be hard, Sam. Be
+merciful.”
+
+Her voice did not tremble but tears ran down her rigid face and her
+expressive hands clutched at her dress.
+
+“Can nothing change you? Must you always have your own way?” she added,
+still refusing to look at him.
+
+“It is not true, Sue, that I always want my own way, and people do
+change me; you have changed me,” he said.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“No, I have not changed you. I found you hungry for something and you
+thought I could feed it. I gave you an idea that you took hold of and
+made your own. I do not know where I got it, from some book or hearing
+some one talk, I suppose. But it belonged to you. You built it and
+fostered it in me and coloured it with your own personality. It is your
+idea to-day. It means more to you than all this firearms trust that the
+papers are full of.”
+
+She turned to look at him, and put out her hand and laid it in his.
+
+“I have not been brave,” she said. “I am standing in your way. I have
+had a hope that we would get back to each other. I should have freed you
+but I hadn’t the courage, I hadn’t the courage. I could not give up the
+dream that some day you would really take me back to you.”
+
+Getting out of her chair she dropped to her knees and putting her head
+in his lap, shook with sobs. Sam sat stroking her hair. Her agitation
+was so great that her muscular little back shook with it.
+
+Sam looked past her at the fire and tried to think clearly. He was not
+greatly moved by her agitation, but with all his heart he wanted to
+think things out and get at the right and the honest thing to do.
+
+“It is a time of big things,” he said slowly and with an air of one
+explaining to a child. “As your socialists say, vast changes are going
+on. I do not believe that your socialists really sense what these
+changes mean, and I am not sure that I do or that any man does, but
+I know they mean something big and I want to be in them and a part of
+them; all big men do; they are struggling like chicks in the shell. Why,
+look here! What I am doing has to be done and if I do not do it another
+man will. The colonel has to go. He will be swept aside. He belongs to
+something old and outworn. Your socialists, I believe, call it the age
+of competition.”
+
+“But not by us, not by you, Sam,” she plead. “After all, he is my
+father.”
+
+A stern look came into Sam’s eyes.
+
+“It does not ring right, Sue,” he said coldly; “fathers do not mean much
+to me. I choked my own father and threw him into the street when I was
+only a boy. You knew about that. You heard of it when you went to find
+out about me that time in Caxton. Mary Underwood told you. I did it
+because he lied and believed in lies. Do not your friends say that the
+individual who stands in the way should be crushed?”
+
+She sprang to her feet and stood before him.
+
+“Do not quote that crowd,” she burst out. “They are not the real thing.
+Do you suppose I do not know that? Do I not know that they come here
+because they hope to get hold of you? Haven’t I watched them and seen
+the look on their faces when you have not come or have not listened to
+their talk? They are afraid of you, all of them. That’s why they talk so
+bitterly. They are afraid and ashamed that they are afraid.”
+
+“Like the workers in the shop?” he asked, musingly.
+
+“Yes, like that, and like me since I failed in my part of our lives and
+had not the courage to get out of the way. You are worth all of us and
+for all our talk we shall never succeed or begin to succeed until we
+make men like you want what we want. They know that and I know it.”
+
+“And what do you want?”
+
+“I want you to be big and generous. You can be. Failure cannot hurt you.
+You and men like you can do anything. You can even fail. I cannot. None
+of us can. I cannot put my father to that shame. I want you to accept
+failure.”
+
+Sam got up and taking her by the arm led her to the door. At the door he
+turned her about and kissed her on the lips like a lover.
+
+“All right, Sue girl, I will do it,” he said, and pushed her through the
+door. “Now let me sit down by myself and think things out.”
+
+It was a night in September and a whisper of the coming frost was in the
+air. He threw up the window and took long breaths of the sharp air and
+listened to the rumble of the elevated road in the distance. Looking
+up the boulevard he saw the lights of the cyclists making a glistening
+stream that flowed past the house. A thought of his new motor car and
+of all of the wonder of the mechanical progress of the world ran through
+his mind.
+
+“The men who make machines do not hesitate,” he said to himself; “even
+though a thousand fat-hearted men stood in their way they would go on.”
+
+A line of Tennyson’s came into his mind.
+
+“And the nation’s airy navies grappling in the central blue,” he quoted,
+thinking of an article he had read predicting the coming of airships.
+
+He thought of the lives of the workers in steel and iron and of the
+things they had done and would do.
+
+“They have,” he thought, “freedom. Steel and iron do not run home to
+carry the struggle to women sitting by the fire.”
+
+He walked up and down the room.
+
+“Fat old coward. Damned fat old coward,” he muttered over and over to
+himself.
+
+It was past midnight when he got into bed and began trying to quiet
+himself for sleep. In his dreams he saw a fat man with a chorus girl
+hanging to his arm kicking his head about a bridge above a swiftly
+flowing stream.
+
+When he got down to the breakfast room the next morning Sue had gone. By
+his plate he found a note saying that she had gone for Colonel Tom
+and would take him to the country for the day. He walked to the office
+thinking of the incapable old man who, in the name of sentiment, had
+beaten him in what he thought the big enterprise of his life.
+
+At his desk he found a message from Webster. “The old turkey cock has
+fled,” it said; “we should have saved the twenty-five thousand.”
+
+On the phone Webster told Sam of an early visit to the club to see
+Colonel Tom and that the old man had left the city, going to the country
+for the day. It was on Sam’s lips to tell of his changed plans but he
+hesitated.
+
+“I will see you at your office in an hour,” he said.
+
+Outside again in the open air Sam walked and thought of his promise.
+Down by the lake he went to where the railroad with the lake beyond
+stopped him. Upon the old wooden bridge looking over the track and down
+to the water he stood as he had stood at other crises in his life and
+thought over the struggle of the night before. In the clear morning air,
+with the roar of the city behind him and the still waters of the lake
+in front, the tears, and the talk with Sue seemed but a part of the
+ridiculous and sentimental attitude of her father, and the promise given
+her insignificant and unfairly won. He reviewed the scene carefully, the
+talk and the tears and the promise given as he led her to the door. It
+all seemed far away and unreal like some promise made to a girl in his
+boyhood.
+
+“It was never a part of all this,” he said, turning and looking at the
+towering city before him.
+
+For an hour he stood on the wooden bridge. He thought of Windy McPherson
+putting the bugle to his lips in the streets of Caxton and again there
+sounded in his ears the roaring laugh of the crowd; again he lay in the
+bed beside Colonel Tom in that northern city and saw the moon rising
+over the round paunch and heard the empty chattering talk of love.
+
+“Love,” he said, still looking toward the city, “is a matter of truth,
+not lies and pretence.”
+
+Suddenly it seemed to him that if he went forward truthfully he should
+get even Sue back again some time. His mind lingered over the thoughts
+of the loves that come to a man in the world, of Sue in the wind-swept
+northern woods and of Janet in her wheel-chair in the little room where
+the cable cars ran rumbling under the window. And he thought of other
+things, of Sue reading papers culled out of books before the fallen
+women in the little State Street hall, of Tom Edwards with his new wife
+and his little watery eyes, of Morrison and the long-fingered socialist
+fighting over words at his table. And then pulling on his gloves he
+lighted a cigar and went back through the crowded streets to his office
+to do the thing he had determined on.
+
+At the meeting that afternoon the project went through without a
+dissenting voice. Colonel Tom being absent, the two employé directors
+voted with Sam with almost panicky haste as Sam looking across at the
+well-dressed, cool-headed Webster, laughed and lighted a fresh cigar.
+And then he voted the stock Sue had intrusted to him for the project,
+feeling that in doing so he was cutting, perhaps for all time, the knot
+that bound them.
+
+With the completion of the deal Sam stood to win five million dollars,
+more money than Colonel Tom or any of the Raineys had ever controlled,
+and had placed himself in the eyes of the business men of Chicago and
+New York where before he had placed himself in the eyes of Caxton and
+South Water Street. Instead of another Windy McPherson failing to blow
+his bugle before the waiting crowd, he was still the man who made good,
+the man who achieved, the kind of man of whom America boasts before the
+world.
+
+He did not see Sue again. When the news of his betrayal reached her she
+went off east taking Colonel Tom with her, and Sam closed the house,
+even sending a man there for his clothes. To her eastern address, got
+from her attorney, he wrote a brief note offering to make over to her or
+to Colonel Tom his entire winnings from the deal and closed it with the
+brutal declaration, “At the end I could not be an ass, even for you.”
+
+To this note Sam got a cold, brief reply telling him to dispose of her
+stock in the company and of that belonging to Colonel Tom, and naming an
+eastern trust company to receive the money. With Colonel Tom’s help she
+had made a careful estimate of the values of their holdings at the
+time of consolidation and refused flatly to accept a penny beyond that
+amount.
+
+Sam felt that another chapter of his life was closed. Webster, Edwards,
+Prince, and the eastern men met and elected him chairman of the board of
+directors of the new company and the public bought eagerly the river
+of common stock he turned upon the market, Prince and Morrison doing
+masterful work in the moulding of public opinion through the press. The
+first board meeting ended with a dinner at which wine flowed in rivulets
+and Edwards, getting drunk, stood up at his place and boasted of the
+beauty of his young wife. And Sam, at his desk in his new offices in the
+Rookery, settled down grimly to the playing of his role as one of the
+new kings of American business.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The story of Sam’s life there in Chicago for the next several years
+ceases to be the story of a man and becomes the story of a type, a
+crowd, a gang. What he and the group of men surrounding him and making
+money with him did in Chicago, other men and other groups of men have
+done in New York, in Paris, in London. Coming into power with the
+great expansive wave of prosperity that attended the first McKinley
+administration, these men went mad of money making. They played
+with great industrial institutions and railroad systems like excited
+children, and a man of Chicago won the notice and something of the
+admiration of the world by his willingness to bet a million dollars on
+the turn of the weather. In the years of criticism and readjustment that
+followed this period of sporadic growth, writers have told with great
+clearness how the thing was done, and some of the participants, captains
+of industry turned penmen, Caesars become ink-slingers, have bruited the
+story to an admiring world.
+
+Given the time, the inclination, the power of the press, and the
+unscrupulousness, the thing that Sam McPherson and his followers did in
+Chicago in not difficult. Advised by Webster and the talented Prince
+and Morrison to handle his publicity work, he rapidly unloaded his huge
+holdings of common stock upon an eager public, keeping for himself the
+bonds which he hypothecated at the banks to increase his working capital
+while continuing to control the company. When the common stock was
+unloaded, he, with a group of fellow spirits, began an attack upon it
+through the stock market and in the press, and bought it again at a
+low figure, holding it ready to unload when the public should have
+forgotten.
+
+The annual advertising expenditure of the firearms trust ran into
+millions and Sam’s hold upon the press of the country was almost
+unbelievably strong. Morrison rapidly developed unusual daring and
+audacity in using this instrument and making it serve Sam’s ends. He
+suppressed facts, created illusions, and used the newspapers as a whip
+to crack at the heels of congressmen, senators, and legislators, of the
+various states, when such matters as appropriation for firearms came
+before them.
+
+And Sam, who had undertaken the consolidation of the firearms companies,
+having a dream of himself as a great master in that field, a sort of
+American Krupp, rapidly awoke from the dream to take the bigger chances
+for gain in the world of speculation. Within a year he dropped Edwards
+as head of the firearms trust and in his place put Lewis, with Morrison
+as secretary and manager of sales. Guided by Sam these two, like the
+little drygoods merchant of the old Rainey Company, went from capital
+to capital and from city to city making contracts, influencing news,
+placing advertising contracts where they would do the most good, fixing
+men.
+
+And in the meantime Sam, with Webster, a banker named Crofts who had
+profited largely in the firearms merger, and sometimes Morrison or
+Prince, began a series of stock raids, speculations, and manipulations
+that attracted country-wide attention, and became known to the newspaper
+reading world as the McPherson Chicago crowd. They were in oil,
+railroads, coal, western land, mining, timber, and street railways. One
+summer Sam, with Prince, built, ran to a profit, and sold to advantage
+a huge amusement park. Through his head day after day marched columns
+of figures, ideas, schemes, more and more spectacular opportunities
+for gain. Some of the enterprises in which he engaged, while because of
+their size they seemed more dignified, were of reality of a type with
+the game smuggling of his South Water Street days, and in all of his
+operations it was his old instinct for bargains and for the finding of
+buyers together with Webster’s ability for carrying through questionable
+deals that made him and his followers almost constantly successful in
+the face of opposition from the more conservative business and financial
+men of the city.
+
+Again Sam led a new life, owning running horses at the tracks,
+memberships in many clubs, a country house in Wisconsin, and shooting
+preserves in Texas. He drank steadily, played poker for big stakes, kept
+in the public prints, and day after day led his crew upon the high seas
+of finance. He did not dare think and in his heart he was sick of it.
+Sick to the soul, so that when thought came to him he got out of his bed
+to seek roistering companions or, getting pen and paper, sat for hours
+figuring out new and more daring schemes for money making. The great
+forward movement in modern industry of which he had dreamed of being a
+part had for him turned out to be a huge meaningless gamble with loaded
+dice against a credulous public. With his followers he went on day after
+day doing deeds without thought. Industries were organised and launched,
+men employed and thrown out of employment, towns wrecked by the
+destruction of an industry and other towns made by the building of other
+industries. At a whim of his a thousand men began building a city on an
+Indiana sand hill, and at a wave of his hand another thousand men of an
+Indiana town sold their homes, with the chicken houses in the back-yards
+and vines trained by the kitchen doors, and rushed to buy sections
+of the hill plotted off for them. He did not stop to discuss with his
+followers the meaning of the things he did. He told them of the profits
+to be made and then, having done the thing, he went with them to drink
+in bar rooms and to spend the evening or afternoon singing songs,
+visiting his stable of runners or, more often, sitting silently about
+the card table playing for high stakes. Making millions through the
+manipulation of the public during the day, he sometimes sat half the
+night struggling with his companions for the possession of thousands.
+
+Lewis, the Jew, the only one of Sam’s companions who had not followed
+him in his spectacular money making, stayed in the office of the
+firearms company and ran it like the scientific able man of business he
+was. While Sam remained chairman of the board of the company and had an
+office, a desk, and the name of leadership there, he let Lewis run the
+place, and spent his own time upon the stock exchange or in some corner
+with Webster and Crofts planning some new money making raid.
+
+“You have the better of it, Lewis,” he said one day in a reflective
+mood; “you thought I had cut the ground from under you when I got Tom
+Edwards, but I only set you more firmly in a larger place.”
+
+He made a movement with his hand toward the large general offices with
+the rows of busy clerks and the substantial look of work being done.
+
+“I might have had the work you are doing. I planned and schemed with
+that end in view,” he added, lighting a cigar and going out at the door.
+
+“And the money hunger got you,” laughed Lewis, looking after him, “the
+hunger that gets Jews and Gentiles and all who feed it.”
+
+One might have come upon the McPherson Chicago crowd about the old
+Chicago stock exchange on any day during those years, Crofts, tall,
+abrupt, and dogmatic; Morrison, slender, dandified, and gracious;
+Webster, well-dressed, suave, gentlemanly, and Sam, silent, restless,
+and often morose and ugly. Sometimes it seemed to Sam that they were
+all unreal, himself and the men with him. He watched his companions
+cunningly. They were constantly posing before the passing crowd of
+brokers and small speculators. Webster, coming up to him on the floor of
+the exchange, would tell him of a snowstorm raging outside with the air
+of a man parting with a long-cherished secret. His companions went from
+one to the other vowing eternal friendships, and then, keeping spies
+upon each other, they hurried to Sam with tales of secret betrayals.
+Into any deal proposed by him they went eagerly, although sometimes
+fearfully, and almost always they won. And with Sam they made millions
+through the manipulation of the firearms company, and the Chicago and
+Northern Lake Railroad which he controlled.
+
+In later years Sam looked back upon it all as a kind of nightmare. It
+seemed to him that never during that period had he lived or thought
+sanely. The great financial leaders that he saw were not, he thought,
+great men. Some of them, like Webster, were masters of craft, or, like
+Morrison, of words, but for the most part they were but shrewd, greedy
+vultures feeding upon the public or upon each other.
+
+In the meantime Sam was rapidly degenerating. His paunch became
+distended, and his hands trembled in the morning. Being a man of
+strong appetites, and having a determination to avoid women, he almost
+constantly overdrank and overate, and in the leisure hours that came to
+him he hurried eagerly from place to place, avoiding thought, avoiding
+sane quiet talk, avoiding himself.
+
+All of his companions did not suffer equally. Webster seemed made for
+the life, thriving and expanding under it, putting his winnings steadily
+aside, going on Sunday to a suburban church, avoiding the publicity
+connecting his name with race horses and big sporting events that Crofts
+sought and to which Sam submitted. One day Sam and Crofts caught him in
+an effort to sell them out to a group of New York bankers in a mining
+deal and turned the trick on him instead, whereupon he went off to New
+York to become a respectable big business man and the friend of senators
+and philanthropists.
+
+Crofts was a man with chronic domestic troubles, one of those men who
+begin each day by cursing their wives before their associates and yet
+continue living with them year after year. There was a kind of rough
+squareness in the man, and after the completion of a successful deal
+he would be as happy as a boy, pounding men on the back, shaking with
+laughter, throwing money about, making crude jokes. After Sam left
+Chicago he finally divorced his wife and married an actress from the
+vaudeville stage and after losing two-thirds of his fortune in an effort
+to capture control of a southern railroad, went to England and, coached
+by the actress wife, developed into an English country gentleman.
+
+And Sam was a man sick. Day after day he went on drinking more and more
+heavily, playing for bigger and bigger stakes, allowing himself less
+and less thought of himself. One day he received a long letter from John
+Telfer telling of the sudden death of Mary Underwood and berating him
+for his neglect of her.
+
+“She was ill for a year and without an income,” wrote Telfer. Sam
+noticed that the man’s hand had begun to tremble. “She lied to me and
+told me you had sent her money, but now that she is dead I find that
+though she wrote you she got no answer. Her old aunt told me.”
+
+Sam put the letter into his pocket and going into one of his clubs began
+drinking with a crowd of men he found idling there. He had paid little
+attention to his correspondence for months. No doubt the letter from
+Mary had been received by his secretary and thrown aside with the
+letters of thousands of other women, begging letters, amorous letters,
+letters directed at him because of his wealth and the prominence given
+his exploits by the newspapers.
+
+After wiring an explanation and mailing a check the size of which filled
+John Telfer with admiration, Sam with a half dozen fellow roisterers
+spent the late afternoon and evening going from saloon to saloon through
+the south side. When he got to his apartments late that night, his head
+was reeling and his mind filled with distorted memories of drinking men
+and women and of himself standing on a table in some obscure drinking
+place and calling upon the shouting, laughing hangers-on of his crowd of
+rich money spenders to think and to work and to seek Truth.
+
+He went to sleep in his chair, his mind filled with the dancing faces of
+dead women, Mary Underwood and Janet and Sue, tear-stained faces calling
+to him. When he awoke and shaved he went out into the street and to
+another down-town club.
+
+“I wonder if Sue is dead, too,” he muttered, remembering his dream.
+
+At the club he was called to the telephone by Lewis, who asked him to
+come at once to his office at the Edwards Consolidated. When he
+got there he found a wire from Sue. In a moment of loneliness and
+despondency over the loss of his old business standing and reputation,
+Colonel Tom had shot himself in a New York hotel.
+
+Sam sat at his desk, fingering the yellow paper lying before him and
+fighting to get his head clear.
+
+“The old coward. The damned old coward,” he muttered; “any one could
+have done that.”
+
+When Lewis came into Sam’s office he found his chief sitting at his desk
+fingering the telegram and muttering to himself. When Sam handed him the
+wire he came around and stood beside Sam, his hand upon his shoulder.
+
+“Well, do not blame yourself for that,” he said, with quick
+understanding.
+
+“I don’t,” Sam muttered; “I do not blame myself for anything. I am a
+result, not a cause. I am trying to think. I am not through yet. I am
+going to begin again when I get things thought out.”
+
+Lewis went out of the room leaving him to his thoughts. For an hour
+he sat there reviewing his life. When he came to the day that he had
+humiliated Colonel Tom, there came back to his mind the sentence he had
+written on the sheet of paper while the vote was being counted. “The
+best men spend their lives seeking truth.”
+
+Suddenly he came to a decision and, calling Lewis, began laying out a
+plan of action. His head cleared and the ring came back into his
+voice. To Lewis he gave an option on his entire holdings of Edwards
+Consolidated stocks and bonds and to him also he entrusted the clearing
+up of deal after deal in which he was interested. Then, calling a
+broker, he began throwing a mass of stock on the market. When Lewis told
+him that Crofts was ‘phoning wildly about town to find him, and was with
+the help of another banker supporting the market and taking Sam’s stocks
+as fast as offered, he laughed and giving Lewis instructions regarding
+the disposal of his monies walked out of the office, again a free man
+and again seeking the answer to his problem.
+
+He made no attempt to answer Sue’s wire. He was restless to get at
+something he had in his mind. He went to his apartments and packed a bag
+and from there disappeared saying goodbye to no one. In his mind was no
+definite idea of where he was going or what he was going to do. He knew
+only that he would follow the message his hand had written. He would try
+to spend his life seeking truth.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+One day when the youth Sam McPherson was new in the city he went on a
+Sunday afternoon to a down-town theatre to hear a sermon. The sermon was
+delivered by a small dark-skinned Boston man, and seemed to the young
+McPherson scholarly and well thought out.
+
+“The greatest man is he whose deeds affect the greatest number of
+lives,” the speaker had said, and the thought had stuck in Sam’s mind.
+Now walking along the street carrying his travelling bag, he remembered
+the sermon and the thought and shook his head in doubt.
+
+“What I have done here in this city must have affected thousands of
+lives,” he mused, and felt a quickening of his blood at just letting go
+of his thoughts as he had not dared do since that day when, by breaking
+his word to Sue, he had started on his career as a business giant.
+
+He began to think of the quest on which he had started and had keen
+satisfaction in the thought of what he should do.
+
+“I will begin all over and come up to Truth through work,” he told
+himself. “I will leave the money hunger behind me, and if it returns I
+will come back here to Chicago and see my fortune piled up and the men
+rushing about the banks and the stock exchange and the court they pay to
+such fools and brutes as I have been, and that will cure me.”
+
+Into the Illinois Central Station he went, a strange spectacle. A
+smile came to his lips as he sat on a bench along the wall between an
+immigrant from Russia and a small plump farmer’s wife who held a banana
+in her hand and gave bites of it to a rosy-cheeked babe lying in her
+arms. He, an American multimillionaire, a man in the midst of his
+money-making, one who had realised the American dream, to have sickened
+at the feast and to have wandered out of a fashionable club with a bag
+in his hand and a roll of bills in his pocket and to have come on this
+strange quest--to seek Truth, to seek God. A few years of the fast
+greedy living in the city, that had seemed so splendid to the Iowa boy
+and to the men and women who had lived in his town, and then a woman had
+died lonely and in want in that Iowa town, and half across the continent
+a fat blustering old man had shot himself in a New York hotel, and here
+he sat.
+
+Leaving his bag in the care of the farmer’s wife, he walked across the
+room to the ticket window and standing there watched the people with
+definite destinations in mind come up, lay down money, and taking their
+tickets go briskly away. He had no fear of being known. Although his
+name and his picture had been upon the front pages of Chicago newspapers
+for years, he felt so great a change within himself from just the
+resolution he had taken that he had no doubt of passing unnoticed.
+
+A thought struck him. Looking up and down the long room filled with
+its strangely assorted clusters of men and women a sense of the great
+toiling masses of people, the labourers, the small merchants, the
+skilled mechanics, came over him.
+
+“These are the Americans,” he began telling himself, “these people with
+children beside them and with hard daily work to be done, and many
+of them with stunted or imperfectly developed bodies, not Crofts, not
+Morrison and I, but these others who toil without hope of luxury and
+wealth, who make up the armies in times of war and raise up boys and
+girls to do the work of the world in their turn.”
+
+He fell into the line moving toward the ticket window behind a
+sturdy-looking old man who carried a box of carpenter tools in one hand
+and a bag in the other, and bought a ticket to the same Illinois town to
+which the old man was bound.
+
+In the train he sat beside the old man and the two fell into quiet
+talk--the old man talking of his family. He had a son, married and
+living in the Illinois town to which he was going, of whom he began
+boasting. The son, he said, had gone to that town and had prospered
+there, owning a hotel which his wife managed while he worked as a
+builder.
+
+“Ed,” he said, “keeps fifty or sixty men going all summer. He has sent
+for me to come and take charge of a gang. He knows well enough I will
+get the work out of them.”
+
+From Ed the old man drifted into talk of himself and his life, telling
+bare facts with directness and simplicity and making no effort to
+disguise a slight turn of vanity in his success.
+
+“I have raised seven sons and made them all good workmen and they are
+all doing well,” he said.
+
+He told of each in detail. One, who had taken to books, was a mechanical
+engineer in a manufacturing town in New England. The mother of his
+children had died the year before and of his three daughters two had
+married mechanics. The third, Sam gathered, had not done well and from
+something the old man said he thought she had perhaps gone the wrong way
+there in Chicago.
+
+To the old man Sam talked of God and of a man’s effort to get truth out
+of life.
+
+“I have thought of it a lot,” he said.
+
+The old man was interested. He looked at Sam and then out at the car
+window and began talking of his own beliefs, the substance of which Sam
+could not get.
+
+“God is a spirit and lives in the growing corn,” said the old man,
+pointing out the window at the passing fields.
+
+He began talking of churches and of ministers, against whom he was
+filled with bitterness.
+
+“They are dodgers. They do not get at things. They are damned dodgers,
+pretending to be good,” he declared.
+
+Sam talked of himself, saying that he was alone in the world and had
+money. He said that he wanted work in the open air, not for the money it
+would bring him, but because his paunch was large and his hand trembled
+in the morning.
+
+“I’ve been drinking,” he said, “and I want to work hard day after day so
+that my muscles may become firm and sleep come to me at night.”
+
+The old man thought that his son could find Sam a place.
+
+“He’s a driver--Ed is,” he said, laughing, “and he won’t pay you much.
+Ed don’t let go of money. He’s a tight one.”
+
+Night had come when they reached the town where Ed lived, and the three
+men walked over a bridge, beneath which roared a waterfall, toward the
+long poorly-lighted main street of the town and Ed’s hotel. Ed, a young,
+broad-shouldered man, with a dry cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth,
+led the way. He had engaged Sam standing in the darkness on the station
+platform, accepting his story without comment.
+
+“I’ll let you carry timbers and drive nails,” he said, “that will harden
+you up.”
+
+On the way over the bridge he talked of the town.
+
+“It’s a live place,” he said, “we are getting people in here.”
+
+“Look at that!” he exclaimed, chewing at the cigar and pointing to the
+waterfall that foamed and roared almost under the bridge. “There’s a lot
+of power there and where there’s power there will be a city.”
+
+At Ed’s hotel some twenty men sat about a long low office. They were,
+for the most part, middle-aged working men and sat in silence reading
+and smoking pipes. At a table pushed against the wall a bald-headed
+young man with a scar on his cheek played solitaire with a greasy pack
+of cards, and in front of him and sitting in a chair tilted against the
+wall a sullen-faced boy idly watched the game. When the three men came
+into the office the boy dropped his chair to the floor and stared at Ed
+who stared back at him. It was as though a contest of some sort went on
+between them. A tall neatly-dressed woman, with a brisk manner and pale,
+inexpressive, hard blue eyes, stood back of a little combined desk and
+cigar case at the end of the room, and as the three walked toward her
+she looked from Ed to the sullen-faced boy and then again at Ed. Sam
+concluded she was a woman bent on having her own way. She had that air.
+
+“This is my wife,” said Ed, introducing Sam with a wave of his hand and
+passing around the end of the desk to stand by her side.
+
+Ed’s wife twirled the hotel register about facing Sam, nodded her head,
+and then, leaning over the desk, bestowed a quick kiss upon the leathery
+cheek of the old carpenter.
+
+Sam and the old man found a place in chairs along the wall and sat down
+among the silent men. The old man pointed to the boy in the chair beside
+the card players.
+
+“Their son,” he whispered cautiously.
+
+The boy looked at his mother, who in turn looked steadily at him, and
+got up from his chair. Back of the desk Ed talked in low tones to his
+wife. The boy, stopping before Sam and the old man and still looking
+toward the woman, put out his hand which the old man took. Then, without
+speaking, he went past the desk and through a doorway, and began noisily
+climbing a flight of stairs, followed by his mother. As they climbed
+they berated each other, their voices rising to a high pitch and echoing
+through the upper part of the house.
+
+Ed, coming across to them, talked to Sam about the assignment of a room,
+and the men began looking at the stranger; noting his fine clothes,
+their eyes filled with curiosity.
+
+“Selling something?” asked a large red-haired young man, rolling a quid
+of tobacco in his mouth.
+
+“No,” replied Sam shortly, “going to work for Ed.”
+
+The silent men in chairs along the wall dropped their newspapers and
+stared, and the bald-headed young man at the table sat with open mouth,
+a card held suspended in the air. Sam had become, for the moment, a
+centre of interest and the men stirred in their chairs and began to
+whisper and point to him.
+
+A large, watery-eyed man, with florid cheeks, clad in a long overcoat
+with spots down the front, came in at the door and passed through the
+room bowing and smiling to the men. Taking Ed by the arm he disappeared
+into a little barroom, where Sam could hear him talking in low tones.
+
+After a little while the florid-faced man came and put his head through
+the barroom door into the office.
+
+“Come on, boys,” he said, smiling and nodding right and left, “the
+drinks are on me.”
+
+The men got up and filed into the bar, the old man and Sam remaining
+seated in their chairs. They began talking in undertones.
+
+“I’ll start ‘em thinking--these men,” said the old man.
+
+From his pocket he took a pamphlet and gave it to Sam. It was a crudely
+written attack upon rich men and corporations.
+
+“Some brains in the fellow who wrote that,” said the old carpenter,
+rubbing his hands together and smiling.
+
+Sam did not think so. He sat reading it and listening to the loud,
+boisterous voices of the men in the barroom. The florid-faced man was
+explaining the details of a proposed town bond issue. Sam gathered that
+the water power in the river was to be developed.
+
+“We want to make this a live town,” said the voice of Ed, earnestly.
+
+The old man, leaning over and putting his hand beside his mouth, began
+whispering to Sam.
+
+“I’ll bet there is a capitalist deal back of that power scheme,” he
+said.
+
+He nodded his head up and down and smiled knowingly.
+
+“If there is Ed will be in on it,” he added. “You can’t lose Ed. He’s a
+slick one.”
+
+He took the pamphlet from Sam’s hand and put it in his pocket.
+
+“I’m a socialist,” he explained, “but don’t say anything. Ed’s against
+‘em.”
+
+The men filed back into the room, each with a freshly-lighted cigar in
+his mouth, and the florid-faced man followed them and went out at the
+office door.
+
+“Well, so long, boys,” he shouted heartily.
+
+Ed went silently up the stairs to join the mother and boy, whose voices
+could still be heard raised in outbursts of wrath from above as the men
+took their former chairs along the wall.
+
+“Well, Bill’s sure all right,” said the red-haired young man, evidently
+expressing the opinion of the men in regard to the florid-faced man.
+
+A small bent old man with sunken cheeks got up and walking across the
+room leaned against the cigar case.
+
+“Did you ever hear this one?” he asked, looking about.
+
+Obviously no answer could be given and the bent old man launched into
+a vile pointless anecdote of a woman, a miner, and a mule, the crowd
+giving close attention and laughing uproariously when he had finished.
+The socialist rubbed his hands together and joined in the applause.
+
+“That was a good one, eh?” he commented, turning to Sam.
+
+Sam, picking up his bag, climbed the stairway as the red-haired young
+man launched into another tale, slightly less vile. In his room to which
+Ed, meeting him at the top of the stairs, led him, still chewing at the
+unlighted cigar, he turned out the light and sat on the edge of the bed.
+He was as homesick as a boy.
+
+“Truth,” he muttered, looking through the window to the dimly-lighted
+street. “Do these men seek truth?”
+
+The next day he went to work, wearing a suit of clothes bought from
+Ed. He worked with Ed’s father, carrying timbers and driving nails as
+directed by him. In the gang with him were four men, boarders at Ed’s
+hotel, and four other men who lived in the town with their families. At
+the noon hour he asked the old carpenter how the men from the hotel, who
+did not live in the town, could vote on the question of the power bonds.
+The old man grinned and rubbed his hands together.
+
+“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose Ed tends to that. He’s a slick one,
+Ed is.”
+
+At work, the men who had been so silent in the office of the hotel were
+alert and wonderfully busy, hurrying here and there at a word from the
+old man and sawing and nailing furiously. They seemed bent upon outdoing
+each other and when one fell behind they laughed and shouted at him,
+asking him if he had decided to quit for the day. But though they seemed
+determined to outdo him the old man kept ahead of them all, his hammer
+beating a rattling tattoo upon the boards all day. At the noon hour he
+had given each of the men one of the pamphlets from his pocket and on
+the way back to his hotel in the evening he told Sam that the others had
+tried to show him up.
+
+“They wanted to see if I had juice in me,” he explained, strutting
+beside Sam with an amusing little swagger of his shoulders.
+
+Sam was sick with fatigue. His hands were blistered, his legs felt weak,
+and a terrible thirst burned in his throat. All day he had gone grimly
+ahead, thankful for every physical discomfort, every throb of his
+strained, tired muscles. In his weariness and in his efforts to keep
+pace with the others he had forgotten Colonel Tom and Mary Underwood.
+
+All during that month and into the next Sam stayed with the old man’s
+gang. He ceased thinking, and only worked desperately. An odd feeling
+of loyalty and devotion to the old man came over him and he felt that he
+too must prove that he had the juice in him. At the hotel he went to bed
+immediately after the silent dinner, slept, awoke aching, and went to
+work again.
+
+One Sunday one of the men of his gang came to Sam’s room and invited him
+to go with a party of the workers into the country. They went in boats,
+carrying with them kegs of beer, to a deep ravine clothed on both sides
+by heavy woods. In the boat with Sam sat the red-haired young man, who
+was called Jake and who talked loudly of the time they would have in the
+woods, and boasted that he was the instigator of the trip.
+
+“I thought of it,” he said over and over again.
+
+Sam wondered why he had been invited. It was a soft October day and
+in the ravine he sat looking at the trees splashed with colour and
+breathing deeply of the air, his whole body relaxed, grateful for the
+day of rest. Jake came and sat beside him.
+
+“What are you?” he asked bluntly. “We know you are no working man.”
+
+Sam told him a half-truth.
+
+“You are right enough about that; I have money enough not to have to
+work. I used to be a business man. I sold guns. But I have a disease and
+the doctors have told me that if I do not work out of doors part of me
+will die.”
+
+The man from his own gang who had invited him on the trip came up to
+them, bringing Sam a foaming glass of beer. He shook his head.
+
+“The doctor says it will not do,” he explained to the two men.
+
+The red-haired man called Jake began talking.
+
+“We are going to have a fight with Ed,” he said. “That’s what we came up
+here to talk about. We want to know where you stand. We are going to see
+if we can’t make him pay as well for the work here as men are paid for
+the same work in Chicago.”
+
+Sam lay back upon the grass.
+
+“All right,” he said. “Go ahead. If I can help I will. I’m not so fond
+of Ed.”
+
+The men began talking among themselves. Jake, standing among them, read
+aloud a list of names among which was the name Sam had written on the
+register at Ed’s hotel.
+
+“It’s a list of the names of men we think will stick together and vote
+together on the bond issue,” he explained, turning to Sam. “Ed’s in that
+and we want to use our votes to scare him into giving us what we want.
+Will you stay with us? You look like a fighter.”
+
+Sam nodded and getting up joined the men about the beer kegs. They began
+talking of Ed and of the money he had made in the town.
+
+“He’s done a lot of town work here and there’s been graft in all of
+it,” explained Jake emphatically. “It’s time he was being made to do the
+right thing.”
+
+While they talked Sam sat watching the men’s faces. They did not seem
+vile to him now as they had seemed that first evening in the hotel
+office. He began thinking of them silently and alertly at work all day
+long, surrounded by such influences as Ed and Bill, and the thought
+sweetened his opinion of them.
+
+“Look here,” he said, “tell me of this matter. I was a business man
+before I came here and I may be able to help you fellows get what you
+want.”
+
+Getting up, Jake took Sam’s arm and they walked down the ravine, Jake
+explaining the situation in the town.
+
+“The game,” he said, “is to make the taxpayers pay for a millrace to be
+built for the development of the water power in the river and then, by a
+trick, to turn it over to a private company. Bill and Ed are both in the
+deal and they are working for a Chicago man named Crofts. He’s been up
+here at the hotel with Bill talking to Ed. I’ve figured out what they
+are up to.” Sam sat down upon a log and laughed heartily.
+
+“Crofts, eh?” he exclaimed. “Say, we will fight this thing. If Crofts
+has been up here you can depend upon it there is some size to the deal.
+We will just smash the whole crooked gang for the good of the town.”
+
+“How would you do that?” asked Jake.
+
+Sam sat down on a log and looked at the river flowing past the mouth of
+the ravine.
+
+“Just fight,” he said. “Let me show you something.”
+
+He took a pencil and slip of paper from his pocket, and, with the
+voices of the men about the beer kegs in his ears and the red-haired man
+peering over his shoulder, began writing his first political pamphlet.
+He wrote and erased and changed words and phrases. The pamphlet was a
+statement of facts as to the value of water power, and was addressed to
+the taxpayers of the community. He warmed to the subject, saying that a
+fortune lay sleeping in the river, and that the town, by the exercise of
+a little discretion now, could build with that fortune a beautiful city
+belonging to the people.
+
+“This fortune in the river rightly managed will pay the expenses of
+government and give you control of a great source of revenue forever,”
+ he wrote. “Build your millrace, but look out for a trick of the
+politicians. They are trying to steal it. Reject the offer of the
+Chicago banker named Crofts. Demand an investigation. A capitalist has
+been found who will take the water power bonds at four per cent and back
+the people in this fight for a free American city.” Across the head
+of the pamphlet Sam wrote the caption, “A River Paved With Gold,” and
+handed it to Jake, who read it and whistled softly.
+
+“Good!” he said. “I will take this and have it printed. It will make
+Bill and Ed sit up.”
+
+Sam took a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to the man.
+
+“To pay for the printing,” he said. “And when we have them licked I am
+the man who will take the four per cent bonds.”
+
+Jake scratched his head. “How much do you suppose the deal is worth to
+Crofts?”
+
+“A million, or he would not bother,” Sam answered.
+
+Jake folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
+
+“This would make Bill and Ed squirm, eh?” he laughed.
+
+Going home down the river the men, filled with beer, sang and shouted
+as the boats, guided by Sam and Jake, floated along. The night fell
+warm and still and Sam thought he had never seen the sky so filled
+with stars. His brain was busy with the idea of doing something for the
+people.
+
+“Perhaps here in this town I shall make a start toward what I am after,”
+ he thought, his heart filled with happiness and the songs of the tipsy
+workmen ringing in his ears.
+
+All through the next few weeks there was an air of something astir among
+the men of Sam’s gang and about Ed’s hotel. During the evening Jake
+went among the men talking in low tones, and once he took a three days’
+vacation, telling Ed that he did not feel well and spending the time
+among the men employed in the plough works up the river. From time to
+time he came to Sam for money.
+
+“For the campaign,” he said, winking and hurrying away.
+
+Suddenly a speaker appeared and began talking nightly from a box before
+a drug store on Main Street, and after dinner the office of Ed’s hotel
+was deserted. The man on the box had a blackboard hung on a pole, on
+which he drew figures estimating the value of the power in the river,
+and as he talked he grew more and more excited, waving his arms and
+inveighing against certain leasing clauses in the bond proposal. He
+declared himself a follower of Karl Marx and delighted the old carpenter
+who danced up and down in the road and rubbed his hands.
+
+“It will come to something--this will--you’ll see,” he declared to Sam.
+
+One day Ed appeared, riding in a buggy, at the job where Sam worked,
+and called the old man into the road. He sat pounding one hand upon the
+other and talking in a low voice. Sam thought the old man had perhaps
+been indiscreet in the distribution of the socialistic pamphlets. He
+seemed nervous, dancing up and down beside the buggy and shaking his
+head. Then hurrying back to where the men worked he pointed over his
+shoulder with his thumb.
+
+“Ed wants you,” he said, and Sam noticed that his voice trembled and his
+hand shook.
+
+In the buggy Ed and Sam rode in silence. Again Ed chewed at an unlighted
+cigar.
+
+“I want to talk with you,” he had said as Sam climbed into the buggy.
+
+At the hotel the two men got out of the buggy and went into the office.
+Inside the door Ed, who came behind, sprang forward and pinioned Sam’s
+arms with his own. He was as powerful as a bear. His wife, the tall
+woman with the inexpressive eyes, came running into the room, her face
+drawn with hatred. In her hand she carried a broom and with the
+handle of this she struck Sam several swinging blows across the face,
+accompanying each blow with a half scream of rage and a volley of vile
+names. The sullen-faced boy, alive now and with eyes burning with zeal,
+came running down the stairs and pushed the woman aside. He struck Sam
+time after time in the face with his fist, laughing each time as Sam
+winced under the blows.
+
+Sam struggled furiously to escape Ed’s powerful grasp. It was the first
+time he had ever been beaten and the first time he had faced hopeless
+defeat. The wrath within him was so intense that the jolting impact
+of the blows seemed a secondary matter to the need of escaping Ed’s
+vice-like grasp.
+
+Suddenly Ed turned and, pushing Sam before him, threw him through the
+office door and into the street. In falling his head struck against a
+hitching post and he lay stunned. When he partially recovered from the
+fall Sam got up and walked along the street. His face was swollen and
+bruised and his nose bled. The street was deserted and the assault upon
+him had been unnoticed.
+
+He went to a hotel on Main Street--a more pretentious place than Ed’s,
+near the bridge leading to the station--and as he passed in he saw,
+through an open door, Jake, the red-haired man, leaning against the bar
+and talking to Bill, the man with the florid face. Sam, paying for a
+room, went upstairs and to bed.
+
+In the bed, with cold bandages on his bruised face, he tried to get
+the situation in hand. Hatred for Ed ran through his veins. His hands
+clenched, his brain whirled, and the brutal, passionate faces of the
+woman and the boy danced before his eyes.
+
+“I’ll fix them, the brutal bullies,” he muttered aloud.
+
+And then the thought of his quest came back to his mind and quieted him.
+Through the window came the roar of the waterfall, broken by noises of
+the street. As he fell asleep they mingled with his dreams, sounding
+soft and quiet like the low talk of a family about the fire of an
+evening.
+
+He was awakened by a noise of pounding on his door. At his call the door
+opened and the face of the old carpenter appeared. Sam laughed and sat
+up in bed. Already the cold bandages had soothed the throbbing of his
+bruised face.
+
+“Go away,” begged the old man, rubbing his hands together nervously.
+“Get out of town.”
+
+He put his hand to his mouth and talked in a hoarse whisper, looking
+back over his shoulder through the open door. Sam, getting out of bed,
+began filling his pipe.
+
+“You can’t beat Ed, you fellows,” added the old man, backing out at the
+door. “He’s a slick one, Ed is. You better get out of town.”
+
+Sam called a boy and gave him a note to Ed asking for his clothes and
+for the bag in his room, and to the boy he gave a large bill, asking him
+to pay anything due. When the boy came back bringing the clothes and the
+bag he returned the bill unbroken.
+
+“They’re scared about something up there,” he said, looking at Sam’s
+bruised face.
+
+Sam dressed carefully and went down into the street. He remembered that
+he had never seen a printed copy of the political pamphlet written in
+the ravine and realised that Jake had used it to make money for himself.
+
+“Now I shall try something else,” he thought.
+
+It was early evening and crowds of men coming down the railroad track
+from the plough works turned to right and left as they reached Main
+Street. Sam walked among them, climbing a little hilly side street to
+a number he had got from a clerk at the drug store before which the
+socialist had talked. He stopped at a little frame house and a moment
+after knocking was in the presence of the man who had talked night after
+night from the box in the street. Sam had decided to see what could be
+done through him. The socialist was a short, fat man, with curly grey
+hair, shiny round cheeks, and black broken teeth. He sat on the edge of
+his bed and looked as if he had slept in his clothes. A corncob pipe lay
+smoking among the covers of the bed, and during most of the talk he sat
+with one shoe held in his hand as though about to put it on. About the
+room in orderly piles lay stack after stack of paper-covered books. Sam
+sat down in a chair by the window and told his mission.
+
+“It is a big thing, this power steal that is going on here,” he
+explained. “I know the man back of it and he would not bother with a
+small affair. I know they are going to make the city build the millrace
+and then steal it. It will be a big thing for your party about here if
+you take hold and stop them. Let me tell you how it can be done.”
+
+He explained his plan, and told of Crofts and of his wealth and dogged,
+bullying determination. The socialist seemed beside himself. He pulled
+on the shoe and began running hurriedly about the room.
+
+“The time for the election,” Sam went on, “is almost here. I have looked
+into this thing. We must beat this bond issue and then put through a
+square one. There is a train out of Chicago at seven o’clock, a fast
+train. You get fifty speakers out here. I will pay for a special train
+if necessary and I will hire a band and help stir things up. I can give
+you facts enough to shake this town to the bottom. You come with me and
+‘phone to Chicago. I will pay everything. I am McPherson, Sam McPherson
+of Chicago.”
+
+The socialist ran to a closet and began pulling on his coat. The name
+affected him so that his hand trembled and he could scarcely get his arm
+into the coat sleeve. He began to apologise for the appearance of the
+room and kept looking at Sam with the air of one not able to believe
+what he had heard. As the two men walked out of the house he ran ahead
+holding doors open for Sam’s passage.
+
+“And you will help us, Mr. McPherson?” he exclaimed. “You, a man of
+millions, will help us in this fight?”
+
+Sam had a feeling that the man was going to kiss his hand or do
+something equally ridiculous. He had the air of a club door man gone off
+his head.
+
+At the hotel Sam stood in the lobby while the fat man waited in a
+telephone booth.
+
+“I will have to ‘phone Chicago, I will simply have to ‘phone Chicago. We
+socialists don’t do anything like this offhand, Mr. McPherson,” he had
+explained as they walked along the street.
+
+When the socialist came out of the booth he stood before Sam shaking his
+head. His whole attitude had changed, and he looked like a man caught
+doing a foolish or absurd thing.
+
+“Nothing doing, nothing doing, Mr. McPherson,” he said, starting for the
+hotel door.
+
+At the door he stopped and shook his finger at Sam.
+
+“It won’t work,” he said, emphatically. “Chicago is too wise.”
+
+Sam turned and went back to his room. His name had killed his only
+chance to beat Crofts, Jake, Bill and Ed. In his room he sat looking out
+of the window into the street.
+
+“Where shall I take hold now?” he asked himself.
+
+Turning out the lights he sat listening to the roar of the waterfall and
+thinking of the events of the last week.
+
+“I have had a time,” he thought. “I have tried something and even though
+it did not work it has been the best fun I have had for years.”
+
+The hours slipped away and night came on. He could hear men shouting and
+laughing in the street, and going downstairs he stood in a hallway at
+the edge of the crowd that gathered about the socialist. The orator
+shouted and waved his hand. He seemed as proud as a young recruit who
+has just passed through his first baptism of fire.
+
+“He tried to make a fool of me--McPherson of Chicago--the
+millionaire--one of the capitalist kings--he tried to bribe me and my
+party.”
+
+In the crowd the old carpenter was dancing in the road and rubbing his
+hands together. With the feeling of a man who had finished a piece of
+work or turned the last leaf of a book, Sam went back to his hotel.
+
+“In the morning I shall be on my way,” he thought.
+
+A knock came at the door and the red-haired man came in. He closed the
+door softly and winked at Sam.
+
+“Ed made a mistake,” he said, and laughed. “The old man told him you
+were a socialist and he thought you were trying to spoil the graft.
+He is scared about that beating you got and mighty sorry. He’s all
+right--Ed is--and he and Bill and I have got the votes. What made you
+stay under cover so long? Why didn’t you tell us you were McPherson?”
+
+Sam saw the hopelessness of any attempt to explain. Jake had evidently
+sold out the men. Sam wondered how.
+
+“How do you know you can deliver the votes?’” he asked, trying to lead
+Jake on.
+
+Jake rolled the quid in his mouth and winked again.
+
+“It was easy enough to fix the men when Ed, Bill and I got together,” he
+said. “You know about the other. There’s a clause in the act authorising
+the bond issue, a sleeper, Bill calls it. You know more about that than
+I do. Anyway the power will be turned over to the man we say.”
+
+“But how do I know you can deliver the votes?”
+
+Jake threw out his hand impatiently.
+
+“What do they know?” he asked sharply. “What they want is more wages.
+There’s a million in the power deal and they can’t any more realise a
+million than they can tell what they want to do in Heaven. I promised
+Ed’s fellows the city scale. Ed can’t kick. He’ll make a hundred
+thousand as it stands. Then I promised the plough works gang a ten per
+cent raise. We’ll get it for them if we can, but if we can’t, they won’t
+know it till the deal is put through.”
+
+Sam walked over and held open the door.
+
+“Good night,” he said.
+
+Jake looked annoyed.
+
+“Ain’t you even going to make a bid against Crofts?” he asked. “We ain’t
+tied to him if you do better by us. I’m in this thing because you put me
+in. That piece you wrote up the river scared ‘em stiff. I want to do
+the right thing by you. Don’t be sore about Ed. He wouldn’t a done it if
+he’d known.”
+
+Sam shook his head and stood with his hand still on the door.
+
+“Good night,” he said again. “I am not in it. I have dropped it. No use
+trying to explain.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+For weeks and months Sam led a wandering vagabond life, and surely a
+stranger or more restless vagabond never went upon the road. In his
+pocket he had at almost any time from one to five thousand dollars, his
+bag went on from place to place ahead of him, and now and then he caught
+up with it, unpacked it, and wore a suit of his former Chicago clothes
+upon the streets of some town. For the most part, however, he wore the
+rough clothes bought from Ed, and, when these were gone, others like
+them, with a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a pair of
+heavy boots lacing half way up the legs. Among the people, he passed for
+a rather well-set-up workman with money in his pocket going his own way.
+
+During all those months of wandering, and even when he had returned to
+something nearer his former way of life, his mind was unsettled and his
+outlook on life disturbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that he, among
+all men, was a unique, an innovation. Day after day his mind ground away
+upon his problem and he was determined to seek and to keep on seeking
+until he found for himself a way of peace. In the towns and in the
+country through which he passed he saw the clerks in the stores,
+the merchants with worried faces hurrying into banks, the farmers,
+brutalised by toil, dragging their weary bodies homeward at the coming
+of night, and told himself that all life was abortive, that on all sides
+of him it wore itself out in little futile efforts or ran away in side
+currents, that nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward giving
+point to the tremendous sacrifice involved in just living and working in
+the world. He thought of Christ going about seeing the world and talking
+to men, and thought that he too would go and talk to them, not as a
+teacher, but as one seeking eagerly to be taught. At times he was filled
+with longing and inexpressible hopes and, like the boy of Caxton, would
+get out of bed, not now to stand in Miller’s pasture watching the rain
+on the surface of the water, but to walk endless miles through the
+darkness getting the blessed relief of fatigue into his body and often
+paying for and occupying two beds in one night.
+
+Sam wanted to go back to Sue; he wanted peace and something like
+happiness, but most of all he wanted work, real work, work that would
+demand of him day after day the best and finest in him so that he would
+be held to the need of renewing constantly the better impulses of his
+mind. He was at the top of his life, and the few weeks of hard physical
+exertion as a driver of nails and a bearer of timbers had begun to
+restore his body to shapeliness and strength, so that he was filled anew
+with all of his native restlessness and energy; but he was determined
+that he would not again pour himself out in work that would react upon
+him as had his money making, his dream of beautiful children, and this
+last half-formed dream of a kind of financial fatherhood to the Illinois
+town.
+
+The incident with Ed and the red-haired man had been his first serious
+effort at anything like social service achieved through controlling or
+attempting to influence the public mind, for his was the type of mind
+that runs to the concrete, the actual. As he sat in the ravine talking
+to Jake, and, later, coming home in the boat under the multitude of
+stars, he had looked up from among the drunken workmen and his mind had
+seen a city built for a people, a city independent, beautiful, strong,
+and free, but a glimpse of a red head through a barroom door and a
+socialist trembling before a name had dispelled the vision. After his
+return from hearing the socialist, who in his turn was hedged about by
+complicated influences, and in those November days when he walked south
+through Illinois, seeing the late glory of the trees and breathing the
+fine air, he laughed at himself for having had the vision. It was not
+that the red-haired man had sold him out, it was not the beating given
+him by Ed’s sullen-faced son or the blows across the face at the hands
+of his vigorous wife--it was just that at bottom he did not believe the
+people wanted reform; they wanted a ten per cent raise in wages. The
+public mind was a thing too big, too complicated and inert for a vision
+or an ideal to get at and move deeply.
+
+And then, walking on the road and struggling to find truth even within
+himself, Sam had to come to something else. At bottom he was no leader,
+no reformer. He had not wanted the free city for a free people, but as a
+work to be done by his own hand. He was McPherson, the money maker, the
+man who loved himself. The fact, not the sight of Jake hobnobbing with
+Bill or the timidity of the socialist, had blocked his way to work as a
+political reformer and builder.
+
+Tramping south between the rows of shocked corn he laughed at himself.
+“The experience with Ed and Jake has done something for me,” he thought.
+“They bullied me. I have been a kind of bully myself and what has
+happened has been good medicine for me.”
+
+Sam walked the roads of Illinois, Ohio, New York, and other states,
+through hill country and flat country, in the snow drifts of winter and
+through the storms of spring, talking to people, asking their way of
+life and the end toward which they worked. At night he dreamed of Sue,
+of his boyhood struggles in Caxton, of Janet Eberly sitting in her chair
+and talking of writers of books, or, visualising the stock exchange or
+some garish drinking place, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster,
+Morrison, and Prince intent and eager as he laid before them some scheme
+of money making. Sometimes at night he awoke, seized with horror, seeing
+Colonel Tom with the revolver pressed against his head; and sitting in
+his bed, and all through the next day he talked aloud to himself.
+
+“The damned old coward,” he shouted into the darkness of his room or
+into the wide peaceful prospect of the countryside.
+
+The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible.
+It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing
+to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent,
+so completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose.
+
+“And yet,” thought Sam, “he has found strength to whip me, the man of
+ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight
+I put upon the little play world in which he had been king.”
+
+In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed
+beard sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead,
+and into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance
+of a thought he had got from a book of Janet’s or from some talk he had
+heard, perhaps at his own dinner table.
+
+“It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying
+dead.”
+
+At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving
+past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that
+issued from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam,
+hurrying and seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to
+the old commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his
+forces to withstand an attack.
+
+“I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth,” he said.
+
+Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping
+night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and
+daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction
+from the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed
+feet on the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon
+his body and subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind,
+chilled by the winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun.
+In the spring he swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the
+cattle grazing in the fields and the white clouds floating across the
+sky, and constantly his legs became harder and his body more flat and
+sinewy. Once he slept for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a
+woods and in the morning was awakened by a farmer’s dog licking his
+face.
+
+Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other
+roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no
+incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or
+on the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he
+talked and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in
+life, sought no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the
+romance went out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and
+stupid, they were, almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they
+wanted passionately to get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding
+life with its problems and responsibilities. They always talked of
+the big cities, of “Chi” and “Cinci” and “Frisco,” and were bent upon
+getting to one of these places. They condemned the rich and begged and
+stole from the poor, talked swaggeringly of their personal courage and
+ran whimpering and begging before country constables. One of them, a
+tall, leering youth in a grey cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the
+edge of a village in Indiana, tried to rob him. Full of his new strength
+and with the thought of Ed’s wife and the sullen-faced son in his mind,
+Sam sprang upon him and had revenge for the beating received in the
+office of Ed’s hotel by beating this fellow in his turn. When the tall
+youth had partially recovered from the beating and had staggered to his
+feet, he ran off into the darkness, stopping when well out of reach to
+hurl a stone that splashed in the mud of the road at Sam’s feet.
+
+Everywhere Sam sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He
+had a kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of
+some simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman,
+with whom he talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana,
+interested him so that he went into a train with her and travelled all
+night in the day coach, listening to her talk of her three sons, one
+of whom had weak lungs and had, with two younger brothers, taken up
+government land in the west. The woman had been with them for some
+months, helping them to get a start.
+
+“I was raised on a farm and knew things they could not know,” she told
+Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of
+fellow passengers.
+
+She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had
+driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a
+house, and had grown brown and strong at the work.
+
+“And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has
+gained eleven pounds,” she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her
+heavy, muscular forearms.
+
+She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle
+factory in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods
+store, with her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her
+hearer’s interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the
+west and the loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they
+sometimes made her heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved
+success, although he did not see how her experience could serve as a
+guide to him.
+
+“You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth,” he said, taking
+her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.
+
+At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through
+southern Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse,
+asked, “Where are you going?” adding genially, “I may be able to give
+you a lift.”
+
+Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man’s manner or in his
+dress suggesting the man of God, he assumed a bantering air.
+
+“I am on my way to the New Jerusalem,” he said seriously. “I am one who
+seeks God.”
+
+The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when
+he saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam’s mouth, he turned the
+wheels of his buggy.
+
+“Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem,”
+ he said.
+
+On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road,
+told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward
+which he might work.
+
+“It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard
+necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will
+bring me bread and butter, but because I need to be doing something that
+will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to
+serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I
+got at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me,
+and I want to find that way.”
+
+The young minister, who was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary at
+Springfield, Ohio, and had come out of college with a very serious
+outlook on life, took Sam to his house and together they sat talking
+half the night. He had a wife, a country girl with a babe lying at
+her breast, who got supper for them, and who, after supper, sat in the
+shadows in a corner of the living-room listening to their talk.
+
+The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe and the minister poked at
+a coal fire that burned in a stove. They talked of God and of what the
+thought of God meant to men; but the young minister did not try to give
+Sam an answer to his problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly
+dissatisfied and unhappy in his way of life.
+
+“There is no spirit of God here,” he said, poking viciously at the coals
+in the stove. “The people here do not want me to talk to them of God.
+They have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has
+put them here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind
+of glorified Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished
+this life of work and of putting money in the savings bank.”
+
+For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the
+country with him and talking of God. In the evening they sat in the
+house, continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man
+preach in his church.
+
+The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked
+vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and
+unnatural.
+
+“The man,” thought Sam, “has no feeling for public address and is not
+treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation,
+the ideas he has expounded to me in his house.” He decided there was
+something to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week
+after week and who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an
+effort.
+
+One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came
+to him as he stood on the little porch before the house.
+
+“I wish you would go away,” she said, standing with her babe in her
+arms and looking at the porch floor. “You stir him up and make him
+dissatisfied.”
+
+Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness.
+There had been tears in the wife’s eyes.
+
+In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and
+eating with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses
+where they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked
+in a new place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and
+several of his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the
+men of the threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot
+of them day after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk,
+crept into the loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began
+another day of heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a
+swim in some creek and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees
+of an orchard sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of
+talk, talk that never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they
+would try to settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at
+some farm during the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man
+in the crew never talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long
+Sunday afternoons and whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.
+
+The threshing outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe,
+who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the
+men all day, drove about the country half the night making deals
+with farmers for other days of threshing. Sam thought that he looked
+constantly on the point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one
+of the men, who had been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that
+at the end of the season their employer did not have enough money left
+from his season of work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines
+and that he continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them.
+
+“One has to keep going,” said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him
+on the matter.
+
+When told to keep Sam’s wage until the end of the season he looked
+relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried
+and said that he had no money.
+
+“I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a
+little time,” he said.
+
+Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him
+from the shadows at the back of the barn.
+
+“Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one
+else?” he asked.
+
+Joe looked indignant.
+
+“A man wants independence,” he said.
+
+When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a
+stream, and tearing up Joe’s note watched the torn pieces of it float
+away upon the brown water.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The
+days on which something happened or on which something outside himself
+interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours
+of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in
+a kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get
+at people who came into his way and to discover something of their way
+of life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed,
+staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the
+sidewalks of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an
+idea came into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once
+the practicability of living by following the idea, and although
+the practice brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the
+difficulties of the problem he was striving to work out, it brought him
+many strange experiences.
+
+At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town
+in eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a
+railroad track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the
+sidewalk. It was a stormy night in September at the end of his first
+year of wandering and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after
+buying drinks for the labourer and cigars for himself, several men came
+in and stood by the bar drinking together. As they drank they became
+more and more friendly, slapping each other on the back, singing songs
+and boasting. One of them got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The
+proprietor, a round-faced man with one dead eye, who had himself been
+drinking freely, put a bottle upon the bar and coming up to Sam, began
+complaining that he had no bartender and had to work long hours.
+
+“Drink what you want, boys, and then I’ll tell you what you owe,” he
+said to the men standing along the bar.
+
+Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room,
+and looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had
+for the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen,
+Sam said to himself, “I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At
+least I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with
+this tramping on the road and thinking.”
+
+The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an
+obscure place had made its proprietor what is called “well fixed.” It
+had a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the
+main street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks
+was but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men
+from the freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand
+about drinking beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at
+the side door was prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door,
+took drinks and hurried out again, looking up the alley and running
+quickly when they found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and
+when Sam had worked for a few days in the place he once made the mistake
+of reaching for the bottle when he heard the door open.
+
+“Let them ask for it,” said the proprietor gruffly. “Do you want to
+insult a man?”
+
+On Saturday the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and
+at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks.
+When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these
+men and put the bottle before them, saying, “Drink all you want of the
+stuff.”
+
+When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment
+by the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat
+pockets and looking at the floor.
+
+“Bar flies,” the proprietor explained laconically.
+
+The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it
+into stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into
+bottles as they became empty. He kept on display in glass cases bottles
+of well known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for
+one of these brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from
+beneath the bar, a bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of
+his own mixture. As Al sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know
+nothing the bartender’s art and stood all day handing out Al’s poisonous
+stuff and the foaming glasses of beer the workingmen drank in the
+evening.
+
+Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the
+proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam
+most. Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over
+their shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at
+Sam apologetically.
+
+“Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold,” they would say,
+as though repeating a formula.
+
+At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre
+notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life’s
+unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day’s duty, and his
+curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in
+at the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked
+them why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the
+telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam’s question an
+impertinence.
+
+“You fool, don’t you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?”
+ Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in
+the centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and
+women going through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to
+overcome a feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening
+before. He had come into town over a poorly made clay road running
+through barren hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores
+of a river, swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges
+of the town.
+
+Before him in the distance he had looked into the windows of a huge
+factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene that
+lay before him. Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers
+ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the glare of the furnace
+fire lighting now one, now another of them, sharply. At his feet the
+tumbling waters that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated
+him. Looking closely at the racing waters his head, light from physical
+weariness, reeled, and in fear of falling he had been compelled to grip
+firmly the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a
+house across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens
+sat on a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly
+fitting accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard
+itself two bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they
+sprang into the fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming
+exhausted, they fell to picking and scratching among the rubbish in the
+yard, and when they had a little recovered renewed the struggle. For an
+hour Sam had looked at the scene, letting his eyes wander from the river
+to the grey sky and to the factory belching forth its black smoke. He
+had thought that the two feebly struggling fowls, immersed in their
+pointless struggle in the midst of such mighty force, epitomised much of
+man’s struggle in the world, and, turning, had gone along the sidewalks
+and to the village hotel, feeling old and tired. Now on the bench in
+the little park, with the early morning sun shining down through the
+glistening rain drops clinging to the red leaves of the trees, he began
+to lose the sense of depression that had clung to him through the night.
+
+A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying
+workers, and stopped to sit beside him.
+
+“On the road, brother?” he asked.
+
+Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.
+
+“Fools and slaves,” he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women
+passing on the sidewalk. “See them going like beasts to their bondage?
+What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of
+dogs.”
+
+He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced.
+
+“We are all fools and slaves,” said Sam, stoutly.
+
+Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about.
+
+“There, you talk sense,” he cried. “Welcome to our town, stranger. We
+have no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity
+among them. Come and have breakfast with me.”
+
+In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a
+graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he
+was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of
+which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud
+of the fact.
+
+“I refuse to work! I scorn it!” he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in
+the air.
+
+Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the
+socialist party in his native town, and boasted of the leadership he
+had already achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried
+because of his connection with the movement.
+
+“She wants me to be respectable,” he said sadly, and added, “What’s the
+use trying to explain to a woman? I can’t get her to see the difference
+between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I’ve given up
+trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by
+getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police.”
+
+He talked of a strike going on among some girl employés of a Jewish
+shirtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began
+asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to
+the scene of the strike.
+
+The shirtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and
+on the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up
+and down. A flashily dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his
+hands in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft
+and looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came
+a stream of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the
+empty air. When Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs,
+shouting oaths over his shoulder.
+
+Sam joined the three girls, and began talking to them, walking up and
+down with them before the grocery store.
+
+“What are you doing to win?” he asked when they had told him of their
+grievances.
+
+“We do what we can!” said a Jewish girl with broad hips, great motherly
+breasts, and fine, soft, brown eyes, who appeared to be a leader and
+spokesman among the strikers. “We walk up and down here and try to get
+a word with the strikebreakers the boss has brought in from other towns,
+when they go in and come out.”
+
+Frank, the University man, spoke up. “We are putting up stickers
+everywhere,” he said. “I myself have put up hundreds of them.”
+
+He took from his coat pocket a printed slip, gummed on one side, and
+told Sam that he had been putting them on walls and telegraph poles
+about town. The thing was vilely written. “Down with the dirty scabs”
+ was the heading in bold, black letters across the top.
+
+Sam was shocked at the vileness of the caption and at the crude
+brutality of the text printed on the slip.
+
+“Do you call women workers names like that?” he asked.
+
+“They have taken our work from us,” the Jewish girl answered simply and
+began again, telling the story of her sister strikers and of what the
+low wage had meant to them and to their families. “To me it does not so
+much matter; I have a brother who works in a clothing store and he can
+support me, but many of the women in our union have only their wage here
+with which to feed their families.”
+
+Sam’s mind began working on the problem.
+
+“Here,” he declared, “is something definite to do, a battle in which I
+will pit myself against this employer for the sake of these women.”
+
+He put away from him his experience in the Illinois town, telling
+himself that the young woman walking beside him would have a sense of
+honour unknown to the red-haired young workman who had sold him out to
+Bill and Ed.
+
+“I failed with my money,” he thought, “now I will try to help these
+girls with my energy.”
+
+Turning to the Jewish girl he made a quick decision.
+
+“I will help you get your places back,” he said.
+
+Leaving the girls he went across the street to a barber shop where he
+could watch the entrance to the factory. He wanted to think out a method
+of procedure and wanted also to look at the girl strikebreakers as
+they came to work. After a time several girls came along the street and
+turned in at the stairway. The flashily dressed Hebrew with the cigar
+still in his mouth was again by the stairway entrance. The three pickets
+running forward accosted the file of girls going up the stairs, one
+of whom, a young American girl with yellow hair, turned and shouted
+something over her shoulder. The man called Frank shouted back and the
+Hebrew took the cigar out of his mouth and laughed heartily. Sam filled
+and lighted his pipe, a dozen plans for helping the striking girls
+running through his mind.
+
+During the morning he went into the grocery store on the corner, a
+saloon in the neighbourhood, and returned to the barber shop talking to
+men of the strike. He ate his lunch alone, still thinking of the three
+girls patiently walking up and down before the stairway. Their ceaseless
+walking seemed to him a useless waste of energy.
+
+“They should be doing something more definite,” he thought.
+
+After lunch he joined the soft-eyed Jewish girl and together they walked
+along the street talking of the strike.
+
+“You cannot win this strike by just calling nasty names,” he said. “I
+do not like that ‘dirty scab’ sticker Frank had in his pocket. It cannot
+help you and only antagonises the girls who have taken your places. Here
+in this part of town the people want to see you win. I have talked to
+the men who come into the saloon and the barber shop across the street
+and you already have their sympathy. You want to get the sympathy of the
+girls who have taken your places. Calling them dirty scabs only makes
+martyrs of them. Did the yellow-haired girl call you a name this
+morning?”
+
+The Jewish girl looked at Sam and laughed bitterly.
+
+“Rather; she called me a loud-mouthed street walker.”
+
+They continued their walk along the street, across the railroad track
+and a bridge, and into a quiet residence street. Carriages stood at
+the curb before the houses, and pointing to these and to the well-kept
+houses Sam said, “Men have bought these things for their women.”
+
+A shadow fell across the girl’s face.
+
+“I suppose all of us want what these women have,” she answered. “We do
+not really want to fight and to stand on our own feet, not when we know
+the world. What a woman really wants is a man,” she added shortly.
+
+Sam began talking and told her of a plan that had come into his mind.
+He had remembered how Jack Prince and Morrison used to talk about the
+appeal of the direct personal letter and how effectively it was used by
+mail order houses.
+
+“We will have a mail order strike here,” he said and went on to lay
+before her the details of his plan. He proposed that she, Frank, and
+some others of the striking girls, should go about town getting the
+names and the mail addresses of the girl strikebreakers.
+
+“Get also the names of the keepers of the boarding houses at which
+these girls live and the names of the men and women who live in the
+same houses,” he suggested. “Then you get the striking girls and women
+together and have them tell me their stories. We will write letters day
+after day to the girl strikebreakers, to the women who keep the boarding
+houses, and to the people who live in the houses and sit at table with
+them. We won’t call names. We will tell the story of what being beaten
+in this fight means to the women in your union, tell it simply and
+truthfully as you told it to me this morning.”
+
+“It will cost such a lot,” said the Jewish girl, shaking her head.
+
+Sam took a roll of bills from his pocket and showed it to her.
+
+“I will pay,” he said.
+
+“Why?” she asked, looking at him sharply.
+
+“Because I am a man wanting work just as you want work,” he replied, and
+then went on hurriedly, “It is a long story. I am a rich man wandering
+about the world seeking Truth. I will not want that known. Take me for
+granted. You won’t be sorry.”
+
+Within an hour he had engaged a large room, paying a month’s rent in
+advance, and into the room chairs and table and typewriters had
+been brought. He put an advertisement in the evening paper for girl
+stenographers, and a printer, hurried by a promise of extra pay, ran out
+for him several thousand letter heads across the top of which in bold,
+black type ran the words, “The Girl Strikers.”
+
+That night Sam held, in the room he had engaged, a meeting of the girl
+strikers, explaining to them his plan and offering to pay all expenses
+of the fight he proposed to make for them. They clapped their hands and
+shouted approvingly, and Sam began laying out his campaign.
+
+One of the girls he told off to stand in front of the factory morning
+and evening.
+
+“I will have other help for you there,” he said. “Before you go home
+to-night there will be a printer here with a bundle of pamphlets I am
+having printed for you.”
+
+Advised by the soft-eyed Jewish girl, he told off others to get
+additional names for the mailing list he wanted, getting many important
+ones from girls in the room. Six of the girls he asked to come in the
+morning to help him with addressing and mailing letters. The Jewish girl
+he told to take charge of the girls at work in the room--on the morrow
+to become also an office--and to superintend getting the names.
+
+Frank rose at the back of the room.
+
+“Who are you anyway?” he asked.
+
+“A man with money and the ability to win this strike,” Sam told him.
+
+“What are you doing it for?” demanded Frank.
+
+The Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
+
+“Because he believes in these women and wants to help,” she explained.
+
+“Rot,” said Frank, going out at the door.
+
+It was snowing when the meeting ended, and Sam and the Jewish girl
+finished their talk in the hallway leading to her room.
+
+“I don’t know what Harrigan, the union leader from Pittsburgh, will
+say to this,” she told him. “He appointed Frank to lead and direct the
+strike here. He doesn’t like interference and he may not like your plan.
+But we working women need men, men like you who can plan and do things.
+There are too many men living on us. We need men who will work for all
+of us as the men work for the women in the carriages and automobiles.”
+ She laughed and put out a hand to him. “See what you have got yourself
+into? I want you to be a husband to our entire union.”
+
+The next morning four girl stenographers went to work in Sam’s strike
+headquarters, and he wrote his first strike letter, a letter telling
+the story of a striking girl named Hadaway, whose young brother was sick
+with tuberculosis. Sam did not put any flourishes in the letter; he
+felt that he did not need to. He thought that with twenty or thirty such
+letters, each telling briefly and truthfully the story of one of the
+striking girls, he should be able to show one American town how its
+other half lived. He gave the letter to the four girl stenographers with
+the mailing list he already had and started them writing it to each of
+the names.
+
+At eight o’clock a man came in to install a telephone and girl strikers
+began bringing in new names for the mailing list. At nine o’clock three
+more stenographers appeared and were put to work, and girls who had been
+in began sending more names over the ‘phone. The Jewish girl walked up
+and down, giving orders, making suggestions. From time to time she ran
+to Sam’s desk and suggested other sources of names for the mailing list.
+Sam thought that if the other working girls were timid and embarrassed
+before him this one was not. She was like a general on the field of
+battle. Her soft brown eyes glowed, her mind worked rapidly, and her
+voice had a ring in it. At her suggestion Sam gave the girls at the
+typewriters lists bearing the names of town officials, bankers and
+prominent business men, and the wives of all these, also presidents of
+various women’s clubs, society women, and charitable organizations. She
+called reporters from the town’s two daily papers and had them interview
+Sam, and at her suggestion he gave them copies of the Hadaway girl
+letter to print.
+
+“Print it,” he said, “and if you cannot use it as news, make it an
+advertisement and bring the bill to me.”
+
+At eleven o’clock Frank came into the room bringing a tall Irishman,
+with sunken cheeks, black, unclean teeth, and an overcoat too small for
+him. Leaving him standing by the door, Frank walked across the room to
+Sam.
+
+“Come to lunch with us,” he said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder
+toward the tall Irishman. “I picked him up,” he said. “Best brain that’s
+been in town for years. He’s a wonder. Used to be a Catholic priest.
+He doesn’t believe in God or love or anything. Come on out and hear him
+talk. He’s great.”
+
+Sam shook his head.
+
+“I am too busy. There is work to be done here. We are going to win this
+strike.”
+
+Frank looked at him doubtfully and then about the room at the busy
+girls.
+
+“I don’t know what Harrigan will think of all this,” he said. “He
+doesn’t like interferences. I never do anything without writing him.
+I wrote and told him what you were doing here. I had to, you know. I’m
+responsible to headquarters.”
+
+In the afternoon the Hebrew owner of the shirtwaist factory came in to
+strike headquarters and, walking through the room took off his hat and
+sat down by Sam’s desk.
+
+“What do you want here?” he asked. “The newspaper boys told me of what
+you had planned to do. What’s your game?”
+
+“I want to whip you,” Sam answered quietly, “to whip you good. You might
+as well get into line. You are going to lose this strike.”
+
+“I’m only one,” said the Hebrew. “There is an association of us
+manufacturers of shirtwaists. We are all in this. We all have a strike
+on our hands. What will you gain if you do beat me here? I’m only a
+little fellow after all.”
+
+Sam laughed and picking up his pen began writing.
+
+“You are unlucky,” he said. “I just happened to take hold here. When I
+have you beaten I will go on and beat the others. There is more money
+back of me than back of you all, and I am going to beat every one of
+you.”
+
+The next morning a crowd stood before the stairway leading to the
+factory when the strikebreaking girls came to work. The letters and
+the newspaper interview had been effective and more than half the
+strikebreakers did not appear. The others hurried along the street and
+turned in at the stairway without looking at the crowd. The girl,
+told off by Sam, stood on the sidewalk passing out pamphlets to the
+strikebreakers. The pamphlets were headed, “The Story of Ten Girls,” and
+told briefly and pointedly the stories of ten striking girls and what
+the loss of the strike meant to them and to their families.
+
+After a while there drove up two carriages and a large automobile, and
+out of the automobile climbed a well-dressed woman who took a bundle of
+the pamphlets from the girl picket and began passing them about among
+the people. Two policemen who stood in front of the crowd took off their
+helmets and accompanied her. The crowd cheered. Frank came hurrying
+across the street to where Sam stood in front of the barber shop and
+slapped him on the back.
+
+“You’re a wonder,” he said.
+
+Sam hurried back to the room and prepared the second letter for the
+mailing list. Two more stenographers had come to work. He had to send
+out for more machines. A reporter for the town’s evening paper ran up
+the stairway.
+
+“Who are you?” he asked. “The town wants to know.”
+
+From his pocket he took a telegram from a Pittsburgh daily.
+
+“What about mail-order strike plan? Give name and story new strike
+leader there.”
+
+At ten o’clock Frank returned.
+
+“There’s a wire from Harrigan,” he said. “He’s coming here. He wants a
+mass meeting of the girls for to-night. I’ve got to get them together.
+We’ll meet here in this room.”
+
+In the room the work went on. The list of names for the mailing had
+doubled. The picket at the shirtwaist factory reported that three more
+of the strikebreakers had left the plant. The Jewish girl was excited.
+She went hurrying about the room, her eyes glowing.
+
+“It’s great,” she said. “The plan is working. The whole town is aroused
+and for us. We’ll win in another twenty-four hours.”
+
+And then at seven o’clock that night Harrigan came into the room where
+Sam sat with the assembled girls, bolting the door behind him. He was a
+short, strongly built man with blue eyes and red hair. He walked about
+the room in silence, followed by Frank. Suddenly he stopped and, picking
+up one of the typewriting machines rented by Sam for the letter writing,
+raised it above his head and sent it smashing to the floor.
+
+“A hell of a strike leader,” he roared. “Look at this. Scab machines!
+
+“Scab stenographers!” he said through his teeth. “Scab printing! Scab
+everything!”
+
+Picking up a bundle of the letterheads, he tore them across, and walking
+to the front of the room, shook his fist before Sam’s face.
+
+“Scab leader!” he shouted, turning and facing the girls.
+
+The soft-eyed Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
+
+“He’s winning for us,” she said.
+
+Harrigan walked toward her threateningly.
+
+“Better lose than win a scab victory,” he bellowed.
+
+“Who are you anyway? What grafter sent you here?” he demanded, turning
+to Sam.
+
+He launched into a speech. “I have been watching this fellow, I know
+him. He has a scheme to break down the union and is being paid by the
+capitalists.”
+
+Sam waited to hear no more. Getting up he pulled on his canvas jacket
+and started for the door. He saw that already he had involved himself
+in a dozen violations of the unionist code and the idea of trying to
+convince Harrigan of his disinterestedness did not occur to him.
+
+“Do not mind me,” he said, “I am going.”
+
+He walked between the rows of frightened, white-faced girls and unbolted
+the door, the Jewish girl following. At the head of the stairway leading
+to the street he stopped and pointed back into the room.
+
+“Go back,” he said, handing her a roll of bills. “Carry on the work
+if you can. Get other machines and new printing. I will help you in
+secret.”
+
+Turning he ran down the stairs, hurried through the curious crowd
+standing at the foot, and walked rapidly along in front of the lighted
+stores. A cold rain, half snow, was falling. Beside him walked a young
+man with a brown pointed beard, one of the newspaper reporters who had
+interviewed him the day before.
+
+“Did Harrigan trim you?” asked the young man, and then added, laughing,
+“He told us he intended to throw you down stairs.”
+
+Sam walked on in silence, filled with wrath. He turned into a side
+street and stopped when his companion put a hand upon his arm.
+
+“This is our dump,” said the young man, pointing to a long low frame
+building facing the side street. “Come in and let us have your story. It
+should be a good one.”
+
+Inside the newspaper office another young man sat with his head lying
+on a flat-top desk. He was clad in a strikingly flashy plaid coat, had a
+little wizened, good-natured face and seemed to have been drinking. The
+young man with the beard explained Sam’s identity, taking the sleeping
+man by the shoulder and shaking him vigorously.
+
+“Wake up, Skipper! There’s a good story here!” he shouted. “The union
+has thrown out the mail-order strike leader!”
+
+The Skipper got to his feet and began shaking his head.
+
+“Of course, of course, Old Top, they would throw you out. You’ve got
+some brains. No man with brains can lead a strike. It’s against the laws
+of Nature. Something was bound to hit you. Did Roughneck come out from
+Pittsburgh?” he asked, turning to the young man of the brown beard.
+
+Then reaching above his head and taking a cap that matched his plaid
+coat from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. “Come on, Old Top. I’ve
+got to get a drink.”
+
+The two men went through a side door and down a dark alley, going in
+at the back door of a saloon. Mud lay deep in the alley and The Skipper
+sloshed through it, splattering Sam’s clothes and face. In the saloon at
+a table facing Sam, with a bottle of French wine between them, he began
+explaining.
+
+“I’ve a note coming due at the bank in the morning and no money to pay
+it,” he said. “When I have a note coming due I always have no money and
+I always get drunk. Then next morning I pay the note. I don’t know how
+I do it, but I always come out all right. It’s a system--Now about this
+strike.” He plunged into a discussion of the strike while men came in
+and out, laughing and drinking. At ten o’clock the proprietor locked
+the front door, drew the curtain, and coming to the back of the room sat
+down at the table with Sam and The Skipper, bringing another bottle of
+the French wine from which the two men continued drinking.
+
+“That man from Pittsburgh busted up your place, eh?” he said, turning
+to Sam. “A man came in here to-night and told me. He sent for the
+typewriter people and made them take away the machines.”
+
+When they were ready to leave, Sam took money from his pocket and
+offered to pay for the bottle of French wine ordered by The Skipper, who
+arose and stood unsteadily on his feet.
+
+“Do you mean to insult me?” he demanded indignantly, throwing a
+twenty-dollar bill on the table. The proprietor gave him back only
+fourteen dollars.
+
+“I might as well wipe off the slate while you’re flush,” he observed,
+winking at Sam.
+
+The Skipper sat down again, taking a pencil and pad of paper from his
+pocket, and throwing them on the table.
+
+“I want an editorial on the strike for the Old Rag,” he said to Sam. “Do
+one for me. Do something strong. Get a punch into it. I want to talk to
+my friend here.”
+
+Putting the pad of paper on the table Sam began writing his newspaper
+editorial. His head seemed wonderfully clear, his command of words
+unusually good. He called the attention of the public to the situation,
+the struggles of the striking girls and the intelligent fight they had
+been making to win a just cause, following this with paragraphs pointing
+out how the effectiveness of the work done had been annulled by the
+position taken by the labour and socialist leaders.
+
+“These fellows at bottom care nothing for results,” he wrote. “They are
+not thinking of the unemployed women with families to support, they are
+thinking only of themselves and their puny leadership which they fear
+is threatened. Now we shall have the usual exhibition of all the old
+things, struggle, and hatred and defeat.”
+
+When he had finished The Skipper and Sam went back through the alley
+to the newspaper office. The Skipper sloshed again through the mud
+and carried in his hand a bottle of red gin. At his desk he took the
+editorial from Sam’s hands and read it.
+
+“Perfect! Perfect to the thousandth part of an inch, Old Top,” he said,
+pounding Sam on the shoulder. “Just what the Old Rag wanted to say about
+the strike.” Then climbing upon the desk and putting the plaid coat
+under his head he went peacefully to sleep, and Sam, sitting beside the
+desk in a shaky office chair, slept also. At daybreak a black man with a
+broom in his hand woke them, and going into a long low room filled with
+presses The Skipper put his head under a water tap and came back waving
+a soiled towel and with water dripping from his hair.
+
+“Now for the day and the labours thereof,” he said, grinning at Sam and
+taking a long drink out of the gin bottle.
+
+After breakfast he and Sam took up their stand in front of the barber
+shop opposite the stairway leading to the shirtwaist factory. Sam’s girl
+with the pamphlets was gone as was also the soft-eyed Jewish girl, and
+in their places Frank and the Pittsburgh leader named Harrigan walked up
+and down. Again carriages and automobiles stood by the curb, and again
+a well-dressed woman got out of a machine and went toward three striking
+girls approaching along the sidewalk. The woman was met by Harrigan,
+shaking his fist and shouting, and getting back into the machine she
+drove off. From the stairway the flashily-dressed Hebrew looked at the
+crowd and laughed.
+
+“Where is the new strike leader--the mail-order strike leader?” he
+called to Frank.
+
+With the words, a working man with a dinner pail on his arm ran out of
+the crowd and knocked the Jew back into the stairway.
+
+“Punch him! Punch the dirty scab leader!” yelled Frank, dancing up and
+down on the sidewalk.
+
+Two policemen running forward began leading the workingman up the
+street, his dinner pail still clutched in one hand.
+
+“I know something,” The Skipper shouted, pounding Sam on the shoulder.
+“I know who will sign that note with me. The woman Harrigan drove back
+into her machine is the richest woman in town. I will show her your
+editorial. She will think I wrote it and it will get her. You’ll see.”
+ He ran off up the street, shouting back over his shoulder, “Come over to
+the dump, I want to see you again.”
+
+Sam returned to the newspaper office and sat down waiting for The
+Skipper who, after a time, came in, took off his coat and began writing
+furiously. From time to time he took long drinks out of the bottle of
+red gin, and after silently offering it to Sam, continued reeling off
+sheet after sheet of loosely-written matter.
+
+“I got her to sign the note,” he called over his shoulder to Sam. “She
+was furious at Harrigan and when I told her we were going to attack him
+and defend you she fell for it quick. I won out by following my system.
+I always get drunk and it always wins.”
+
+At ten o’clock the newspaper office was in a ferment. The little man
+with the brown pointed beard, and another, kept running to The Skipper
+asking advice, laying typewritten sheets before him, talking as he
+wrote.
+
+“Give me a lead. I want one more front page lead,” The Skipper kept
+bawling at them, working like mad.
+
+At ten thirty the door opened and Harrigan, accompanied by Frank, came
+in. Seeing Sam they stopped, looking at him uncertainly, and at the man
+at work at the desk.
+
+“Well, speak up. This is no ladies’ reception room. What do you fellows
+want?” snapped The Skipper, glaring at them.
+
+Frank, coming forward, laid a typewritten sheet on the desk, which the
+newspaper man read hurriedly.
+
+“Will you use it?” asked Frank.
+
+The Skipper laughed.
+
+“Wouldn’t change a word of it,” he shouted. “Sure I’ll use it. It’s what
+I wanted to make my point. You fellows watch me.”
+
+Frank and Harrigan went out and The Skipper, rushing to the door, began
+yelling into the room beyond.
+
+“Hey, you Shorty and Tom, I’ve got that last lead.”
+
+Coming back to his desk he began writing again, grinning as he worked.
+To Sam he handed the typewritten sheet prepared by Frank.
+
+“Dastardly attempt to win the cause of the working girls by dirty scab
+leaders and butter-fingered capitalist class,” it began, and after
+this followed a wild jumble of words, words without meaning, sentences
+without point in which Sam was called a mealy-mouthed mail-order musser
+and The Skipper was mentioned incidentally as a pusillanimous ink
+slinger.
+
+“I’ll run the stuff and comment on it,” declared The Skipper, handing
+Sam what he had written. It was an editorial inviting the public to
+read the article prepared for publication by the strike leaders and
+sympathising with the striking girls that their cause had to be lost
+because of the incompetence and lack of intelligence of their leaders.
+
+“Hurrah for Roughhouse, the brave man who leads working girls to defeat
+in order that he may retain leadership and drive intelligent effort out
+of the cause of labour,” wrote The Skipper.
+
+Sam looked at the sheets and out of the window where a snow storm
+raged. It seemed to him that a crime was being done and he was sick and
+disgusted at his own inability to stop it. The Skipper lighted a short
+black pipe and took his cap from a nail on the wall.
+
+“I’m the smoothest little newspaper thing in town and some financier as
+well,” he declared. “Let’s go have a drink.”
+
+After the drink Sam walked through the town toward the country. At the
+edge of town where the houses became scattered and the road started to
+drop away into a deep valley some one helloed behind him. Turning, he
+saw the soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.
+
+“Where are you going?” he asked, stopping to lean against a board fence,
+the snow falling upon his face.
+
+“I’m going with you,” said the girl. “You’re the best and the strongest
+man I’ve ever seen and I’m not going to let you get away. If you’ve got
+a wife it don’t matter. She isn’t what she should be or you wouldn’t be
+walking about the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you’re crazy,
+but I know better. I am going with you and I’m going to help you find
+what you want.”
+
+Sam wondered. She took a roll of bills from a pocket in her dress and
+gave it to him.
+
+“I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars,” she said.
+
+They stood looking at each other. She put out a hand and laid it on his
+arm. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with eager light looked into his.
+Her round breasts rose and fell.
+
+“Anywhere you say. I’ll be your servant if you ask it of me.”
+
+A wave of hot desire ran through Sam followed by a quick reaction. He
+thought of his months of weary seeking and his universal failure.
+
+“You are going back to town if I have to drive you there with stones,”
+ he told her, and turning ran down the valley leaving her standing by the
+board fence, her head buried in her arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in
+Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying
+or loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed
+to be a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women
+who met at the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away
+together. Sam found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings.
+In the year since he had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had
+grown more and more reflective. Little things--a smile on the lips of
+an ill-clad old man mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the
+flutter of a child’s hand from the doorway of a farmhouse--had furnished
+him food for hours of thought. Now he watched with interest the little
+incidents; the nods, the hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances
+around of the men and women who met for a moment at the corner. On the
+sidewalk near his doorway several middle-aged men, evidently from a
+large hotel around the corner, were eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry,
+furtive eyes the women in the crowd.
+
+A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. “Waiting for
+some one?” she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with
+the harried, uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the
+middle-aged men upon the sidewalk.
+
+“What are you doing here with your husband at work?” he ventured.
+
+She looked startled and then laughed.
+
+“Why don’t you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?”
+ she demanded, adding, “I don’t know who you are, but whoever you are I
+want to tell you that I’ve quit my husband.”
+
+“Why?” asked Sam.
+
+She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.
+
+“I guess you’re bluffing,” she said. “I don’t believe you know Alf at
+all. And I’m glad you don’t. I’ve quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just
+the same, if he saw me out here hustling.”
+
+Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a
+lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and
+beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered,
+“Hello, Sport!”
+
+Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in
+the eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of
+the lives of great numbers of people in the cities--of the men and
+women on the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe
+marriage had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together
+in the theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of
+all modern city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching
+hunger stood in the way of men’s getting hold of life and living it
+earnestly and purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all
+men and women wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in
+Caxton he was more than once startled by the flashes of brutality and
+coarseness in the speech and actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now
+as he walked in the streets of the city he thought that he had got past
+being startled. “It is a quality of our lives,” he decided. “American
+men and women have not learned to be clean and noble and natural, like
+their forests and their wide, clean plains.”
+
+He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other
+cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his
+lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.
+
+“We are no finer nor cleaner than these,” he said, “and we sprang from
+the big clean new land through which I have been walking all these
+months. Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly
+expressed hunger in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will
+it never shrive itself and understand itself, and turn fiercely and
+energetically toward the building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?”
+
+“It won’t unless you help,” came the answer from some hidden part of
+him.
+
+Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and
+he wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of
+vice, and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in
+futile attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward
+human betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or
+stopping the playing of baseball on Sunday.
+
+As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously
+in league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as
+something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague
+charm.
+
+“For me,” he reflected, “there have been no François Villons or Sapphos
+in the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only
+heart-breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces
+and torn, greasy finery.”
+
+He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how
+he, as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly’s
+suggestion and had been helped by him--helped and frightened and made
+to see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of
+a second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed
+across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of “Nana’s Brother,”
+ saying with a smirk, “That’s some sporty stuff.” And he wondered what he
+should have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the
+bookseller’s comment was intended to arouse.
+
+In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in
+which he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to
+sleep sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman’s saloon
+in Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting
+that it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.
+
+“Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth,” he thought, coming to
+a street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a
+dingy poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. “It gets
+into all modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears
+lewd stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men
+from the cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the
+stove in village stores.”
+
+Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things
+were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and
+daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of
+Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could
+but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the
+glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in
+that city and in every city he had known.
+
+Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far
+gone in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam’s mind leaped back to
+those first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man
+he had left behind him in Caxton.
+
+“You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than
+that painter’s son of Caxton,” he reminded himself, “and yet he embraced
+vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading
+talk and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part
+with able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was
+too rare a thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the
+lips-that-touch-liquor-shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was
+reserved for the lips that did not invite.”
+
+He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business
+men of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of
+himself, quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and
+to shout the innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in
+Chicago barrooms. Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one
+to keep himself to himself. But on these carouses he let himself go,
+and got a reputation for daring audacity by slapping men on the back and
+singing songs with them. A glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for
+a time he had really believed there was such a thing as high flying vice
+that glistens in the sun.
+
+Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city’s
+streets, he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.
+
+He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted
+questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained
+unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they
+walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at
+the windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams,
+and cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the
+place; men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their
+faces; sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were
+locked out.
+
+He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from
+farms and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men
+believers in the golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and
+women of the town laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked
+in that way. He also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible
+mistress that lurked at the bottom of men’s tales of the submerged
+world. He wanted his golden girl. He was like the naïve German lad in
+the South Water Street warehouses who had once said to him--he was a
+frugal soul--“I would like to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and
+modest and who will be my mistress and not charge anything.”
+
+Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He
+had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and
+now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not
+be made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks
+of vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no
+housecleaning days in the tenderloin?
+
+During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this
+matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the
+scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary
+decent social life could not go on without it. Often during the past
+year Sam had thought of the man’s talk and his brain had reeled before
+the thought. In towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little
+girls come laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered
+which of them would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in
+his hour of depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his
+dinner table might be made to walk with him and to share with him his
+thoughts.
+
+Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam
+continued his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and
+soothed his mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought
+with gratitude that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of
+faces rolling up to him under the lights filled him with peace. “There
+is so much of life,” he thought, “it must come to some end.”
+
+Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the
+faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose,
+the faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on
+which the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers
+ached to get a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas
+in enduring pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able
+to say, “Here are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves
+and for your children.”
+
+In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little
+cigar counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly
+at a woman clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her
+machine to wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.
+
+Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that
+had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one
+woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little
+Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness--her quick,
+deft fingers and her muscular little arms. “Another such as she,” he
+muttered, “has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman;
+a hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the
+warm furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy--a shot, and
+red blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws
+in the air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her
+white limbs, her cheeks, her hair.”
+
+For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like
+himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit
+of the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could
+achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the
+power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces
+in the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers
+the story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.
+
+In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer’s talk, and in Chicago and
+New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of
+the artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the
+long street he thought that he did understand.
+
+Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an
+affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her
+face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message
+of the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong,
+bullet-like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold.
+He remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love
+passage with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How
+eagerly both man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place.
+How her strong hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor
+by the office building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so
+free from the marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of
+a cattle raiser had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the
+beauty of that face.
+
+On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman,
+standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called
+softly, and turning he went to her.
+
+“I am not a customer,” he said, looking at her thin face and bony
+hands, “but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am
+getting hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to
+me so that I won’t get to thinking.”
+
+“You’re a queer bird,” said the woman, taking his arm. “What have you
+done that you don’t want to think?”
+
+Sam said nothing.
+
+“There’s a place over there,” she said, pointing to the lighted front of
+a cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.
+
+Sam kept on walking.
+
+“If you do not mind,” he said, “I will pick the place. I want to buy
+a good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good
+cook in the kitchen.”
+
+They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he
+waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited
+he went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When
+she returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam
+thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work
+on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still
+waiting.
+
+“I thought maybe it was a stall,” she said.
+
+They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with
+clean washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private
+dining-rooms. Sam had been there several times during the month, and the
+food had been well cooked.
+
+They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself,
+and she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not
+studying her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his
+loneliness, and because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out
+from the darkness by the church door, had made an appeal.
+
+She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not
+defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy’s.
+Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had
+the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother’s hands. Now that she
+sat before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his
+mother.
+
+After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman
+of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.
+
+“Are you going to take me anywhere after this--after we leave here?” she
+said.
+
+“I am going to take you to the door of your room, that’s all.”
+
+“I’m glad,” she said; “it’s a long time since I’ve had an evening like
+this. It makes me feel clean.”
+
+For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home
+town in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came
+into his mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she
+in turn told of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about
+hearing which made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be
+repeated to her and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire,
+letting her talk. Her father had been a captain of a small steamboat
+plying up and down Long Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd
+woman and a good housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village
+and had a garden back of their house. The captain had not married until
+he was forty-five and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother
+dying a year later.
+
+The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy
+and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in
+the garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with
+thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had
+married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the
+house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her
+life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills
+and the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature,
+undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of
+her husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by
+various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a
+time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that
+her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the
+town.
+
+“There wasn’t any use wasting words when I found he didn’t care for me
+or for the baby and wouldn’t support us, so I left him,” she said in a
+level, businesslike way.
+
+When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and
+had taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her
+savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to
+work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with
+her hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with
+a small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine
+man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a
+gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing
+to be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was
+seven dollars a week.
+
+“And so,” she said, “I began going on the street. I knew no one and
+there was nothing else to do. I couldn’t do that in the town where the
+boy lived, so I came away. I’ve gone from city to city, working mostly
+for patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in
+the streets. I’m not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many
+of them care about me. I don’t like to have them touch me with their
+hands. I can’t drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to
+be left alone. Perhaps I shouldn’t have married. Not that I minded my
+husband. We got along very well until I had to stop giving him money.
+When I found where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to
+have at least a thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened
+to me. When I found there wasn’t anything to do but just go on the
+streets, I went. I tried doing other work, but hadn’t the strength, and
+when it came to the test I cared more about the boy than I did about
+myself--any woman would. I thought he was of more importance than what I
+wanted.
+
+“It hasn’t been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with
+me I walk along the street praying that I won’t shudder and draw away
+when he touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away
+and I won’t get any money.
+
+“And then they talk and lie about themselves. I’ve had them try to work
+off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make
+love to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That’s the
+hard part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies
+over and over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to
+these others lying to me.”
+
+She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and
+sat looking into the fire.
+
+“My mother,” she began again, “didn’t always wear a clean dress. She
+couldn’t. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor
+or out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was
+dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be
+that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I’m losing it all.
+All evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear
+isn’t clean. Most of the time I don’t care. Being clean doesn’t go with
+what I am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men
+will stop when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done
+well I don’t go on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean
+up my room and bathe myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the
+basement at night. I don’t seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am
+on the streets.”
+
+The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German
+waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He
+stopped by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From
+another room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing
+voices. The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam
+felt that he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to
+him he should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly.
+She had a quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.
+
+As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.
+
+“I wouldn’t mind about you,” she said, looking at him frankly.
+
+Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. “It’s been a good evening,” he
+said, “we’ll go through with it as it stands.”
+
+“Thanks for that,” she said, “and there is something else I want to tell
+you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don’t want to
+go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on
+gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders.”
+
+As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic
+breathing as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped
+and waved her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish.
+Sam had a feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting
+citizens in the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the
+long deserted street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton.
+Like Mike, he lifted up his voice in the night.
+
+“Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth
+hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,
+and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and
+hurt and destroy?”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out
+of his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia,
+looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly
+lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his
+bill at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely
+abandoned the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about
+the country and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in
+villages, and had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his
+income.
+
+He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the
+wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood.
+The spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain
+spring mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in
+his experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran
+through the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when
+the call of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind,
+filling him with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in
+his brain, yet at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was,
+after all, a man of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water
+Street and LaSalle Street had all left their marks on him, and so,
+throwing his canvas jacket into a corner of the room in the West
+Virginia hotel, he returned to the haunts of his kind.
+
+In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and
+into the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named
+Jackson.
+
+Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he
+had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again
+the quiet elegance of the surroundings.
+
+“Hello, Moneymaker,” said Jackson, heartily. “Heard you had gone to a
+nunnery.”
+
+Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson’s eyes open
+with astonishment.
+
+“You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man’s spending month after
+month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then
+suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this,” he
+observed.
+
+Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.
+
+“How little you know me,” he said. “I would live my life in the open but
+that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New
+York run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will
+you go back to Morrison and Prince and money making?”
+
+Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before
+him. How satisfied and happy he looked.
+
+“I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely,” he said.
+
+“They are a rotten crew,” Jackson assured him, “and I am taking a night
+train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over.”
+
+On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old
+man who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.
+
+“I am going to sail from Seattle,” he said, “and go everywhere and hunt
+everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind
+of thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there
+until I die.”
+
+“I will go with you,” said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at
+Detroit and continued westward with his new acquaintance.
+
+For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous,
+big-hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early
+investment in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to
+his lusty, primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion
+hunts, elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of
+Africa Sam took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the
+beach smoking black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over
+and that Sam was a fool to go.
+
+After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life
+of a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He
+went on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern
+lakes, canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat
+about clubs and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and
+women of that world.
+
+Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on
+the Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw
+her. For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure
+as she walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had
+come to mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come
+face to face with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train
+to the city feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed
+after the years.
+
+In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily
+and almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from
+his hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting
+with Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant,
+got into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode
+about town laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to
+passers-by in the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place
+at the edge of town, where the party spent hours around a long table,
+drinking, and singing songs.
+
+One of the girls sat on Sam’s lap and put an arm about his neck.
+
+“Give me some money, rich man,” she said.
+
+Sam looked at her closely.
+
+“Who are you?” he asked.
+
+She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that
+she had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.
+
+“I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes,” she said frankly,
+“but if Tim saw me here he would kill me.”
+
+Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a
+taxicab drove back to his hotel.
+
+After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in
+a kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which
+he did not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited,
+planned a return to business which he did not execute, and month after
+month continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon
+and begin drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry
+and talkative, calling men by their first names, slapping chance
+acquaintances on the back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young
+men intent upon gain. In the early summer he got in with a party of
+young men from New York and with them spent months in sheer idle waste
+of time. Together they drove high-powered automobiles on long trips,
+drank, quarrelled, and went on board a yacht to carouse, alone or with
+women. At times Sam would leave his companions and spend days riding
+through the country on fast trains, sitting for hours in silence looking
+out of the window at the passing country and wondering at his endurance
+of the life he led. For some months he carried with him a young man whom
+he called a secretary and paid a large salary for his ability to tell
+stories and sing clever songs, only to discharge him suddenly for
+telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of another tale told by the
+stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed’s hotel in the Illinois
+town.
+
+From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings,
+Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless
+way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right
+way of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He
+lost his native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for
+hours by little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and
+talking nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew
+habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and
+more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about
+hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to
+sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor’s head.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train
+intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had
+heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he
+thought he would do something for them.
+
+“I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them
+my money,” he thought. “Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by
+setting them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear.”
+
+At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see
+an attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days
+stayed about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had
+picked up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and
+gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men
+and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of
+enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that
+shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.
+
+In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he
+came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the
+river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.
+
+“I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the
+river,” he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. “Take
+us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it
+costs.”
+
+It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he
+went among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to
+continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him
+on the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.
+
+“Sing louder,” he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his
+companions.
+
+A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to
+perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the
+deck before the shouting crowd.
+
+“Now dance!” he growled, “or I will throw you into the river.”
+
+The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked
+at him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along
+the deck or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take
+effect, a queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction
+came to him and he raised his hand for silence.
+
+“I want to see a woman who is a mother,” he shouted. “I want to see a
+woman who has borne children.”
+
+A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the
+group gathered about the dancer.
+
+“I have borne children--three of them,” she said, laughing up into his
+face. “I can bear more of them.”
+
+Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair
+on the deck. The crowd laughed.
+
+“Belle is after his roll,” whispered a short, fat man to his companion,
+a tall woman with blue eyes.
+
+As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing
+songs, went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman
+beside Sam pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.
+
+“My children are there. They are getting supper now,” she said.
+
+She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting
+along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang
+a song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam’s companion kept
+time with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain
+stood looking up the river.
+
+“Turn back,” he said, “I am tired of this crew.”
+
+On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside
+Sam.
+
+“We will go to my house,” she said quietly, “just you and me. I will
+show you the kids.”
+
+Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the
+distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had
+grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small
+groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell
+Sam her story.
+
+She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.
+
+“I drove him crazy,” she said, laughing quietly. “He wanted me to stay
+at home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me
+down town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn’t come he
+would go away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn’t a
+man. He would do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and
+left the kids on my hands.”
+
+In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in
+an open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place,
+eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but
+grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.
+
+“We will go to my house. I want to have you alone,” said the woman.
+
+They drove through street after street of workingmen’s houses, where
+children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their
+bare legs flashing in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after
+them, holding to the back of the carriage.
+
+The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up
+and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of
+the running boys.
+
+“Run, you little devils,” she cried.
+
+They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under
+the lights.
+
+“Give me a silver dollar,” she said, turning to Sam, and when he had
+given it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp.
+The two boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her.
+
+Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps,
+striking Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black
+crawling thing, alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she
+crept forward and dropped it down the neck of the driver.
+
+In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam’s
+head was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran
+back over the years he had passed since breaking his word to Sue, and a
+scorn of all effort burned in him.
+
+“It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth,” he thought. “He comes to
+a fine end in life.”
+
+On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the
+air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night
+there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the
+carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood
+climbed through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half
+hope awoke in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing,
+intoxicated woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot
+through him. He began thinking of what she had said before the laughing
+crowd on the steamer.
+
+“I have borne three children and can bear more.”
+
+His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain,
+and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him.
+He thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of
+life unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command
+and direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company.
+
+“Else why am I here?” he muttered, looking away from the vacant,
+laughing face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver
+on the seat in front. “Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why
+went I about seeking Truth?”
+
+His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles
+and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her
+black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling
+beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her
+hand.
+
+“Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have
+been,” he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he
+thought, was being tossed about by life.
+
+Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped.
+Through the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before
+a bar drinking foaming glasses of beer, the hanging lamps above their
+heads throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell
+came out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and
+shouted. “O Will, come out here.”
+
+A man clad in a long white apron and with his shirt sleeves rolled to
+his elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had
+started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place.
+
+“Will you run it?” he asked.
+
+“Sure,” she said. “The kids can take care of themselves.”
+
+At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got
+out of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk
+skirting a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a
+tangled mass of bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and
+in the distance the grey body of the river showed faint and far away.
+The undergrowth was so thick that, looking down, one saw only the
+tops of the growth, with here and there a grey outcrop of rocks that
+glistened in the moonlight.
+
+Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the
+houses facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily
+on Sam’s arm, her feet groping for the steps. They passed through a door
+and into a long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the
+room went up to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the
+end one looked into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor
+and about a table, under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three
+children. Sam looked at them closely. His head reeled and he clutched at
+the knob of the door. A boy of perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his
+face and on the backs of his hands and with reddish-brown hair and brown
+eyes, was reading aloud. Beside him a younger boy with black hair and
+black eyes, and with his knees doubled up on the chair in front of him
+so that his chin rested on them, sat listening. A tiny girl, pale and
+with yellow hair and dark circles under her eyes, slept in another
+chair, her head hanging uncomfortably to one side. She was, one would
+have said, seven, the black-haired boy ten.
+
+The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman;
+the sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired
+boy straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder.
+
+“Hello, Mother,” he said heartily.
+
+The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the
+dining-room and pulled aside the curtains.
+
+“Come here, Joe,” she said.
+
+The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside,
+supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he passed
+she struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him
+reeling into the dining-room.
+
+“Now you, Tom,” she called to the black-haired boy. “I told you kids to
+wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten
+and nothing done and you two reading books again.”
+
+The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam
+walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she
+winced and twisted in his grasp.
+
+“You come with me,” he said.
+
+He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned
+heavily on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face.
+
+At the top of the stairway he stopped.
+
+“We go in here,” she said, pointing to a door.
+
+He took her into the room. “You get to sleep,” he said, and going out
+closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.
+
+Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off
+the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by
+the table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.
+
+Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back
+at him self-consciously.
+
+“Which of you two puts Mary to bed?” he asked, and then, without waiting
+for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. “Let Tom do it,” he
+said. “I will help you here.”
+
+Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going
+busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him
+dry wiping towels. Sam’s coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.
+
+The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within
+Sam’s breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though
+the lash of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old
+memories began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood,
+his mother at work among other people’s soiled clothes, his father Windy
+coming home drunk, and the chill in his mother’s heart and in his own.
+There was something men and women owed to childhood, not because it
+was childhood but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any
+question of fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.
+
+In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house
+there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam’s spirit. The boy Joe
+went quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves.
+Somewhere on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The
+backs of the hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and
+competent the hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled,
+unshaken by life. Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He
+had always wanted quickness and firmness within his own body, the health
+of the body that is a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an
+American and down deep within himself was the moral fervor that is
+American and that had become so strangely perverted in himself and
+others. As so often happened with him, when he was deeply stirred, an
+army of vagrant thoughts ran through his head. The thoughts had taken
+the place of the perpetual scheming and planning of his days as a man of
+affairs, but as yet all his thinking had brought him to nothing and had
+only left him more shaken and uncertain then ever.
+
+The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to
+escape the shy silent presence of the boy. “Has life quite gone from me?
+Am I but a dead thing walking about?” he asked himself. The presence of
+the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown
+tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad.
+Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?
+
+The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two
+boys said good night to the strange man in their mother’s house. Joe,
+the bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook
+it solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.
+
+“I’ll be around here to-morrow I think,” Sam said huskily.
+
+The boys were gone, into the silence of the house, and Sam walked up and
+down in the little room. He was restless as though about to start on a
+new journey and half unconsciously began running his hands over his body
+wishing it strong and hard as when he tramped the road. As on the day
+when he had walked out of the Chicago Club bound on his hunt for
+Truth, he let his mind go so that it played freely over his past life,
+reviewing and analysing.
+
+For hours he sat on the porch or walked up and down in the room where
+the lamp still burned brightly. Again the smoke from his pipe tasted
+good on his tongue and all the night air had a sweetness that brought
+back to him the walk beside the bridle path in Jackson Park when Sue had
+given him herself, and with herself a new impulse in life.
+
+It was two o’clock when he lay down upon a couch in the living-room and
+blew out the light. He did not undress, but threw his shoes on the floor
+and lay looking at a wide path of moonlight that came through the open
+door. In the darkness it seemed that his mind worked more rapidly and
+that the events and motives of his restless years went streaming past
+like living things upon the floor.
+
+Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy
+with sleep, ran through the upper part of the house.
+
+“Mother! O Mother!” called the sleepy voice, and Sam thought he could
+hear the little body moving restlessly in bed.
+
+Silence followed. He sat upon the edge of the couch, waiting. It seemed
+to him that he was coming to something; that his brain that had for
+hours been working more and more rapidly was about to produce the thing
+for which he waited. He felt as he had felt that night as he waited in
+the corridor of the hospital.
+
+In the morning the three children came down the stairs and finished
+dressing in the long room, the little girl coming last, carrying her
+shoes and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A
+cool morning wind blew up from the river and through the open screened
+doors as he and Joe cooked breakfast, and later as the four of them
+sat at the table Sam tried to talk but did not make much progress. His
+tongue was heavy and the children seemed looking at him with strange
+questioning eyes. “Why are you here?” their eyes asked.
+
+For a week Sam stayed in the city, coming daily to the house. With the
+children he talked a little, and in the evening, when the mother had
+gone away, the little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the
+porch outside and while the boys sat reading under the lamp inside she
+went to sleep in his arms. Her body was warm and the breath came softly
+and sweetly from between her lips. Sam looked down the bluffside and saw
+the country and the river far below, sweet in the moonlight. Tears came
+into his eyes. Was a new sweet purpose growing within him or were the
+tears but evidence of self pity? He wondered.
+
+One night the black-haired woman again came home far gone in drink, and
+again Sam led her up the stairs to see her fall muttering and babbling
+upon the bed. Her companion, a little flashily dressed man with a beard,
+had run off at the sight of Sam standing in the living-room under the
+lamp. The two boys, to whom he had been reading, said nothing, looking
+self-consciously at the book upon the table and occasionally out of the
+corner of their eyes at their new friend. In a few minutes they too
+went up the stairs, and as on that first night, they put out their hands
+awkwardly.
+
+Through the night Sam again sat in the darkness outside or lay awake on
+the couch. “I will make a new try, adopt a new purpose in life now,” he
+said to himself.
+
+When the children had gone to school the next morning, Sam took a car
+and went into the city, going first to a bank to have a large draft
+cashed. Then he spent many busy hours going from store to store and
+buying clothes, caps, soft underwear, suit cases, dresses, night
+clothes, and books. Last of all he bought a large dressed doll. All
+these things he had sent to his room at the hotel, leaving a man there
+to pack the trunks and suit cases, and get them to the station. A large,
+motherly-looking woman, an employé of the hotel, who passed through the
+hall, offered to help with the packing.
+
+After another visit or two Sam got back upon the car and went again to
+the house. In his pockets he had several thousands of dollars in large
+bills. He had remembered the power of cash in deals he had made in the
+past.
+
+“I will see what it will do here,” he thought.
+
+In the house Sam found the black-haired woman lying on a couch in the
+living-room. As he came in at the door she arose unsteadily and looked
+at him.
+
+“There’s a bottle in the cupboard in the kitchen,” she said. “Get me a
+drink. Why do you hang about here?”
+
+Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with
+her by putting the bottle to his lips and throwing back his head.
+
+“What was your husband like?” he asked.
+
+“Who? Jack?” she said. “Oh, he was all right. He was stuck on me. He
+stood for anything until I brought men home here. Then he got crazy and
+went away.” She looked at Sam and laughed.
+
+“I didn’t care much for him,” she added. “He couldn’t make money enough
+for a live woman.”
+
+Sam began talking of the saloon she intended buying.
+
+“The children will be a bother, eh?” he said.
+
+“I have an offer for the house,” she said. “I wish I didn’t have the
+kids. They are a nuisance.”
+
+“I have been figuring that out,” Sam told her. “I know a woman in the
+East who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I
+should like to do something to help you. I might take them to her.”
+
+“In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away,” she laughed, and took
+another drink from the bottle.
+
+Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown
+attorney.
+
+“Get a neighbour in here to witness this,” he said. “The woman will want
+things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and
+puts it on her.”
+
+She looked at him suspiciously. “What’s the graft? Who gets stuck for
+the fares down east?”
+
+Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a
+tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.
+
+“Sign here,” he said, putting the paper before her. “Here is your
+neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent.”
+
+The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at
+Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle
+lay down again on the couch.
+
+“If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed,”
+ she declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but
+at the moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take
+an advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in
+life, for purpose to come into his own life.
+
+Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at
+the brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an
+automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came
+out.
+
+He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children
+accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found
+the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit
+cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an
+envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked
+up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride
+of them.
+
+At two o’clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of
+the boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York
+flyer--bound for Sue.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money,
+that he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does
+not mean much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy
+Americans than is commonly believed. Something has happened to him
+that has happened to the others also, to how many of the others? Men
+of courage, with strong bodies and quick brains, men who have come of
+a strong race, have taken up what they had thought to be the banner of
+life and carried it forward. Growing weary they have stopped in a road
+that climbs a long hill and have leaned the banner against a tree. Tight
+brains have loosened a little. Strong convictions have become weak. Old
+gods are dying.
+
+  “It is only when you are torn from your mooring and
+    drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come
+    near to you.”
+
+The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with
+determination.
+
+What is inscribed on it?
+
+It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have
+believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves
+Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been
+unknown among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life
+and courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads
+had to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What
+in Europe has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the
+generations we must build now, in a lifetime.
+
+In our father’s day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio,
+Kentucky, and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in
+our fathers and mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land.
+When the land was conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in
+our American souls the wolves still howl.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three
+children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws
+of failure.
+
+But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still
+there. It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New
+England roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it
+looked down at him from the stars.
+
+Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept.
+Perhaps his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it
+began then.
+
+The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was
+a house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam’s
+breast there was a feeling of something alive, growing.
+
+Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in
+Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by
+raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night,
+coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children--a
+little inclined toward tears and homesickness--she was flustered and
+nervous.
+
+Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate
+to the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe
+and Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come
+out at the front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little
+frightened. Her hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam
+thought her figure almost boyish in its slenderness.
+
+With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask
+many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question
+she did ask.
+
+“Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?” she
+asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the
+children.
+
+Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a
+help.
+
+“They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep,” he
+said, as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with
+him three strange children were an everyday affair.
+
+Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the
+house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought
+together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other
+and little Mary put her arms about Sam’s neck and hid her face on his
+shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue’s
+arms. “She will be your mother now,” he said defiantly, not looking at
+Sue.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and
+very nobly by Sue.
+
+There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted
+on that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come
+into her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly
+romantic act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening,
+both Sam and the children had been installed in the house.
+
+A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions
+regarding food for the children. “They will want bread and milk, and
+beds must be found for them,” she said, and then, although her mind was
+still filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam’s children
+by some other woman, she took her plunge. “This is Mr. McPherson, my
+husband, and these are our three children,” she announced to the puzzled
+and smiling servant.
+
+They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden.
+In the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A
+little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more.
+“Don’t bring lamps, a candle will do,” Sue said, and she went to stand
+near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point
+of breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive
+sense of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children
+feel at home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys.
+“There is a barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you
+everything,” she said, smiling at them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue’s house and a
+road that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and
+the Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In
+the feeble light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick
+branches overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into
+the darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before
+the house.
+
+He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling
+for possession of his person.
+
+There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring
+always to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way,
+trampled people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped
+forward, the man of achievement.
+
+And then there was another personality, a quite different being
+altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a
+timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or
+walked before men.
+
+What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive
+thing within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him
+out of his place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many
+times it had tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him.
+
+It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against
+it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into
+darkness.
+
+He kept whispering to himself. Perhaps now the test of his life had
+come. There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. A basis
+for love and understanding might be found with her. Later the impulse
+could be carried on and into the lives of the children he had found and
+brought to her.
+
+A vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life,
+kneeling before the intricate wonder of life, came to him, but he was
+again afraid. When he saw Sue’s figure, dressed in white, a dim, pale,
+flashing thing, coming down steps toward him, he wanted to run away, to
+hide himself in the darkness.
+
+And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because
+she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human
+perplexities.
+
+He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive
+within him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her.
+“Nothing but boldness will answer now,” he kept saying to himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to
+tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he
+came to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path
+and stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.
+
+Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically.
+“I have taken them and you, of course,” she said, after he had stepped
+to her and had put his arm about her waist. “My life alone hasn’t turned
+out to be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them
+and you, in the house there. The two years you have been gone have
+seemed like an age. What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought
+they must be your own children by some other woman, some woman you had
+found to take my place. It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two
+must be nearly fourteen.”
+
+They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue’s command,
+found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped
+and excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.
+
+In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue’s figure
+going through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room.
+Presently she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A
+place was being prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which
+he was to live what was left of his life.
+
+With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure
+of the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped
+down over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more
+intense.
+
+Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house
+darkly seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman,
+Sue, ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives
+together. Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three
+children who must begin life as he had once done, who must listen to
+his voice, the voice of Sue and all the other voices they would hear
+speaking words in the world. They would grow up and thrust out into a
+world of people as he had done.
+
+To what end?
+
+There was an end. Sam believed that stoutly. “To shift the load to the
+shoulders of children is cowardice,” he whispered to himself.
+
+An almost overpowering desire to turn and run away from the house, from
+Sue who had so generously received him and from the three new lives into
+which he had thrust himself and in which in the future he would have to
+be concerned, took hold of him. His body shook with the strength of it,
+but he stood still under the trees. “I cannot run away from life. I must
+face it. I must begin to try to understand these other lives, to love,”
+ he told himself. The buried inner thing in him thrust itself up.
+
+How still the night had become. In the tree beneath which he stood a
+bird moved on some slender branch and there was a faint rustling of
+leaves. The darkness before and behind was a wall through which he
+must in some way manage to thrust himself into the light. With his hand
+before him, as though trying to push aside some dark blinding mass, he
+moved out of the grove and thus moving stumbled up the steps and into
+the house.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s Windy McPherson’s Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windy McPherson's Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Windy McPherson's Son
+
+Author: Sherwood Anderson
+
+
+Release Date: February, 2005  [EBook #7443]
+This file was first posted on April 30, 2003
+Last Updated: May 31, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anne Soulard, Eric Eldred, John R. Bilderback,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON
+
+By Sherwood Anderson
+
+
+
+To The Living Men And Women Of My Own Middle Western Home Town This Book
+Is Dedicated
+
+
+
+
+WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam
+McPherson, a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black
+eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he
+walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping
+town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked
+cautiously, lifting his bare feet and putting them down with extreme
+deliberateness on the hot, dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried
+a bundle of newspapers. A long black cigar was in his hand.
+
+In front of the station he stopped; and Jerry Donlin, the baggage-man,
+seeing the cigar in his hand, laughed, and slowly drew the side of his
+face up into a laboured wink.
+
+"What is the game to-night, Sam?" he asked.
+
+Sam stepped to the baggage-room door, handed him the cigar, and
+began giving directions, pointing into the baggage-room, intent and
+business-like in the face of the Irishman's laughter. Then, turning, he
+walked across the station platform to the main street of the town, his
+eyes bent on the ends of his fingers on which he was making computations
+with his thumb. Jerry looked after him, grinning so that his red gums
+made a splash of colour on his bearded face. A gleam of paternal pride
+lit his eyes and he shook his head and muttered admiringly. Then,
+lighting the cigar, he went down the platform to where a wrapped
+bundle of newspapers lay against the building, under the window of the
+telegraph office, and taking it in his arm disappeared, still grinning,
+into the baggage-room.
+
+Sam McPherson walked down Main Street, past the shoe store, the bakery,
+and the candy store kept by Penny Hughes, toward a group lounging at
+the front of Geiger's drug store. Before the door of the shoe store he
+paused a moment, and taking a small note-book from his pocket ran his
+finger down the pages, then shaking his head continued on his way, again
+absorbed in doing sums on his fingers.
+
+Suddenly, from among the men by the drug store, a roaring song broke the
+evening quiet of the street, and a voice, huge and guttural, brought a
+smile to the boy's lips:
+
+  "He washed the windows and he swept the floor,
+  And he polished up the handle of the big front door.
+  He polished that handle so carefullee,
+  That now he's the ruler of the queen's navee."
+
+The singer, a short man with grotesquely wide shoulders, wore a long
+flowing moustache, and a black coat, covered with dust, that reached to
+his knees. He held a smoking briar pipe in his hand, and with it beat
+time for a row of men sitting on a long stone under the store window and
+pounding on the sidewalk with their heels to make a chorus for the song.
+Sam's smile broadened into a grin as he looked at the singer, Freedom
+Smith, a buyer of butter and eggs, and past him at John Telfer, the
+orator, the dandy, the only man in town, except Mike McCarthy, who kept
+his trousers creased. Among all the men of Caxton, Sam most admired
+John Telfer and in his admiration had struck upon the town's high light.
+Telfer loved good clothes and wore them with an air, and never allowed
+Caxton to see him shabbily or indifferently dressed, laughingly
+declaring that it was his mission in life to give tone to the town.
+
+John Telfer had a small income left him by his father, once a banker
+in the town, and in his youth he had gone to New York to study art, and
+later to Paris; but lacking ability or industry to get on had come back
+to Caxton where he had married Eleanor Millis, a prosperous milliner.
+They were the most successful married pair in Caxton, and after years
+of life together they were still in love; were never indifferent to
+each other, and never quarrelled; Telfer treated his wife with as much
+consideration and respect as though she were a sweetheart, or a guest in
+his house, and she, unlike most of the wives in Caxton, never ventured
+to question his goings and comings, but left him free to live his own
+life in his own way while she attended to the millinery business.
+
+At the age of forty-five John Telfer was a tall, slender, fine looking
+man, with black hair and a little black pointed beard, and with
+something lazy and care-free in his every movement and impulse. Dressed
+in white flannels, with white shoes, a jaunty cap upon his head,
+eyeglasses hanging from a gold chain, and a cane lightly swinging from
+his hand, he made a figure that might have passed unnoticed on the
+promenade before some fashionable summer hotel, but that seemed a breach
+of the laws of nature when seen on the streets of a corn-shipping town
+in Iowa. And Telfer was aware of the extraordinary figure he cut; it was
+a part of his programme of life. Now as Sam approached he laid a hand on
+Freedom Smith's shoulder to check the song, and, with his eyes twinkling
+with good-humour, began thrusting with his cane at the boy's feet.
+
+"He will never be ruler of the queen's navee," he declared, laughing and
+following the dancing boy about in a wide circle. "He is a little mole
+that works underground intent upon worms. The trick he has of tilting up
+his nose is only his way of smelling out stray pennies. I have it from
+Banker Walker that he brings a basket of them into the bank every day.
+One of these days he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket."
+
+Circling about on the stone sidewalk and dancing to escape the flying
+cane, Sam dodged under the arm of Valmore, a huge old blacksmith with
+shaggy clumps of hair on the back of his hands, and sought refuge
+between him and Freedom Smith. The blacksmith's hand stole out and lay
+upon the boy's shoulder. Telfer, his legs spread apart and the cane
+hooked upon his arm, began rolling a cigarette; Geiger, a yellow skinned
+man with fat cheeks and with hands clasped over his round paunch, smoked
+a black cigar, and as he sent each puff into the air, grunted forth his
+satisfaction with life. He was wishing that Telfer, Freedom Smith,
+and Valmore, instead of moving on to their nightly nest at the back of
+Wildman's grocery, would come into his place for the evening. He
+thought he would like to have the three of them there night after night
+discussing the doings of the world.
+
+Quiet once more settled down upon the sleepy street. Over Sam's
+shoulder, Valmore and Freedom Smith talked of the coming corn crop and
+the growth and prosperity of the country.
+
+"Times are getting better about here, but the wild things are almost
+gone," said Freedom, who in the winter bought hides and pelts.
+
+The men sitting on the stone beneath the window watched with idle
+interest Telfer's labours with paper and tobacco. "Young Henry Kerns
+has got married," observed one of them, striving to make talk. "He
+has married a girl from over Parkertown way. She gives lessons in
+painting--china painting--kind of an artist, you know."
+
+An ejaculation of disgust broke from Telfer: his fingers trembled and
+the tobacco that was to have been the foundation of his evening smoke
+rained on the sidewalk.
+
+"An artist!" he exclaimed, his voice tense with excitement. "Who said
+artist? Who called her that?" He glared fiercely about. "Let us have an
+end to this blatant misuse of fine old words. To say of one that he is
+an artist is to touch the peak of praise."
+
+Throwing his cigarette paper after the scattered tobacco he thrust
+one hand into his trouser pocket. With the other he held the cane,
+emphasising his points by ringing taps upon the pavement. Geiger, taking
+the cigar between his fingers, listened with open mouth to the outburst
+that followed. Valmore and Freedom Smith dropped their conversation and
+with broad smiles upon their faces gave attention, and Sam McPherson,
+his eyes round with wonder and admiration, felt again the thrill that
+always ran through him under the drum beats of Telfer's eloquence.
+
+"An artist is one who hungers and thirsts after perfection, not one
+who dabs flowers upon plates to choke the gullets of diners," declared
+Telfer, setting himself for one of the long speeches with which he loved
+to astonish the men of Caxton, and glaring down at those seated upon the
+stone. "It is the artist who, among all men, has the divine audacity.
+Does he not hurl himself into a battle in which is engaged against him
+all of the accumulative genius of the world?"
+
+Pausing, he looked about for an opponent upon whom he might pour the
+flood of his eloquence, but on all sides smiles greeted him. Undaunted,
+he rushed again to the charge.
+
+"A business man--what is he?" he demanded. "He succeeds by outwitting
+the little minds with which he comes in contact. A scientist is of
+more account--he pits his brains against the dull unresponsiveness of
+inanimate matter and a hundredweight of black iron he makes do the work
+of a hundred housewives. But an artist tests his brains against the
+greatest brains of all times; he stands upon the peak of life and hurls
+himself against the world. A girl from Parkertown who paints flowers
+upon dishes to be called an artist--ugh! Let me spew forth the thought!
+Let me cleanse my mouth! A man should have a prayer upon his lips who
+utters the word artist!"
+
+"Well, we can't all be artists and the woman can paint flowers upon
+dishes for all I care," spoke up Valmore, laughing good naturedly. "We
+can't all paint pictures and write books."
+
+"We do not want to be artists--we do not dare to be," shouted Telfer,
+whirling and shaking his cane at Valmore. "You have a misunderstanding
+of the word."
+
+He straightened his shoulders and threw out his chest and the boy
+standing beside the blacksmith threw up his chin, unconsciously
+imitating the swagger of the man.
+
+"I do not paint pictures; I do not write books; yet am I an artist,"
+declared Telfer, proudly. "I am an artist practising the most difficult
+of all arts--the art of living. Here in this western village I stand
+and fling my challenge to the world. 'On the lip of not the greatest of
+you,' I cry, 'has life been more sweet.'"
+
+He turned from Valmore to the men upon the stone.
+
+"Make a study of my life," he commanded. "It will be a revelation to
+you. With a smile I greet the morning; I swagger in the noontime; and
+in the evening, like Socrates of old, I gather a little group of you
+benighted villagers about me and toss wisdom into your teeth, striving
+to teach you judgment in the use of great words."
+
+"You talk an almighty lot about yourself, John," grumbled Freedom Smith,
+taking his pipe from his mouth.
+
+"The subject is complex, it is varied, it is full of charm," Telfer
+answered, laughing.
+
+Taking a fresh supply of tobacco and paper from his pocket, he rolled
+and lighted a cigarette. His fingers no longer trembled. Flourishing his
+cane he threw back his head and blew smoke into the air. He thought
+that in spite of the roar of laughter that had greeted Freedom Smith's
+comment, he had vindicated the honour of art and the thought made him
+happy.
+
+To the newsboy, who had been leaning against the storefront lost in
+admiration, it seemed that he had caught in Telfer's talk an echo of the
+kind of talk that must go on among men in the big outside world. Had
+not this Telfer travelled far? Had he not lived in New York and Paris?
+Without understanding the sense of what had been said, Sam felt that it
+must be something big and conclusive. When from the distance there came
+the shriek of a locomotive, he stood unmoved, trying to comprehend the
+meaning of Telfer's outburst over the lounger's simple statement.
+
+"There's the seven forty-five," cried Telfer, sharply. "Is the war
+between you and Fatty at an end? Are we going to lose our evening's
+diversion? Has Fatty bluffed you out or are you growing rich and lazy
+like Papa Geiger here?"
+
+Springing from his place beside the blacksmith and grasping the bundle
+of newspapers, Sam ran down the street, Telfer, Valmore, Freedom Smith
+and the loungers following more slowly.
+
+When the evening train from Des Moines stopped at Caxton, a blue-coated
+train news merchant leaped hurriedly to the platform and began looking
+anxiously about.
+
+"Hurry, Fatty," rang out Freedom Smith's huge voice, "Sam's already half
+through one car."
+
+The young man called "Fatty" ran up and down the station platform.
+"Where is that bundle of Omaha papers, you Irish loafer?" he shouted,
+shaking his fist at Jerry Donlin who stood upon a truck at the front of
+the train, up-ending trunks into the baggage car.
+
+Jerry paused with a trunk dangling in mid-air. "In the baggage-room, of
+course. Hurry, man. Do you want the kid to work the whole train?"
+
+An air of something impending hung over the idlers upon the platform,
+the train crew, and even the travelling men who began climbing off the
+train. The engineer thrust his head out of the cab; the conductor, a
+dignified looking man with a grey moustache, threw back his head and
+shook with mirth; a young man with a suit-case in his hand and a long
+pipe in his mouth ran to the door of the baggage-room, calling, "Hurry!
+Hurry, Fatty! The kid is working the entire train. You won't be able to
+sell a paper."
+
+The fat young man ran from the baggage-room to the platform and shouted
+again to Jerry Donlin, who was now slowly pushing the empty truck along
+the platform. From the train came a clear voice calling, "Latest Omaha
+papers! Have your change ready! Fatty, the train newsboy, has fallen
+down a well! Have your change ready, gentlemen!"
+
+Jerry Donlin, followed by Fatty, again disappeared from sight. The
+conductor, waving his hand, jumped upon the steps of the train. The
+engineer pulled in his head and the train began to move.
+
+The fat young man emerged from the baggage-room, swearing revenge upon
+the head of Jerry Donlin. "There was no need to put it under a mail
+sack!" he shouted, shaking his fist. "I'll be even with you for this."
+
+Followed by the shouts of the travelling men and the laughter of the
+idlers upon the platform he climbed upon the moving train and began
+running from car to car. Off the last car dropped Sam McPherson, a smile
+upon his lips, the bundle of newspapers gone, his pocket jingling with
+coins. The evening's entertainment for the town of Caxton was at an end.
+
+John Telfer, standing by the side of Valmore, waved his cane in the air
+and began talking.
+
+"Beat him again, by Gad!" he exclaimed. "Bully for Sam! Who says the
+spirit of the old buccaneers is dead? That boy didn't understand what I
+said about art, but he is an artist just the same!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Windy McPherson, the father of the Caxton newsboy, Sam McPherson, had
+been war touched. The civilian clothes that he wore caused an itching
+of the skin. He could not forget that he had once been a sergeant in a
+regiment of infantry and had commanded a company through a battle fought
+in ditches along a Virginia country road. He chafed under the fact of
+his present obscure position in life. Had he been able to replace his
+regimentals with the robes of a judge, the felt hat of a statesman, or
+even with the night stick of a village marshal life might have retained
+something of its sweetness, but to have ended by becoming an obscure
+housepainter in a village that lived by raising corn and by feeding that
+corn to red steers--ugh!--the thought made him shudder. He looked with
+envy at the blue coat and the brass buttons of the railroad agent; he
+tried vainly to get into the Caxton Cornet Band; he got drunk to forget
+his humiliation and in the end he fell to loud boasting and to the
+nursing of a belief within himself that in truth not Lincoln nor Grant
+but he himself had thrown the winning die in the great struggle. In his
+cups he said as much and the Caxton corn grower, punching his neighbour
+in the ribs, shook with delight over the statement.
+
+When Sam was a twelve year old, barefooted boy upon the streets a kind
+of backwash of the wave of glory that had swept over Windy McPherson in
+the days of '61 lapped upon the shores of the Iowa village. That strange
+manifestation called the A. P. A. movement brought the old soldier to
+a position of prominence in the community. He founded a local branch
+of the organisation; he marched at the head of a procession through the
+streets; he stood on a corner and pointing a trembling forefinger
+to where the flag on the schoolhouse waved beside the cross of Rome,
+shouted hoarsely, "See, the cross rears itself above the flag! We shall
+end by being murdered in our beds!"
+
+But although some of the hard-headed, money-making men of Caxton joined
+the movement started by the boasting old soldier and although for the
+moment they vied with him in stealthy creepings through the streets to
+secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands the movement
+subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its leader more
+desolate.
+
+In the little house at the end of the street by the shores of Squirrel
+Creek, Sam and his sister Kate regarded their father's warlike
+pretensions with scorn. "The butter is low, father's army leg will ache
+to-night," they whispered to each other across the kitchen table.
+
+Following her mother's example, Kate, a tall slender girl of sixteen
+and already a bread winner with a clerkship in Winney's drygoods store,
+remained silent under Windy's boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate
+them, did not always succeed. There was now and then a rebellious
+muttering that should have warned Windy. It had once burst into an open
+quarrel in which the victor of a hundred battles withdrew defeated from
+the field. Windy, half-drunk, had taken an old account book from a shelf
+in the kitchen, a relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when he had
+first come to Caxton, and had begun reading to the little family a list
+of names of men who, he claimed, had been the cause of his ruin.
+
+"There is Tom Newman, now," he exclaimed excitedly. "Owns a hundred
+acres of good corn-growing land and won't pay for the harness on the
+backs of his horses or for the ploughs in his barn. The receipt he has
+from me is forged. I could put him in prison if I chose. To beat an old
+soldier!--to beat one of the boys of '61!--it is shameful!"
+
+"I have heard of what you owed and what men owed you; you had none the
+worst of it," Sam protested coldly, while Kate held her breath and Jane
+McPherson, at work over the ironing board in the corner, half turned and
+looked silently at the man and the boy, the slightly increased pallor of
+her long face the only sign that she had heard.
+
+Windy had not pressed the quarrel. Standing for a moment in the middle
+of the kitchen, holding the book in his hand, he looked from the pale
+silent mother by the ironing board to the son now standing and staring
+at him, and, throwing the book upon the table with a bang, fled the
+house. "You don't understand," he had cried, "you don't understand the
+heart of a soldier."
+
+In a way the man was right. The two children did not understand the
+blustering, pretending, inefficient old man. Having moved shoulder to
+shoulder with grim, silent men to the consummation of great deeds Windy
+could not get the flavour of those days out of his outlook upon life.
+Walking half drunk in the darkness along the sidewalks of Caxton on
+the evening of the quarrel the man became inspired. He threw back his
+shoulders and walked with martial tread; he drew an imaginary sword from
+its scabbard and waved it aloft; stopping, he aimed carefully at a body
+of imaginary men who advanced yelling toward him across a wheatfield; he
+felt that life in making him a housepainter in a farming village in Iowa
+and in giving him an unappreciative son had been cruelly unfair; he wept
+at the injustice of it.
+
+The American Civil War was a thing so passionate, so inflaming, so vast,
+so absorbing, it so touched to the quick the men and women of those
+pregnant days that but a faint echo of it has been able to penetrate
+down to our days and to our minds; no real sense of it has as yet crept
+into the pages of a printed book; it yet wants its Thomas Carlyle; and
+in the end we are put to the need of listening to old fellows boasting
+on our village streets to get upon our cheeks the living breath of it.
+For four years the men of American cities, villages and farms walked
+across the smoking embers of a burning land, advancing and receding as
+the flame of that universal, passionate, death-spitting thing swept down
+upon them or receded toward the smoking sky-line. Is it so strange that
+they could not come home and begin again peacefully painting houses or
+mending broken shoes? A something in them cried out. It sent them to
+bluster and boast upon the street corners. When people passing continued
+to think only of their brick laying and of their shovelling of corn
+into cars, when the sons of these war gods walking home at evening and
+hearing the vain boastings of the fathers began to doubt even the facts
+of the great struggle, a something snapped in their brains and they fell
+to chattering and shouting their vain boastings to all as they looked
+hungrily about for believing eyes.
+
+When our own Thomas Carlyle comes to write of our Civil War he will make
+much of our Windy McPhersons. He will see something big and pathetic in
+their hungry search for auditors and in their endless war talk. He
+will go filled with eager curiosity into little G. A. R. halls in the
+villages and think of the men who coming there night after night, year
+after year, told and re-told endlessly, monotonously, their story of
+battle.
+
+Let us hope that in his fervour for the old fellows he will not fail to
+treat tenderly the families of those veteran talkers; the families that
+with their breakfasts and their dinners, by the fire at evening, through
+fast day and feast day, at weddings and at funerals got again and again
+endlessly, everlastingly this flow of war words. Let him reflect that
+peaceful men in corn-growing counties do not by choice sleep among the
+dogs of war nor wash their linen in the blood of their country's foe.
+Let him, in his sympathy with the talkers, remember with kindness the
+heroism of the listeners.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On a summer day Sam McPherson sat on a box before Wildman's grocery lost
+in thought. In his hand he held the little yellow account book and in
+this he buried himself, striving to wipe from his consciousness a scene
+being enacted before his eyes upon the street.
+
+The realisation of the fact that his father was a confirmed liar and
+braggart had for years cast a shadow over his days and the shadow had
+been made blacker by the fact that in a land where the least fortunate
+can laugh in the face of want he had more than once stood face to face
+with poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation was
+money in the bank and with all the ardour of his boy's heart he strove
+to realise that answer. He wanted to be a money-maker and the totals at
+the foot of the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones
+that marked the progress he had already made. They told him that the
+daily struggles with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton's streets on
+bleak winter evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when crowds
+filled the stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he worked
+among them tirelessly and persistently were not without fruit.
+
+Suddenly, above the murmur of men's voices on the street, his father's
+voice rose loud and insistent. A block further down the street, leaning
+against the door of Hunter's jewelry store, Windy talked at the top of
+his lungs, pumping his arms up and down with the air of a man making a
+stump speech.
+
+"He is making a fool of himself," thought Sam, and returned to his
+bankbook, striving in the contemplation of the totals at the foot of the
+pages to shake off the dull anger that had begun to burn in his brain.
+Glancing up again, he saw that Joe Wildman, son of the grocer and a
+boy of his own age, had joined the group of men laughing and jeering at
+Windy. The shadow on Sam's face grew heavier.
+
+Sam had been at Joe Wildman's house; he knew the air of plenty and of
+comfort that hung over it; the table piled high with meat and potatoes;
+the group of children laughing and eating to the edge of gluttony; the
+quiet, gentle father who amid the clamour and the noise did not raise
+his voice, and the well-dressed, bustling, rosy-cheeked mother. As a
+contrast to this scene he began to call up in his mind a picture of
+life in his own home, getting a kind of perverted pleasure out of his
+dissatisfaction with it. He saw the boasting, incompetent father telling
+his endless tales of the Civil War and complaining of his wounds; the
+tall, stoop-shouldered, silent mother with the deep lines in her long
+face, everlastingly at work over her washtub among the soiled clothes;
+the silent, hurriedly-eaten meals snatched from the kitchen table; and
+the long winter days when ice formed upon his mother's skirts and
+Windy idled about town while the little family subsisted upon bowls of
+cornmeal mush everlastingly repeated.
+
+Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half gone
+in drink, and knew that he was boasting of his part in the Civil War.
+"He is either doing that or telling of his aristocratic family or lying
+about his birthplace," he thought resentfully, and unable any longer to
+endure the sight of what seemed to him his own degradation, he got up
+and went into the grocery where a group of Caxton citizens stood talking
+to Wildman of a meeting to be held that morning at the town hall.
+
+Caxton was to have a Fourth of July celebration. The idea, born in the
+heads of the few, had been taken up by the many. Rumours of it had run
+through the streets late in May. It had been talked of in Geiger's drug
+store, at the back of Wildman's grocery, and in the street before the
+New Leland House. John Telfer, the town's one man of leisure, had
+for weeks been going from place to place discussing the details with
+prominent men. Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall over
+Geiger's drug store and to a man the citizens of Caxton had turned out
+for the meeting. The housepainter had come down off his ladder, the
+clerks were locking the doors of the stores, men went along the streets
+in groups bound for the hall. As they went they shouted to each other.
+"The old town has woke up," they called.
+
+On a corner by Hunter's jewelry store Windy McPherson leaned against a
+building and harangued the passing crowd.
+
+"Let the old flag wave," he shouted excitedly, "let the men of Caxton
+show the true blue and rally to the old standards."
+
+"That's right, Windy, expostulate with them," shouted a wit, and a roar
+of laughter drowned Windy's reply.
+
+Sam McPherson also went to the meeting in the hall. He came out of the
+grocery store with Wildman and went along the street looking at the
+sidewalk and trying not to see the drunken man talking in front of the
+jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up
+and down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the
+town's life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned.
+He squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window
+ledge where he could watch the men come in and find seats.
+
+As Caxton's one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a
+living and a kind of standing in the town's life. To be a newsboy or a
+bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in
+the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great
+men and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day
+likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town owe to
+future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the men of Caxton
+and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the window ledge of the
+hall while the other boys of the town waited on the sidewalk below.
+
+John Telfer was chairman of the mass meeting. He was always chairman of
+public meetings in Caxton. The industrious silent men of position in
+the town envied his easy, bantering style of public address, while
+pretending to treat it with scorn. "He talks too much," they said,
+making a virtue of their own inability with apt and clever words.
+
+Telfer did not wait to be appointed chairman of the meeting, but went
+forward, climbed the little raised platform at the end of the hall,
+and usurped the chairmanship. He walked up and down on the platform
+bantering with the crowd, answering gibes, calling to well-known men,
+getting and giving keen satisfaction with his talent. When the hall was
+filled with men he called the meeting to order, appointed committees and
+launched into a harangue. He told of plans made to advertise the big
+day in other towns and to get low railroad rates arranged for excursion
+parties. The programme, he said, included a musical carnival with brass
+bands from other towns, a sham battle by the military company at the
+fairgrounds, horse races, speeches from the steps of the town hall,
+and fireworks in the evening. "We'll show them a live town here," he
+declared, walking up and down the platform and swinging his cane, while
+the crowd applauded and shouted its approval.
+
+When a call came for voluntary subscriptions to pay for the fun, the
+audience quieted down. One or two men got up and started to go out,
+grumbling that it was a waste of money. The fate of the celebration was
+on the knees of the gods.
+
+Telfer arose to the occasion. He called out the names of the departing,
+and made jests at their expense so that they dropped back into their
+chairs unable to face the roaring laughter of the crowd, and shouted
+to a man at the back of the hall to close and bolt the door. Men began
+getting up in various parts of the hall and calling out sums, Telfer
+repeating the name and the amount in a loud voice to young Tom Jedrow,
+clerk in the bank, who wrote them down in a book. When the amount
+subscribed did not meet with his approval, he protested and the crowd
+backing him up forced the increase he demanded. When a man did not rise,
+he shouted at him and the man answered back an amount.
+
+Suddenly in the hall a diversion arose. Windy McPherson emerged from the
+crowd at the back of the hall and walked down the centre aisle to the
+platform. He walked unsteadily straightening his shoulders and thrusting
+out his chin. When he got to the front of the hall he took a roll of
+bills from his pocket and threw it on the platform at the chairman's
+feet. "From one of the boys of '61," he announced in a loud voice.
+
+The crowd shouted and clapped its hands with delight as Telfer picked
+up the bills and ran his finger over them. "Seventeen dollars from our
+hero, the mighty McPherson," he shouted while the bank clerk wrote the
+name and the amount in the book and the crowd continued to make merry
+over the title given the drunken soldier by the chairman.
+
+The boy on the window ledge slipped to the floor and stood with burning
+cheeks behind the mass of men. He knew that at home his mother was
+doing a family washing for Lesley, the shoe merchant, who had given five
+dollars to the Fourth-of-July fund, and the resentment he had felt on
+seeing his father talking to the crowd before the jewelry store blazed
+up anew.
+
+After the taking of subscriptions, men in various parts of the hall
+began making suggestions for added features for the great day. To some
+of the speakers the crowd listened respectfully, at others they
+hooted. An old man with a grey beard told a long rambling story of a
+Fourth-of-July celebration of his boyhood. When voices interrupted he
+protested and shook his fist in the air, pale with indignation.
+
+"Oh, sit down, old daddy," shouted Freedom Smith and a murmur of
+applause greeted this sensible suggestion.
+
+Another man got up and began to talk. He had an idea. "We will have," he
+said, "a bugler mounted on a white horse who will ride through the town
+at dawn blowing the reveille. At midnight he will stand on the steps of
+the town hall and blow taps to end the day."
+
+The crowd applauded. The idea had caught their fancy and had instantly
+taken a place in their minds as one of the real events of the day.
+
+Again Windy McPherson emerged from the crowd at the back of the hall.
+Raising his hand for silence he told the crowd that he was a bugler,
+that he had been a regimental bugler for two years during the Civil War.
+He said that he would gladly volunteer for the place.
+
+The crowd shouted and John Telfer waved his hand. "The white horse for
+you, McPherson," he said.
+
+Sam McPherson wriggled along the wall and out at the now unbolted door.
+He was filled with astonishment at his father's folly, and was still
+more astonished at the folly of these other men in accepting his
+statement and handing over the important place for the big day. He knew
+that his father must have had some part in the war as he was a member of
+the G. A. R., but he had no faith at all in the stories he had heard
+him relate of his experiences in the war. Sometimes he caught himself
+wondering if there ever had been such a war and thought that it must be
+a lie like everything else in the life of Windy McPherson. For years he
+had wondered why some sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did
+not rise, and in a matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing
+as the Civil War had ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in
+the minds of pompous old men demanding unearned glory of their fellows.
+Now hurrying along the street with burning cheeks, he decided that after
+all there must have been such a war. He had had the same feeling about
+birthplaces and there could be no doubt that people were born. He
+had heard his father claim as his birthplace Kentucky, Texas, North
+Carolina, Louisiana and Scotland. The thing had left a kind of defect in
+his mind. To the end of his life when he heard a man tell the place of
+his birth he looked up suspiciously, and a shadow of doubt crossed his
+mind.
+
+From the mass meeting Sam went home to his mother and presented the case
+bluntly. "The thing will have to be stopped," he declared, standing
+with blazing eyes before her washtub. "It is too public. He can't blow
+a bugle; I know he can't. The whole town will have another laugh at our
+expense."
+
+Jane McPherson listened in silence to the boy's outburst, then, turning,
+went back to rubbing clothes, avoiding his eyes.
+
+With his hands thrust into his trousers pocket Sam stared sullenly at
+the ground. A sense of justice told him not to press the matter, but as
+he walked away from the washtub and out at the kitchen door, he hoped
+there would be plain talk of the matter at supper time. "The old fool!"
+he protested, addressing the empty street. "He is going to make a show
+of himself again."
+
+When Windy McPherson came home that evening, something in the eyes of
+the silent wife, and the sullen face of the boy, startled him. He passed
+over lightly his wife's silence but looked closely at his son. He felt
+that he faced a crisis. In the emergency he was magnificent. With a
+flourish, he told of the mass meeting, and declared that the citizens
+of Caxton had arisen as one man to demand that he take the responsible
+place as official bugler. Then, turning, he glared across the table at
+his son.
+
+Sam, openly defiant, announced that he did not believe his father
+capable of blowing a bugle.
+
+Windy roared with amazement. He rose from the table declaring in a loud
+voice that the boy had wronged him; he swore that he had been for two
+years bugler on the staff of a colonel, and launched into a long story
+of a surprise by the enemy while his regiment lay asleep in their tents,
+and of his standing in the face of a storm of bullets and blowing his
+comrades to action. Putting one hand on his forehead he rocked back and
+forth as though about to fall, declaring that he was striving to
+keep back the tears wrenched from him by the injustice of his son's
+insinuation and, shouting so that his voice carried far down the street,
+he declared with an oath that the town of Caxton should ring and echo
+with his bugling as the sleeping camp had echoed with it that night in
+the Virginia wood. Then dropping again into his chair, and resting his
+head upon his hand, he assumed a look of patient resignation.
+
+Windy McPherson was victorious. In the little house a great stir
+and bustle of preparation arose. Putting on his white overalls and
+forgetting for the time his honourable wounds the father went day after
+day to his work as a housepainter. He dreamed of a new blue uniform for
+the great day and in the end achieved the realisation of his dreams, not
+however without material assistance from what was known in the house
+as "Mother's Wash Money." And the boy, convinced by the story of the
+midnight attack in the woods of Virginia, began against his judgment to
+build once more an old dream of his father's reformation. Boylike, the
+scepticism was thrown to the winds and he entered with zeal into the
+plans for the great day. As he went through the quiet residence streets
+delivering the late evening papers, he threw back his head and revelled
+in the thought of a tall blue-clad figure on a great white horse passing
+like a knight before the gaping people. In a fervent moment he even drew
+money from his carefully built-up bank account and sent it to a firm in
+Chicago to pay for a shining new bugle that would complete the picture
+he had in his mind. And when the evening papers were distributed he
+hurried home to sit on the porch before the house discussing with his
+sister Kate the honours that had alighted upon their family.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With the coming of dawn on the great day the three McPhersons hurried
+hand in hand toward Main Street. In the street, on all sides of them,
+they saw people coming out of houses rubbing their eyes and buttoning
+their coats as they went along the sidewalk. All of Caxton seemed
+abroad.
+
+In Main Street the people were packed on the sidewalk, and massed on the
+curb and in the doorways of the stores. Heads appeared at windows, flags
+waved from roofs or hung from ropes stretched across the street, and a
+great murmur of voices broke the silence of the dawn.
+
+Sam's heart beat so that he was hard put to it to keep back the tears
+from his eyes. He thought with a gasp of the days of anxiety that had
+passed when the new bugle had not come from the Chicago company, and in
+retrospect he suffered again the horror of the days of waiting. It
+had been all important. He could not blame his father for raving and
+shouting about the house, he himself had felt like raving, and had put
+another dollar of his savings into telegrams before the treasure was
+finally in his hands. Now, the thought that it might not have come
+sickened him, and a little prayer of thankfulness rose from his lips.
+To be sure one might have been secured from a nearby town, but not a new
+shining one to go with his father's new blue uniform.
+
+A cheer broke from the crowd massed along the street. Into the street
+rode a tall figure seated upon a white horse. The horse was from
+Culvert's livery and the boys there had woven ribbons into its mane and
+tail. Windy McPherson, sitting very straight in the saddle and looking
+wonderfully striking in the new blue uniform and the broad-brimmed
+campaign hat, had the air of a conqueror come to receive the homage of
+the town. He wore a gold band across his chest and against his hip
+rested the shining bugle. With stern eyes he looked down upon the
+people.
+
+The lump in the throat of the boy hurt more and more. A great wave of
+pride ran over him, submerging him. In a moment he forgot all the past
+humiliations the father had brought upon his family, and understood
+why his mother remained silent when he, in his blindness, had wanted to
+protest against her seeming indifference. Glancing furtively up he saw
+a tear lying upon her cheek and felt that he too would like to sob aloud
+his pride and happiness.
+
+Slowly and with stately stride the horse walked up the street between
+the rows of silent waiting people. In front of the town hall the tall
+military figure, rising in the saddle, took one haughty look at the
+multitude, and then, putting the bugle to his lips, blew.
+
+Out of the bugle came only a thin piercing shriek followed by a squawk.
+Again Windy put the bugle to his lips and again the same dismal
+squawk was his only reward. On his face was a look of helpless boyish
+astonishment.
+
+And in a moment the people knew. It was only another of Windy
+McPherson's pretensions. He couldn't blow a bugle at all.
+
+A great shout of laughter rolled down the street. Men and women sat on
+the curbstones and laughed until they were tired. Then, looking at the
+figure upon the motionless horse, they laughed again.
+
+Windy looked about him with troubled eyes. It is doubtful if he had ever
+had a bugle to his lips until that moment, but he was filled with wonder
+and astonishment that the reveille did not roll forth. He had heard
+the thing a thousand times and had it clearly in his mind; with all his
+heart he wanted it to roll forth, and could picture the street ringing
+with it and the applause of the people; the thing, he felt, was in him,
+and it was only a fatal blunder in nature that it did not come out at
+the flaring end of the bugle. He was amazed at this dismal end of his
+great moment--he was always amazed and helpless before facts.
+
+The crowd began gathering about the motionless, astonished figure,
+laughter continuing to send them off into something near convulsions.
+Grasping the bridle of the horse, John Telfer began leading it off up
+the street. Boys whooped and shouted at the rider, "Blow! Blow!"
+
+The three McPhersons stood in a doorway leading into a shoe store. The
+boy and the mother, white and speechless with humiliation, dared not
+look at each other. In the flood of shame sweeping over them they stared
+straight before them with hard, stony eyes.
+
+The procession led by John Telfer at the bridle of the white horse
+marched down the street. Looking up, the eyes of the laughing, shouting
+man met those of the boy and a look of pain shot across his face.
+Dropping the bridle he hurried away through the crowd. The procession
+moved on, and watching their chance the mother and the two children
+crept home along side streets, Kate weeping bitterly. Leaving them at
+the door Sam went straight on down a sandy road toward a small wood.
+"I've got my lesson. I've got my lesson," he muttered over and over as
+he went.
+
+At the edge of the wood he stopped and leaning on a rail fence watched
+until he saw his mother come out to the pump in the back yard. She had
+begun to draw water for the day's washing. For her also the holiday was
+at an end. A flood of tears ran down the boy's cheeks, and he shook his
+fist in the direction of the town. "You may laugh at that fool Windy,
+but you shall never laugh at Sam McPherson," he cried, his voice shaking
+with excitement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+One evening, when he had grown so that he outtopped Windy, Sam McPherson
+returned from his paper route to find his mother arrayed in her black,
+church-going dress. An evangelist was at work in Caxton and she had
+decided to hear him. Sam shuddered. In the house it was an understood
+thing that when Jane McPherson went to church her son went with her.
+There was nothing said. Jane McPherson did all things without words,
+always there was nothing said. Now she stood waiting in her black
+dress when her son came in at the door and he hurriedly put on his best
+clothes and went with her to the brick church.
+
+Valmore, John Telfer, and Freedom Smith, who had taken upon themselves
+a kind of common guardianship of the boy and with whom he spent evening
+after evening at the back of Wildman's grocery, did not go to church.
+They talked of religion and seemed singularly curious and interested in
+what other men thought on the subject but they did not allow themselves
+to be coaxed into a house of worship. To the boy, who had become a
+fourth member of the evening gatherings at the back of the grocery
+store, they would not talk of God, answering the direct questions he
+sometimes asked by changing the subject. Once Telfer, the reader of
+poetry, answered the boy. "Sell papers and fill your pockets with money
+but let your soul sleep," he said sharply.
+
+In the absence of the others Wildman talked more freely. He was a
+spiritualist and tried to make Sam see the beauties of that faith.
+On long summer afternoons the grocer and the boy spent hours driving
+through the streets in a rattling old delivery wagon, the man striving
+earnestly to make clear to the boy the shadowy ideas of God that were in
+his mind.
+
+Although Windy McPherson had been the leader of a Bible class in his
+youth, and had been a moving spirit at revival meetings during his early
+days in Caxton, he no longer went to church and his wife did not ask
+him to go. On Sunday mornings he lay abed. If there was work to be done
+about the house or yard he complained of his wounds. He complained of
+his wounds when the rent fell due, and when there was a shortage of food
+in the house. Later in his life and after the death of Jane McPherson
+the old soldier married the widow of a farmer by whom he had four
+children and with whom he went to church twice on Sunday. Kate wrote
+Sam one of her infrequent letters about it. "He has met his match," she
+said, and was tremendously pleased.
+
+In church on Sunday mornings Sam went regularly to sleep, putting his
+head on his mother's arm and sleeping throughout the service. Jane
+McPherson loved to have the boy there beside her. It was the one thing
+in life they did together and she did not mind his sleeping the time
+away. Knowing how late he had been upon the streets at the paper selling
+on Saturday evenings, she looked at him with eyes filled with tenderness
+and sympathy. Once the minister, a man with brown beard and hard,
+tightly-closed mouth, spoke to her. "Can't you keep him awake?" he
+asked impatiently. "He needs the sleep," she said and hurried past the
+minister and out of the church, looking ahead of her and frowning.
+
+The evening of the evangelist meeting was a summer evening fallen on a
+winter month. All day the warm winds had come up from the southwest. Mud
+lay soft and deep in the streets and among the little pools of water
+on the sidewalks were dry spots from which steam arose. Nature had
+forgotten herself. A day that should have sent old fellows to their
+nests behind stoves in stores sent them forth to loaf in the sun. The
+night fell warm and cloudy. A thunder storm threatened in the month of
+February.
+
+Sam walked along the sidewalk with his mother bound for the brick
+church, wearing a new grey overcoat. The night did not demand the
+overcoat but Sam wore it out of an excess of pride in its possession.
+The overcoat had an air. It had been made by Gunther the tailor after a
+design sketched on the back of a piece of wrapping paper by John Telfer
+and had been paid for out of the newsboy's savings. The little
+German tailor, after a talk with Valmore and Telfer, had made it at a
+marvellously low price. Sam swaggered as he walked.
+
+He did not sleep in church that evening; indeed he found the quiet
+church filled with a medley of strange noises. Folding carefully the new
+coat and laying it beside him on the seat he looked with interest at
+the people, feeling within him something of the nervous excitement with
+which the air was charged. The evangelist, a short, athletic-looking man
+in a grey business suit, seemed to the boy out of place in the church.
+He had the assured business-like air of the travelling men who come to
+the New Leland House, and Sam thought he looked like a man who had goods
+to be sold. He did not stand quietly back of the pulpit giving out the
+text as did the brown-bearded minister, nor did he sit with closed eyes
+and clasped hands waiting for the choir to finish singing. While the
+choir sang he ran up and down the platform waving his arms and shouting
+excitedly to the people on the church benches, "Sing! Sing! Sing! For
+the glory of God, sing!"
+
+When the song was finished, he began talking, quietly at first, of life
+in the town. As he talked he grew more and more excited. "The town is a
+cesspool of vice!" he shouted. "It reeks with evil! The devil counts it
+a suburb of hell!"
+
+His voice rose, and sweat ran off his face. A sort of frenzy seized him.
+He pulled off his coat and throwing it over a chair ran up and down the
+platform and into the aisles among the people, shouting, threatening,
+pleading. People began to stir uneasily in their seats. Jane McPherson
+stared stonily at the back of the woman in front of her. Sam was
+horribly frightened.
+
+The newsboy of Caxton was not without a hunger for religion. Like all
+boys he thought much and often of death. In the night he sometimes
+awakened cold with fear, thinking that death must be just without the
+door of his room waiting for him. When in the winter he had a cold and
+coughed, he trembled at the thought of tuberculosis. Once, when he was
+taken with a fever, he fell asleep and dreamed that he had died and was
+walking on the trunk of a fallen tree over a ravine filled with lost
+souls that shrieked with terror. When he awoke he prayed. Had some one
+come into his room and heard his prayer he would have been ashamed.
+
+On winter evenings as he walked through the dark streets with the papers
+under his arm he thought of his soul. As he thought a tenderness came
+over him; a lump came into his throat and he pitied himself; he felt
+that there was something missing in his life, something he wanted very
+badly.
+
+Under John Telfer's influence, the boy, who had quit school to devote
+himself to money making, read Walt Whitman and had a season of admiring
+his own body with its straight white legs, and the head that was poised
+so jauntily on the body. Sometimes he would awaken on summer nights and
+be so filled with strange longing that he would creep out of bed and,
+pushing open the window, sit upon the floor, his bare legs sticking out
+beyond his white nightgown, and, thus sitting, yearn eagerly toward some
+fine impulse, some call, some sense of bigness and of leadership that
+was absent from the necessities of the life he led. He looked at the
+stars and listened to the night noises, so filled with longing that the
+tears sprang to his eyes.
+
+Once, after the affair of the bugle, Jane McPherson had been ill--and
+the first touch of the finger of death reaching out to her--had sat with
+her son in the warm darkness in the little grass plot at the front of
+the house. It was a clear, warm, starlit evening without a moon, and as
+the two sat closely together a sense of the coming of death crept over
+the mother.
+
+At the evening meal Windy McPherson had talked voluminously, ranting
+and shouting about the house. He said that a housepainter who had a real
+sense of colour had no business trying to work in a hole like Caxton.
+He had been in trouble with a housewife about a colour he had mixed for
+painting a porch floor and at his own table he raved about the woman
+and what he declared her lack of even a primitive sense of colour. "I
+am sick of it all," he shouted, going out of the house and up the street
+with uncertain steps. His wife had been unmoved by his outburst, but in
+the presence of the quiet boy whose chair touched her own she trembled
+with a strange new fear and began to talk of the life after death,
+making effort after effort to get at what she wanted to say, and only
+succeeding in finding expression for her thoughts in little sentences
+broken by long painful pauses. She told the boy she had no doubt at all
+that there was some kind of future life and that she believed she should
+see and live with him again after they had finished with this world.
+
+One day the minister who had been annoyed because he had slept in his
+church, stopped Sam on the street to talk to him of his soul. He said
+that the boy should be thinking of making himself one of the brothers in
+Christ by joining the church. Sam listened silently to the talk of the
+man, whom he instinctively disliked, but in his silence felt there was
+something insincere. With all his heart he wanted to repeat a sentence
+he had heard from the lips of grey-haired, big-fisted Valmore--"How can
+they believe and not lead a life of simple, fervent devotion to their
+belief?" He thought himself superior to the thin-lipped man who talked
+with him and had he been able to express what was in his heart he might
+have said, "Look here, man! I am made of different stuff from all the
+people there at the church. I am new clay to be moulded into a new man.
+Not even my mother is like me. I do not accept your ideas of life just
+because you say they are good any more than I accept Windy McPherson
+just because he happens to be my father."
+
+During one winter Sam spent evening after evening reading the Bible in
+his room. It was after Kate's marriage--she had got into an affair with
+a young farmer that had kept her name upon the tongues of whisperers for
+months but was now a housewife on a farm at the edge of a village some
+miles from Caxton, and the mother was again at her endless task among
+the soiled clothes in the kitchen and Windy McPherson off drinking and
+boasting about town. Sam read the book in secret. He had a lamp on a
+little stand beside his bed and a novel, lent him by John Telfer, beside
+it. When his mother came up the stairway he slipped the Bible under
+the cover of the bed and became absorbed in the novel. He thought it
+something not quite in keeping with his aims as a business man and a
+money getter to be concerned about his soul. He wanted to conceal his
+concern but with all his heart wanted to get hold of the message of
+the strange book, about which men wrangled hour after hour on winter
+evenings in the store.
+
+He did not get it; and after a time he stopped reading the book. Left to
+himself he might have sensed its meaning, but on all sides of him were
+the voices of the men--the men at Wildman's who owned to no faith and
+yet were filled with dogmatisms as they talked behind the stove in the
+grocery; the brown-bearded, thin-lipped minister in the brick church;
+the shouting, pleading evangelists who came to visit the town in
+the winter; the gentle old grocer who talked vaguely of the spirit
+world,--all these voices were at the mind of the boy pleading,
+insisting, demanding, not that Christ's simple message that men love
+one another to the end, that they work together for the common good, be
+accepted, but that their own complex interpretation of his word be taken
+to the end that souls be saved.
+
+In the end the boy of Caxton got to the place where he had a dread
+of the word soul. It seemed to him that the mention of the word in
+conversation was something shameful and to think of the word or the
+shadowy something for which the word stood an act of cowardice. In his
+mind the soul became a thing to be hidden away, covered up, not thought
+of. One might be allowed to speak of the matter at the moment of death,
+but for the healthy man or boy to have the thought of his soul in
+his mind or word of it on his lips--one might better become blatantly
+profane and go to the devil with a swagger. With delight he imagined
+himself as dying and with his last breath tossing a round oath into the
+air of his death chamber.
+
+In the meantime Sam continued to have inexplicable longings and hopes.
+He kept surprising himself by the changing aspect of his own viewpoint
+of life. He found himself indulging in the most petty meannesses, and
+following these with flashes of a kind of loftiness of mind. Looking at
+a girl passing in the street, he had unbelievably mean thoughts; and the
+next day, passing the same girl, a line caught from the babbling of John
+Telfer came to his lips and he went his way muttering, "June's twice
+June since she breathed it with me."
+
+And then into the complex nature of this boy came the sex motive.
+Already he dreamed of having women in his arms. He looked shyly at the
+ankles of women crossing the street, and listened eagerly when the crowd
+about the stove in Wildman's fell to telling smutty stories. He sank
+to unbelievable depths of triviality in sordidness, looking shyly into
+dictionaries for words that appealed to the animal lust in his queerly
+perverted mind and, when he came across it, lost entirely the beauty of
+the old Bible tale of Ruth in the suggestion of intimacy between man and
+woman that it brought to him. And yet Sam McPherson was no evil-minded
+boy. He had, as a matter of fact, a quality of intellectual honesty that
+appealed strongly to the clean-minded, simple-hearted old blacksmith
+Valmore; he had awakened something like love in the hearts of the women
+school teachers in the Caxton schools, at least one of whom continued
+to interest herself in him, taking him with her on walks along country
+roads, and talking to him constantly of the development of his mind; and
+he was the friend and boon companion of Telfer, the dandy, the reader of
+poems, the keen lover of life. The boy was struggling to find himself.
+One night when the sex call kept him awake he got up and dressed, and
+went and stood in the rain by the creek in Miller's pasture. The wind
+swept the rain across the face of the water and a sentence flashed
+through his mind: "The little feet of the rain run on the water." There
+was a quality of almost lyrical beauty in the Iowa boy.
+
+And this boy, who couldn't get hold of his impulse toward God, whose sex
+impulses made him at times mean, at times full of beauty, and who had
+decided that the impulse toward bargaining and money getting was the
+impulse in him most worth cherishing, now sat beside his mother in
+church and watched with wide-open eyes the man who took off his coat,
+who sweated profusely, and who called the town in which he lived a
+cesspool of vice and its citizens wards of the devil.
+
+The evangelist from talking of the town began talking instead of heaven
+and hell and his earnestness caught the attention of the listening boy
+who began seeing pictures.
+
+Into his mind there came a picture of a burning pit of fire in which
+great flames leaped about the heads of the people who writhed in the
+pit. "Art Sherman would be there," thought Sam, materialising the
+picture he saw; "nothing can save him; he keeps a saloon."
+
+Filled with pity for the man he saw in the picture of the burning pit,
+his mind centered on the person of Art Sherman. He liked Art Sherman.
+More than once he had felt the touch of human kindness in the man. The
+roaring, blustering saloonkeeper had helped the boy sell and collect
+for newspapers. "Pay the kid or get out of the place," the red-faced man
+roared at drunken men leaning on the bar.
+
+And then, looking into the burning pit, Sam thought of Mike McCarthy,
+for whom he had at that moment a kind of passion akin to a young girl's
+blind devotion to her lover. With a shudder he realised that Mike also
+would go into the pit, for he had heard Mike laughing at churches and
+declaring there was no God.
+
+The evangelist ran upon the platform and called to the people demanding
+that they stand upon their feet. "Stand up for Jesus," he shouted;
+"stand up and be counted among the host of the Lord God."
+
+In the church people began getting to their feet. Jane McPherson stood
+with the others. Sam did not stand. He crept behind his mother's dress,
+hoping to pass through the storm unnoticed. The call to the faithful to
+stand was a thing to be complied with or resisted as the people might
+wish; it was something entirely outside of himself. It did not occur to
+him to count himself among either the lost or the saved.
+
+Again the choir began singing and a businesslike movement began among
+the people. Men and women went up and down the aisles clasping the hands
+of people in the pews, talking and praying aloud. "Welcome among us,"
+they said to certain ones who stood upon their feet. "It gladdens our
+hearts to see you among us. We are happy at seeing you in the fold among
+the saved. It is good to confess Jesus."
+
+Suddenly a voice from the bench back of him struck terror to Sam's
+heart. Jim Williams, who worked in Sawyer's barber shop, was upon his
+knees and in a loud voice was praying for the soul of Sam McPherson.
+"Lord, help this erring boy who goes up and down in the company of
+sinners and publicans," he shouted.
+
+In a moment the terror of death and the fiery pit that had possessed him
+passed, and Sam was filled instead with blind, dumb rage. He remembered
+that this same Jim Williams had treated lightly the honour of his sister
+at the time of her disappearance, and he wanted to get upon his feet and
+pour out his wrath on the head of the man, who, he felt, had betrayed
+him. "They would not have seen me," he thought; "this is a fine trick
+Jim Williams has played me. I shall be even with him for this."
+
+He got to his feet and stood beside his mother. He had no qualms about
+passing himself off as one of the lambs safely within the fold. His mind
+was bent upon quieting Jim Williams' prayers and avoiding the attention
+of the people.
+
+The minister began calling on the standing people to testify of their
+salvation. From various parts of the church the people spoke out, some
+loudly and boldly and with a ring of confidence in their voices, some
+tremblingly and hesitatingly. One woman wept loudly shouting between the
+paroxysms of sobbing that seized her, "The weight of my sins is heavy on
+my soul." Girls and young men when called on by the minister responded
+with shamed, hesitating voices asking that a verse of some hymn be sung,
+or quoting a line of scripture.
+
+At the back of the church the evangelist with one of the deacons and two
+or three women had gathered about a small, black-haired woman, the wife
+of a baker to whom Sam delivered papers. They were urging her to rise
+and get within the fold, and Sam turned and watched her curiously, his
+sympathy going out to her. With all his heart he hoped that she would
+continue doggedly shaking her head.
+
+Suddenly the irrepressible Jim Williams broke forth again. A quiver
+ran over Sam's body and the blood rose to his cheeks. "Here is another
+sinner saved," shouted Jim, pointing to the standing boy. "Count this
+boy, Sam McPherson, in the fold among the lambs."
+
+On the platform the brown-bearded minister stood upon a chair and looked
+over the heads of the people. An ingratiating smile played about his
+lips. "Let us hear from the young man, Sam McPherson," he said, raising
+his hand for silence, and, then, encouragingly, "Sam, what have you to
+say for the Lord?"
+
+Become the centre for the attention of the people in the church Sam
+was terror-stricken. The rage against Jim Williams was forgotten in the
+spasm of fear that seized him. He looked over his shoulder to the door
+at the back of the church and thought longingly of the quiet street
+outside. He hesitated, stammered, grew more red and uncertain,
+and finally burst out: "The Lord," he said, and then looked about
+hopelessly, "the Lord maketh me to lie out in green pastures."
+
+In the seats behind him a titter arose. A young woman sitting among the
+singers in the choir put her handkerchief to her face and throwing back
+her head rocked back and forth. A man near the door guffawed loudly and
+went hurriedly out. All over the church people began laughing.
+
+Sam turned his eyes upon his mother. She was staring straight ahead of
+her, and her face was red. "I'm going out of this place and I'm never
+coming back again," he whispered, and, stepping into the aisle, walked
+boldly toward the door. He had made up his mind that if the evangelist
+tried to stop him he would fight. At his back he felt the rows of people
+looking at him and smiling. The laughter continued.
+
+In the street he hurried along consumed with indignation. "I'll never
+go into any church again," he swore, shaking his fist in the air.
+The public avowals he had heard in the church seemed to him cheap and
+unworthy. He wondered why his mother stayed in there. With a sweep of
+his arm he dismissed all the people in the church. "It is a place to
+make public asses of the people," he thought.
+
+Sam McPherson wandered through Main Street, dreading to meet Valmore and
+John Telfer. Finding the chairs back of the stove in Wildman's grocery
+deserted, he hurried past the grocer and hid in a corner. Tears of wrath
+stood in his eyes. He had been made a fool of. He imagined the scene
+that would go on when he came upon the street with the papers the next
+morning. Freedom Smith would be there sitting in the old worn buggy and
+roaring so that all the street would listen and laugh. "Going to lie out
+in any green pastures to-night, Sam?" he would shout. "Ain't you afraid
+you'll take cold?" By Geiger's drug store would stand Valmore and
+Telfer, eager to join in the fun at his expense. Telfer would pound on
+the side of the building with his cane and roar with laughter. Valmore
+would make a trumpet of his hands and shout after the fleeing boy. "Do
+you sleep out alone in them green pastures?" Freedom Smith would roar
+again.
+
+Sam got up and went out of the grocery. As he hurried along, blind with
+wrath, he felt he would like a stand-up fight with some one. And, then,
+hurrying and avoiding the people, he merged with the crowd on the street
+and became a witness to the strange thing that happened that night in
+Caxton.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Main Street hushed people stood about in groups talking. The air
+was heavy with excitement. Solitary figures went from group to group
+whispering hoarsely. Mike McCarthy, the man who had denied God and
+who had won a place for himself in the affection of the newsboy, had
+assaulted a man with a pocket knife and had left him bleeding and
+wounded beside a country road. Something big and sensational had
+happened in the life of the town.
+
+Mike McCarthy and Sam were friends. For years the man had idled upon the
+streets of the town, loitering about, boasting and talking. He had sat
+for hours in a chair under a tree before the New Leland House, reading
+books, doing tricks with cards, engaging in long discussions with John
+Telfer or any who would stand up to him.
+
+Mike McCarthy got into trouble in a fight over a woman. A young farmer
+living at the edge of Caxton had come home from the fields to find his
+wife in the bold Irishman's arms and the two men had gone out of the
+house together to fight in the road. The woman, weeping in the house,
+followed to ask forgiveness of her husband. Running in the gathering
+darkness along the road she had found him cut and bleeding terribly,
+lying in a ditch under a hedge. On down the road she ran and appeared at
+the door of a neighbour, screaming and calling for help.
+
+The story of the fight in the road got to Caxton just as Sam came out of
+the corner, back of the stove in Wildman's and appeared on the street.
+Men ran from store to store and from group to group along the street
+saying that the young farmer had died and that murder had been done. On
+a street corner Windy McPherson harangued the crowd declaring that the
+men of Caxton should arise in the defence of their homes and string the
+murderer to a lamp post. Hop Higgins, driving a horse from Culvert's
+livery, appeared on Main Street. "He will be at the McCarthy farm," he
+shouted. When several men, coming out of Geiger's drug store, stopped
+the marshal's horse, saying, "You will have trouble out there; you had
+better take help," the little red-faced marshal with the crippled leg
+laughed. "What trouble?" he asked--"To get Mike McCarthy? I shall ask
+him to come and he will come. The rest of that lot won't cut any figure.
+Mike can wrap the entire McCarthy family around his finger."
+
+There were six of the McCarthy men, all, except Mike, silent, sullen
+men who only talked when they were in liquor. Mike furnished the town's
+social touch with the family. It was a strange family to live there
+in that fat, corn-growing country, a family with something savage and
+primitive about it, one that belonged among western mining camps or
+among the half savage dwellers in deep alleys in cities, and the fact
+that it lived on a corn farm in Iowa was, in the words of John Telfer,
+"something monstrous in Nature."
+
+The McCarthy farm, lying some four miles east of Caxton, had once
+contained a thousand acres of good corn-growing land. Lem McCarthy, the
+father of the family, had inherited it from a brother, a gold miner,
+a forty-niner, a sport owning fast horses, who planned to breed race
+horses on the Iowa land. Lem had come out of the back streets of an
+eastern city, bringing his brood of tall, silent, savage boys to live
+upon the land and, like the forty-niner, to be a sport. Thinking the
+wealth that had come to him vast beyond spending, he had plunged into
+horse racing and gambling. When, within two years, five hundred acres
+of the farm had to be sold to pay gambling debts, and the wide acres lay
+covered with weeds, Lem became alarmed, and settled down to hard work,
+the boys working all day in the field and at long intervals coming
+into town at night to get into trouble. Having no mother or sister, and
+knowing that no Caxton woman could be hired to go upon the place, they
+did their own housework; and on rainy days sat about the old farmhouse
+playing cards and fighting. On other days they would stand around the
+bar in Art Sherman's saloon in Piety Hollow drinking until they had lost
+their savage silence and had become loud and quarrelsome, going from
+there upon the streets to seek trouble. Once, going into Hayner's
+restaurant, they took stacks of plates from shelves back of the counter
+and, standing in the doorway, threw them at people passing in the
+street, the crash of the breaking crockery accompanying their roaring
+laughter. When they had driven the people to cover they got upon their
+horses and with wild shouts raced up and down Main Street between the
+rows of tied horses until Hop Higgins, the town marshal, appeared, when
+they rode off into the country awakening the farmers along the darkened
+road as they fled, shouting and singing, toward home.
+
+When the McCarthy boys got into trouble in Caxton, old Lem McCarthy
+drove into town and got them out of it, paying for the damage done and
+going about declaring the boys meant no harm. When told to keep them out
+of town he shook his head and said he would try.
+
+Mike McCarthy did not ride swearing and singing with the five brothers
+along the dark road. He did not work all day in the hot corn fields. He
+was the family gentleman, and, wearing good clothes, strolled instead
+upon the street or loitered in the shade before the New Leland House.
+Mike had been educated. For some years he had attended a college in
+Indiana from which he was expelled for an affair with a woman. After his
+return from college he stayed in Caxton, living at the hotel and making
+a pretence of studying law in the office of old Judge Reynolds. He paid
+slight attention to the study of law, but with infinite patience had so
+trained his hands that he became wonderfully dexterous with coins and
+cards, plucking them out of the air and making them appear in the shoes,
+the hats, and even in the mouths, of bystanders. During the day he
+walked the streets looking at the girl clerks in the stores, or stood
+upon the station platform waving his hand to women passengers on passing
+trains. He told John Telfer that the flattery of women was a lost art
+that he intended to restore. Mike McCarthy carried in his pockets books
+which he read sitting in a chair before the hotel or on the stones
+before store windows. When on Saturdays the streets were filled with
+people, he stood on the corners giving gratuitous performances of his
+magical art with cards and coins, and eyeing country girls in the crowd.
+Once, a woman, the town stationer's wife, shouted at him, calling him
+a lazy lout, whereupon he threw a coin in the air, and when it did not
+come down rushed toward her shouting, "She has it in her stocking." When
+the stationer's wife ran into her shop and banged the door the crowd
+laughed and shouted with delight.
+
+Telfer had a liking for the tall, grey-eyed, loitering McCarthy
+and sometimes sat with him discussing a novel or a poem; Sam in the
+background listened eagerly. Valmore did not care for the man, shaking
+his head and declaring that such a fellow could come to no good end.
+
+The rest of the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this,
+sunned himself in the town's displeasure. For the sake of the public
+furor it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist,
+an anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone
+cared greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations
+of his passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in
+Wildman's grocery store he would stand whipping them into a frenzy by
+declaring for free love, and vowing that he would have the best of any
+woman who gave him the chance.
+
+For this man the frugal, hard working newsboy had conceived a regard
+amounting to a passion. As he listened to McCarthy he got continuous
+delightful little thrills. "There is nothing he would not dare," thought
+the boy. "He is the freest, the boldest, the bravest man in town."
+When the young Irishman, seeing the admiration in his eyes, flung him
+a silver dollar saying, "That is for your fine brown eyes, my boy; it
+I had them I would have half the women in town after me," Sam kept the
+dollar in his pocket and counted it a kind of treasure like the rose
+given a lover by his sweetheart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was past eleven o'clock when Hop Higgins returned to town with
+McCarthy, driving quietly along the street and through an alley at the
+back of the town hall. The crowd upon the street had broken up. Sam had
+gone from one to another of the muttering groups, his heart quaking with
+fear. Now he stood at the back of the mass of men gathered at the jail
+door. An oil lamp, burning at the top of the post above the door, threw
+dancing, flickering lights on the faces of the men before him. The
+thunder storm that had threatened had not come, but the unnatural warm
+wind continued and the sky overhead was inky black.
+
+Through the alley, to the jail door, drove the town marshal, the young
+McCarthy sitting in the buggy beside him. A man rushed forward to hold
+the horse. McCarthy's face was chalky white. He laughed and shouted,
+raising his hand toward the sky.
+
+"I am Michael, son of God. I have cut a man with a knife so that his
+red blood ran upon the ground. I am the son of God and this filthy jail
+shall be my sanctuary. In there I shall talk aloud with my Father," he
+roared hoarsely, shaking his fist at the crowd. "Sons of this cesspool
+of respectability, stay and hear! Send for your females and let them
+stand in the presence of a man!"
+
+Taking the white, wild-eyed man by the arm Marshal Higgins led him into
+the jail, the clank of locks, the low murmur of the voice of Higgins and
+the wild laughter of McCarthy floating out to the group of silent men
+standing in the mud of the alley.
+
+Sam McPherson ran past the group of men to the side of the jail and
+finding John Telfer and Valmore leaning silently against the wall of
+Tom Folger's wagon shop slipped between them. Telfer put out his arm and
+laid it upon the boy's shoulder. Hop Higgins, coming out of the jail,
+addressed the crowd. "Don't answer if he talks," he said; "he is as
+crazy as a loon."
+
+Sam moved closer to Telfer. The voice of the imprisoned man, loud,
+and filled with a startling boldness, rolled out of the jail. He began
+praying.
+
+"Hear me, Father Almighty, who has permitted this town of Caxton to
+exist and has let me, Thy son, grow to manhood. I am Michael, Thy son.
+They have put me in this jail where rats run across the floor and
+they stand in the mud outside as I talk with Thee. Are you there, old
+Truepenny?"
+
+A breath of cold air blew up the alley followed by a flaw of rain. The
+group under the flickering lamp by the jail entrance drew back against
+the walls of the building. Sam could see them dimly, pressing closely
+against the wall. The man in the jail laughed loudly.
+
+"I have had a philosophy of life, O Father," he shouted. "I have seen
+men and women here living year after year without children. I have seen
+them hoarding pennies and denying Thee new life on which to work Thy
+will. To these women I have gone secretly talking of carnal love. With
+them I have been gentle and kind; them I have flattered."
+
+A roaring laugh broke from the lips of the imprisoned man. "Are you
+there, oh dwellers in the cesspool of respectability?" he shouted. "Do
+you stand in the mud with cold feet listening? I have been with your
+wives. Eleven Caxton wives without babes have I been with and it has
+been fruitless. The twelfth woman I have just left, leaving her man in
+the road a bleeding sacrifice to thee. I shall call out the names of the
+eleven. I shall have revenge also upon the husbands of the women, some
+of whom wait with the others in the mud outside."
+
+He began calling off the names of Caxton wives. A shudder ran through
+the body of the boy, sensitised by the new chill in the air and by the
+excitement of the night. Among the men standing along the wall of the
+jail a murmur arose. Again they grouped themselves under the flickering
+light by the jail door, disregarding the rain. Valmore, stumbling out of
+the darkness beside Sam, stood before Telfer. "The boy should be going
+home," he said; "this isn't fit for him to hear."
+
+Telfer laughed and drew Sam closer to him. "He has heard enough lies in
+this town," he said. "Truth won't hurt him. I would not go myself, nor
+would you, and the boy shall not go. This McCarthy has a brain. Although
+he is half insane now he is trying to work something out. The boy and I
+will stay to hear."
+
+The voice from the jail continued calling out the names of Caxton wives.
+Voices in the group before the jail door began shouting: "This should be
+stopped. Let us tear down the jail."
+
+McCarthy laughed aloud. "They squirm, oh Father, they squirm; I have
+them in the pit and I torture them," he cried.
+
+An ugly feeling of satisfaction came over Sam. He had a sense of the
+fact that the names shouted from the jail would be repeated over and
+over through the town. One of the women whose names had been called out
+had stood with the evangelist at the back of the church trying to induce
+the wife of the baker to rise and be counted in the fold with the lambs.
+
+The rain, falling on the shoulders of the men by the jail door, changed
+to hail, the air grew colder and the hailstones rattled on the roofs of
+buildings. Some of the men joined Telfer and Valmore, talking in low,
+excited voices. "And Mary McKane, too, the hypocrite," Sam heard one of
+them say.
+
+The voice inside the jail changed. Still praying, Mike McCarthy seemed
+also to be talking to the group in the darkness outside.
+
+"I am sick of my life. I have sought leadership and have not found
+it. Oh Father! Send down to men a new Christ, one to get hold of us, a
+modern Christ with a pipe in his mouth who will swear and knock us about
+so that we vermin who pretend to be made in Thy image will understand.
+Let him go into churches and into courthouses, into cities, and into
+towns like this, shouting, 'Be ashamed! Be ashamed of your cowardly
+concern over your snivelling souls!' Let him tell us that never will our
+lives, so miserably lived, be repeated after our bodies lie rotting in
+the grave."
+
+A sob broke from his lips and a lump came into Sam's throat.
+
+"Oh Father! help us men of Caxton to understand that we have only this,
+our lives, this life so warm and hopeful and laughing in the sun, this
+life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls
+with their long legs and freckles on their noses, that are meant to
+carry life within themselves, new life, kicking and stirring, and waking
+them at night."
+
+The voice of the prayer broke. Wild sobs took the place of speech.
+"Father!" shouted the broken voice, "I have taken a life, a man that
+moved and talked and whistled in the sunshine on winter mornings; I have
+killed."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The voice inside the jail became inaudible. Silence, broken by low sobs
+from the jail, fell on the little dark alley and the listening men began
+going silently away. The lump in Sam's throat grew larger. Tears stood
+in his eyes. He went with Telfer and Valmore out of the alley and into
+the street, the two men walking in silence. The rain had ceased and a
+cold wind blew.
+
+The boy felt that he had been shriven. His mind, his heart, even his
+tired body seemed strangely cleansed. He felt a new affection for Telfer
+and Valmore. When Telfer began talking he listened eagerly, thinking
+that at last he understood him and knew why men like Valmore, Wildman,
+Freedom Smith, and Telfer loved each other and went on being friends
+year after year in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings. He
+thought that he had got hold of the idea of brotherhood that John Telfer
+talked of so often and so eloquently. "Mike McCarthy is only a brother
+who has gone the dark road," he thought and felt a glow of pride in the
+thought and in the apt expression of it in his mind.
+
+John Telfer, forgetting the boy, talked soberly to Valmore, the two men
+stumbling along in the darkness intent upon their own thoughts.
+
+"It is an odd thought," said Telfer and his voice seemed far away and
+unnatural like the voice from the jail; "it is an odd thought that but
+for a quirk in the brain this Mike McCarthy might himself have been a
+kind of Christ with a pipe in his mouth."
+
+Valmore stumbled and half fell in the darkness at a street crossing.
+Telfer went on talking.
+
+"The world will some day grope its way into some kind of an
+understanding of its extraordinary men. Now they suffer terribly. In
+success or in such failures as has come to this imaginative, strangely
+perverted Irishman their lot is pitiful. It is only the common, the
+plain, unthinking man who slides peacefully through this troubled
+world."
+
+At the house Jane McPherson sat waiting for her boy. She was thinking of
+the scene in the church and a hard light was in her eyes. Sam went
+past the sleeping room of his parents, where Windy McPherson snored
+peacefully, and up the stairway to his own room. He undressed and,
+putting out the light, knelt upon the floor. From the wild ravings of
+the man in the jail he had got hold of something. In the midst of the
+blasphemy of Mike McCarthy he had sensed a deep and abiding love of
+life. Where the church had failed the bold sensualist succeeded. Sam
+felt that he could have prayed in the presence of the entire town.
+
+"Oh, Father!" he cried, sending up his voice in the silence of the
+little room, "make me stick to the thought that the right living of
+this, my life, is my duty to you."
+
+By the door below, while Valmore waited on the sidewalk, Telfer talked
+to Jane McPherson.
+
+"I wanted Sam to hear," he explained. "He needs a religion. All young
+men need a religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man like Mike
+McCarthy keeps instinctively trying to justify himself before God."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+John Telfer's friendship was a formative influence upon Sam McPherson.
+His father's worthlessness and the growing realisation of the hardship
+of his mother's position had given life a bitter taste in his mouth,
+and Telfer sweetened it. He entered with zeal into Sam's thoughts
+and dreams, and tried valiantly to arouse in the quiet, industrious,
+money-making boy some of his own love of life and beauty. At night, as
+the two walked down country roads, the man would stop and, waving his
+arms about, quote Poe or Browning or, in another mood, would compel
+Sam's attention to the rare smell of a hayfield or to a moonlit stretch
+of meadow.
+
+Before people gathered on the streets he teased the boy, calling him a
+little money grubber and saying, "He is like a little mole that
+works underground. As the mole goes for a worm so this boy goes for a
+five-cent piece. I have watched him. A travelling man goes out of town
+leaving a stray dime or nickel here and within an hour it is in this
+boy's pocket. I have talked to banker Walker of him. He trembles lest
+his vaults become too small to hold the wealth of this young Croesus.
+The day will come when he will buy the town and put it into his vest
+pocket."
+
+For all his public teasing of the boy Telfer had the genius to adopt a
+different attitude when they were alone together. Then he talked to him
+openly and freely as he talked to Valmore and Freedom Smith and to other
+cronies of his on the streets of Caxton. Walking along the road he would
+point with his cane to the town and say, "You and that mother of yours
+have more of the real stuff in you than the rest of the boys and mothers
+of the town put together."
+
+In all Caxton Telfer was the only man who knew books and who took them
+seriously. Sam sometimes found his attitude toward them puzzling and
+would stand with open mouth listening as Telfer swore or laughed at a
+book as he did at Valmore or Freedom Smith. He had a fine portrait
+of Browning which he kept hung in the stable and before this he would
+stand, his legs spread apart, and his head tilted to one side, talking.
+
+"A rich old sport you are, eh?" he would say, grinning. "Getting
+yourself discussed by women and college professors in clubs, eh? You old
+fraud!"
+
+Toward Mary Underwood, the school teacher who had become Sam's friend
+and with whom the boy sometimes walked and talked, Telfer had no
+charity. Mary Underwood was a sort of cinder in the eyes of Caxton. She
+was the only child of Silas Underwood, the town harness maker, who once
+had worked in a shop belonging to Windy McPherson. After the business
+failure of Windy he had started independently and for a time did
+well, sending his daughter to a school in Massachusetts. Mary did
+not understand the people of Caxton and the people misunderstood and
+distrusted her. Taking no part in the life of the town and keeping to
+herself and to her books she awoke a kind of fear in others. Because she
+did not join them at church suppers, or go from porch to porch gossiping
+with other women through the long summer evenings, they thought her
+something abnormal. On Sundays she sat alone in her pew at church and
+on Saturday afternoons, come storm, come sunshine, she walked on country
+roads and through the woods accompanied by a collie dog. She was a small
+woman with a straight, slender figure and had fine blue eyes filled with
+changing lights, hidden by the eye-glasses she almost constantly wore.
+Her lips were very full and red, and she sat with them parted so that
+the edges of her fine teeth showed. Her nose was large, and a fine
+reddish-brown colour glowed in her cheeks. Though different, she had,
+like Jane McPherson, a habit of silence; and under her silence, she,
+like Sam's mother, possessed an unusually strong and vigorous mind.
+
+As a child she was a sort of half invalid and had not been on friendly
+footing with other children. It was then that her habit of silence and
+reticence had been established. The years in the school in Massachusetts
+restored her health but did not break this habit. She came home and took
+the place in the schools to earn money with which to take her back East,
+dreaming of a position as instructor in an eastern college. She was that
+rare thing, a woman scholar, loving scholarship for its own sake.
+
+Mary Underwood's position in the town and in the schools was insecure.
+Out of her silent, independent way of life had sprung a misunderstanding
+that, at least once, had taken definite form and had come near driving
+her from the town and schools. That she did not succumb to the storm of
+criticism that for some weeks beat about her head was due to her habit
+of silence and to a determination to get her own way in the face of
+everything.
+
+It was a suggestion of scandal that had put the grey hairs upon her
+head. The scandal had blown over before the time of her friendship for
+Sam, but he had known of it. In those days he knew of everything that
+went on in the town--his quick ears and eyes missed nothing. More than
+once he had heard the men waiting to be shaved in Sawyer's barber shop
+speak of her.
+
+The tale ran that she had been involved in an affair with a real estate
+agent who had afterward left town. It was said that the man, a tall,
+fine-looking fellow, had been in love with Mary and had wanted to desert
+his wife and go away with her. One night he had driven to Mary's house
+in a closed buggy and the two had driven into the country. They had sat
+for hours in the covered buggy at the side of the road and talked, and
+people driving past had seen them there talking together.
+
+And then she had got out of the buggy and walked home alone through snow
+drifts. The next day she was at school as usual. When told of it the
+school superintendent, a puttering old fellow with vacant eyes, had
+shaken his head in alarm and declared that it must be looked into. He
+called Mary into his little narrow office in the school building, but
+lost courage when she sat before him, and said nothing. The man in the
+barber shop, who repeated the tale, said that the real estate man drove
+on to a distant station and took a train to the city, and that some days
+later he came back to Caxton and moved his family out of town.
+
+Sam dismissed the story from his mind. Having begun a friendship for
+Mary he put the man in the barber shop into a class with Windy McPherson
+and thought of him as a pretender and liar who talked for the sake of
+talk. He remembered with a shock the crude levity with which the loafers
+in the shop had greeted the repetition of the tale. Their comments
+had come back to his mind as he walked through the streets with his
+newspapers and had given him a kind of jolt. He went along under the
+trees thinking of the sunlight falling upon the grey hair as they walked
+together on summer afternoons, and bit his lip and opened and closed his
+fist convulsively.
+
+During Mary's second year in the Caxton schools her mother died, and at
+the end of another year, her father, failing in the harness business,
+Mary became a fixture in the schools. The house at the edge of the town,
+the property of her mother, had come down to her and she lived there
+with an old aunt. After the passing of the wind of scandal concerning
+the real estate man the town lost interest in her. She was thirty-six
+at the time of her first friendship with Sam and lived alone among her
+books.
+
+Sam had been deeply moved by her friendship. It had seemed to him
+something significant that grown people with affairs of their own should
+be so in earnest about his future as she and Telfer were. Boylike, he
+counted it a tribute to himself rather than to the winsome youth in him,
+and was made proud by it. Having no real feeling for books, and only
+pretending to have out of a desire to please, he sometimes went from one
+to the other of his two friends, passing off their opinions as his own.
+
+At this trick Telfer invariably caught him. "That is not your notion,"
+he would shout, "you have it from that school teacher. It is the opinion
+of a woman. Their opinions, like the books they sometimes write, are
+founded on nothing. They are not the real things. Women know nothing.
+Men only care for them because they have not had what they want from
+them. No woman is really big--except maybe my woman, Eleanor."
+
+When Sam continued to be much in the company of Mary, Telfer grew more
+bitter.
+
+"I would have you observe women's minds and avoid letting them influence
+your own," he told the boy. "They live in a world of unrealities. They
+like even vulgar people in books, but shrink from the simple, earthy
+folk about them. That school teacher is so. Is she like me? Does she,
+while loving books, love also the very smell of human life?"
+
+In a way Telfer's attitude toward the kindly little school teacher
+became Sam's attitude. Although they walked and talked together the
+course of study she had planned for him he never took up and as he
+grew to know her better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced
+appealed to him less and less. He thought that she, as Telfer held,
+lived in a world of illusion and unreality and said so. When she lent
+him books, he put them in his pocket and did not read them. When he did
+read, he thought the books reminded him of something that hurt him. They
+were in some way false and pretentious. He thought they were like
+his father. One day he tried reading aloud to Telfer from a book Mary
+Underwood had lent him.
+
+The story was one of a poetic man with long, unclean fingernails who
+went among people preaching the doctrine of beauty. It began with a
+scene on a hillside in a rainstorm where the poetic man sat under a tent
+writing a letter to his sweetheart.
+
+Telfer was beside himself. Jumping from his seat under a tree by the
+roadside he waved his arms and shouted:
+
+"Stop! Stop it! Do not go on with it. The story lies. A man could not
+write love letters under the circumstances and he was a fool to pitch
+his tent on a hillside. A man in a tent on a hillside in a storm would
+be cold and wet and getting the rheumatism. To be writing letters he
+would need to be an unspeakable ass. He had better be out digging a
+trench to keep the water from running through his tent."
+
+Waving his arms, Telfer went off up the road and Sam followed thinking
+him altogether right, and, if later in life he learned that there are
+men who could write love letters on a piece of housetop in a flood, he
+did not know it then and the least suggestion of windiness or pretence
+lay heavy in his stomach.
+
+Telfer had a vast enthusiasm for Bellamy's "Looking Backward," and read
+it aloud to his wife on Sunday afternoons, sitting under the apple trees
+in the garden. They had a fund of little personal jokes and sayings that
+they were forever laughing over, and she had infinite delight in his
+comments on the life and people of Caxton, but did not share his love of
+books. When she sometimes went to sleep in her chair during the Sunday
+afternoon readings he poked her with his cane and laughingly told her
+to wake up and listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning's
+verses his favourites were "A Light Woman" and "Fra Lippo Lippi," and
+he would recite these aloud with great gusto. He declared Mark Twain the
+greatest man in the world and in certain moods he would walk the road
+beside Sam reciting over and over one or two lines of verse, often this
+from Poe:
+
+  Helen, thy beauty is to me
+  Like some Nicean bark of yore.
+
+Then, stopping and turning upon the boy, he would demand whether or not
+the writing of such lines wasn't worth living a life for.
+
+Telfer had a pack of dogs that always went with them on their walks
+at night and he had for them long Latin names that Sam could never
+remember. One summer be bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and
+gave great attention to the colt, which he named Bellamy Boy, trotting
+him up and down a little driveway by the side of his house for hours at
+a time and declaring he would be a great trotting horse. He could recite
+the colt's pedigree with great gusto and when he had been talking to Sam
+of some book he would repay the boy's attention by saying, "You, my boy,
+are as far superior to the run of boys about town as the colt, Bellamy
+Boy, is superior to the farm horses that are hitched along Main Street
+on Saturday afternoons." And then, with a wave of his hand and a look
+of much seriousness on his face, he would add, "And for the same reason.
+You have been, like him, under a master trainer of youth."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One evening Sam, now grown to man's stature and full of the awkwardness
+and self-consciousness of his new growth, was sitting on a cracker
+barrel at the back of Wildman's grocery. It was a summer evening and a
+breeze blew through the open doors swaying the hanging oil lamps that
+burned and sputtered overhead. As usual he was listening in silence to
+the talk that went on among the men.
+
+Standing with legs wide apart and from time to time jabbing with his
+cane at Sam's legs, John Telfer held forth on the subject of love.
+
+"It is a theme that poets do well to write of," he declared. "In
+writing of it they avoid the necessity of embracing it. In trying for a
+well-turned line they forget to look at well-turned ankles. He who
+sings most passionately of love has been in love the least; he woos the
+goddess of poesy and only gets into trouble when he, like John Keats,
+turns to the daughter of a villager and tries to live the lines he has
+written."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense," roared Freedom Smith, who had been sitting tilted
+far back in a chair with his feet against the cold stove, smoking a
+short, black pipe, and who now brought his feet down upon the floor with
+a bang. Admiring Telfer's flow of words he pretended to be filled with
+scorn. "The night is too hot for eloquence," he bellowed. "If you must
+be eloquent talk of ice cream or mint juleps or recite a verse about the
+old swimming pool."
+
+Telfer, wetting his finger, thrust it into the air.
+
+"The wind is in the north-west; the beasts roar; we will have a storm,"
+he said, winking at Valmore.
+
+Banker Walker came into the store, followed by his daughter. She was a
+small, dark-skinned girl with black, quick eyes. Seeing Sam sitting with
+swinging legs upon the cracker barrel she spoke to her father and went
+out of the store. At the sidewalk she stopped and, turning, made a quick
+motion with her hand.
+
+Sam jumped off the cracker barrel and strolled toward the street door.
+A flush was on his cheeks. His mouth felt hot and dry. He went with
+extreme deliberateness, stopping to bow to the banker, and for a moment
+lingering to read a newspaper that lay upon the cigar case, to avoid the
+comments he feared his going might excite among the men by the stove.
+In his heart he trembled lest the girl should have disappeared down the
+street, and with his eyes, he looked guiltily at the banker, who had
+joined the group at the back of the store and who now stood listening
+to the talk, while he read from a list held in his hand and Wildman
+went here and there doing up packages and repeating aloud the names of
+articles called off by the banker.
+
+At the end of the lighted business section of Main Street, Sam found the
+girl waiting for him. She began to tell of the subterfuge by which she
+had escaped her father.
+
+"I told him I would go home with my sister," she said, tossing her head.
+
+Taking hold of the boy's hand, she led him along the shaded street. For
+the first time Sam walked in the company of one of the strange beings
+that had begun to bring him uneasy nights, and overcome with the wonder
+of it the blood climbed through his body and made his head reel so that
+he walked in silence unable to understand his own emotions. He felt the
+soft hand of the girl with delight; his heart pounded against the walls
+of his chest and a choking sensation gripped at his throat.
+
+Walking along the street, past lighted residences where the low voices
+of women in talk greeted his ears, Sam was inordinately proud. He
+thought that he should like to turn and walk with this girl through the
+lighted Main Street. Had she not chosen him from among all the boys of
+the town; had she not, with a flutter of her little, white hand, called
+to him with a call that he wondered the men upon the cracker barrels had
+not heard? Her boldness and his own took his breath away. He could not
+talk. His tongue seemed paralysed.
+
+Down the street went the boy and girl, loitering in the shadows,
+hurrying past the dim oil lamps at street crossings, getting from each
+other wave after wave of exquisite little thrills. Neither spoke. They
+were beyond words. Had they not together done this daring thing?
+
+In the shadow of a tree they stopped and stood facing each other; the
+girl looked at the ground and stood facing the boy. Putting out his hand
+he laid it upon her shoulder. In the darkness on the other side of the
+street a man stumbled homeward along a board sidewalk. The lights of
+Main Street glowed in the distance. Sam drew the girl toward him. She
+raised her head. Their lips met, and then, throwing her arms about his
+neck, she kissed him again and again eagerly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sam's return to Wildman's was marked by extreme caution. Although he had
+been absent but fifteen minutes it seemed to him that hours must have
+passed and he would not have been surprised to see the stores locked
+and darkness settled down on Main Street. It was inconceivable that the
+grocer could still be wrapping packages for banker Walker. Worlds had
+been remade. Manhood had come to him. Why! the man should have wrapped
+the entire store, package after package, and sent it to the ends of the
+earth. He lingered in the shadows at the first of the store lights
+where ages before he had gone, a mere boy, to meet her, a mere girl, and
+looked with wonder at the lighted way before him.
+
+Sam crossed the street and, from the front of Sawyer's barber shop,
+looked into Wildman's. He felt like a spy looking into the camp of an
+enemy. There before him sat the men into whose midst he had it in
+his power to cast a thunderbolt. He might walk to the door and say,
+truthfully enough, "Here before you is a boy that by the flutter of a
+white hand has been made into a man; here is one who has wrung the heart
+of womankind and eaten his fill at the tree of the knowledge of life."
+
+In the grocery the talk still continued among the men upon the cracker
+barrels who seemed unconscious of the boy's slinking entrance. Indeed,
+their talk had sunk. From talking of love and of poets they talked of
+corn and of steers. Banker Walker, his packages of groceries lying on
+the counter, smoked a cigar.
+
+"You can fairly hear the corn growing to-night," he said. "It wants but
+another shower or two and we shall have a record crop. I plan to feed a
+hundred steers at my farm out Rabbit Road this winter."
+
+The boy climbed again upon a cracker barrel and tried to look
+unconcerned and interested in the talk. Still his heart thumped; still
+a throbbing went on in his wrists. He turned and looked at the floor
+hoping his agitation would pass unnoticed.
+
+The banker, taking up the packages, walked out at the door. Valmore and
+Freedom Smith went over to the livery barn for a game of pinochle.
+And John Telfer, twirling his cane and calling to a troup of dogs that
+loitered in an alley back of the store, took Sam for a walk into the
+country.
+
+"I will continue this talk of love," said Telfer, striking at weeds
+along the road with his cane and from time to time calling sharply to
+the dogs that, filled with delight at being abroad, ran growling and
+tumbling over each other in the dusty road.
+
+"That Freedom Smith is a sample of life in this town. At the word love
+he drops his feet upon the floor and pretends to be filled with disgust.
+He will talk of corn or steers or of the stinking hides that he buys,
+but at the mention of the word love he is like a hen that has seen a
+hawk in the sky. He runs about in circles making a fuss. 'Here! Here!
+Here!' he cries, 'you are making public something that should be kept
+hidden. You are doing in the light of day what should only be done with
+a shamed face in a darkened room.' Why, boy, if I were a woman in
+this town I would not stand it--I would go to New York, to France,
+to Paris--To be wooed for but a passing moment by a shame-faced yokel
+without art--uh--it is unthinkable."
+
+The man and the boy walked in silence. The dogs, scenting a rabbit,
+disappeared across a long pasture, their master letting them go. From
+time to time he threw back his head and took long breaths of the night
+air.
+
+"I am not like banker Walker," he declared. "He thinks of the growing
+corn in terms of fat steers feeding on the Rabbit Run farm; I think of
+it as something majestic. I see the long corn rows with the men and the
+horses half hidden, hot and breathless, and I think of a vast river of
+life. I catch a breath of the flame that was in the mind of the man who
+said, 'The land is flowing with milk and honey.' I am made happy by my
+thoughts not by the dollars clinking in my pocket.
+
+"And then in the fall when the corn stands shocked I see another
+picture. Here and there in companies stand the armies of the corn.
+It puts a ring in my voice to look at them. 'These orderly armies has
+mankind brought out of chaos,' I say to myself. 'On a smoking black ball
+flung by the hand of God out of illimitable space has man stood up these
+armies to defend his home against the grim attacking armies of want.'"
+
+Telfer stopped and stood in the road with his legs spread apart. He took
+off his hat and throwing back his head laughed up at the stars.
+
+"Freedom Smith should hear me now," he cried, rocking back and forth
+with laughter and switching his cane at the boy's legs so that Sam had
+to hop merrily about in the road to avoid it. "Flung by the hand of God
+out of illimitable space--eh! not bad, eh! I should be in Congress. I
+am wasted here. I am throwing priceless eloquence to dogs who prefer to
+chase rabbits and to a boy who is the worst little money grubber in the
+town."
+
+The midsummer madness that had seized Telfer passed and for a time he
+walked in silence. Suddenly, putting his arm on the boy's shoulder, he
+stopped and pointed to where a faint light in the sky marked the lighted
+town.
+
+"They are good people," he said, "but their ways are not my ways or your
+ways. You will go out of the town. You have genius. You will be a man of
+finance. I have watched you. You are not niggardly and you do not cheat
+and lie--result--you will not be a little business man. What have you?
+You have the gift of seeing dollars where the rest of the boys of the
+town see nothing and you are tireless after those dollars--you will be
+a big man of dollars, it is plain." Into his voice came a touch of
+bitterness. "I also was marked out. Why do I carry a cane? why do I not
+buy a farm and raise steers? I am the most worthless thing alive. I have
+the touch of genius without the energy to make it count."
+
+Sam's mind that had been inflamed by the kiss of the girl cooled in the
+presence of Telfer. In the summer madness of the talking man there was
+something soothing to the fever in his blood. He followed the words
+eagerly, seeing pictures, getting thrills, filled with happiness.
+
+At the edge of town a buggy passed the walking pair. In the buggy sat
+a young farmer, his arm about the waist of a girl, her head upon his
+shoulder. Far in the distance sounded the faint call of the dogs. Sam
+and Telfer sat down on a grassy bank under a tree while Telfer rolled
+and lighted a cigarette.
+
+"As I promised, I will talk to you of love," he said, making a wide
+sweep with his arm each time as he put his cigarette into his mouth.
+
+The grassy bank on which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot
+days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind
+them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of
+serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer and
+his face became serious.
+
+"My foolishness is more than half earnest," he said. "I think that a
+man or boy who has set for himself a task had better let women and girls
+alone. If he be a man of genius, he has a purpose independent of all
+the world, and should cut and slash and pound his way toward his mark,
+forgetting every one, particularly the woman that would come to grips
+with him. She also has a mark toward which she goes. She is at war with
+him and has a purpose that is not his purpose. She believes that the
+pursuit of women is an end for a life. For all they now condemn Mike
+McCarthy who went to the asylum because of them and who, while loving
+life, came near to taking life, the women of Caxton do not condemn his
+madness for themselves; they do not blame him for loitering away his
+good years or for making an abortive mess of his good brain. While he
+made an art of the pursuit of women they applauded secretly. Did
+not twelve of them accept the challenge thrown out by his eyes as he
+loitered in the streets?"
+
+The man, who had begun talking quietly and seriously, raised his voice
+and waved the lighted cigarette in the air and the boy who had begun
+to think again of the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker listened
+attentively. The barking of the dogs grew nearer.
+
+"If you as a boy can get from me, a grown man, an understanding of the
+purpose of women you will not have lived in this town for nothing. Set
+your mark at money making if you will, but drive at that. Let yourself
+but go and a sweet wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd or a pair
+of little feet running over a dance floor will retard your growth for
+years. No man or boy can grow toward the purpose of a life while he
+thinks of women. Let him try it and he will be undone. What is to him
+a passing humour is to them an end. They are diabolically clever. They
+will run and stop and run and stop again, keeping just without his
+reach. He sees them here and there about him. His mind is filled with
+vague, delicious thoughts that come out of the very air; before he
+realises what he has done he has spent his years in vain pursuit and
+turning finds himself old and undone."
+
+Telfer began jabbing at the ground with his stick.
+
+"I had my chance. In New York I had money to live on and time to have
+made an artist of myself. I won prize after prize. The master, walking
+up and down back of us, lingered longest over my easel. There was a
+fellow sat beside me who had nothing. I made sport of him and called him
+Sleepy Jock after a dog we used to have about our house here in Caxton.
+Now I am here idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only
+last week I saw in a paper that he had won a place among the world's
+great artists by a picture he has painted. In the school I watched for
+a look in the eyes of the girl students and went about with them night
+after night winning, like Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy
+Jock had the best of it. He did not look about with open eyes but kept
+peering instead at the face of the master. My days were full of small
+successes. I could wear clothes. I could make soft-eyed girls turn to
+look at me in a dance hall. I remember a night. We students gave a dance
+and Sleepy Jock came. He went about asking for dances and the girls
+laughed and told him they had none to give, that the dances were taken.
+I followed him and had my ears filled with flattery and my card with
+names. In riding the wave of small success I got the habit of small
+success. When I could not catch the line I wanted to make a drawing
+live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my arm, went for a
+day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I overheard two women
+talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy for a week."
+
+Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.
+
+"My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me?
+Let me tell you. It has brought me to this--that at fifty I, who might
+have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of
+beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a
+flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising
+corn.
+
+"If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small
+success and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you
+that I got it when I saw it lurking in a woman's eyes and heard the
+pleasant little songs that lull to sleep upon a woman's lips."
+
+The boy, sitting upon the grassy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of
+life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare
+silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at
+night, of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little
+blue-eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith's home and
+of how he had gone at night to stand under her window.
+
+In Caxton adolescent love had about it a virility befitting a land
+that raised so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers
+through the streets to be loaded upon cars. Men and women went their
+ways believing, with characteristic American what-boots-it attitude
+toward the needs of childhood, that it was well for growing boys and
+girls to be much alone together. To leave them alone together was a
+principle with them. When a young man called upon his sweetheart,
+her parents sat in the presence of the two with apologetic eyes and
+presently disappeared leaving them alone together. When boys' and girls'
+parties were given in Caxton houses, parents went away leaving the
+children to shift for themselves.
+
+"Now have a good time and don't tear the house down," they said, going
+off upstairs.
+
+Left to themselves the children played kissing games and young men
+and tall half-formed girls sat on the front porches in the darkness,
+thrilled and half frightened, getting through their instincts, crudely
+and without guidance, their first peep at the mystery of life. They
+kissed passionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds
+fevered and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.
+
+Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing
+aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a
+kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as
+a drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on
+the next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost
+their keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men
+about the station and in the stores, they went slinking through the
+streets in groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said,
+"It is the loutish age."
+
+If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to
+increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to
+the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and
+to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now
+sat musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to
+do with the Walker girl. He remembered his sister's affair with a young
+farmer and shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the
+shoulder of the man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the
+rolling fields stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came
+Telfer's speech. So vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the
+armies of standing corn which men had set up in the fields to protect
+themselves against the march of pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the
+picture in his mind as he followed the sense of Telfer's talk, thought
+that all society had resolved itself into a few sturdy souls who went
+on and on regardless, and a hunger to make of himself such another arose
+engulfing him. The desire within him seemed so compelling that he turned
+and haltingly tried to express what was in his mind.
+
+"I will try," he stammered, "I will try to be a man. I will try to
+not have anything to do with them--with women. I will work and make
+money--and--and----"
+
+Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the
+ground.
+
+"To Hell with women and girls," he burst forth as though throwing
+something distasteful out of his throat.
+
+In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits,
+came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the grassy
+bank, covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his
+sensitive nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. His _sang
+froid_ had returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the
+dogs he cried joyfully, "We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy,
+and dog. We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked
+into bed."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to
+him. For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun
+come up hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the
+streets in the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from
+the north came into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on
+the deserted little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry
+Donlin to hurry with his work that they might get back into the warm
+stale air of the smoking car.
+
+In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become
+a man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some
+subtle way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that
+to make money and to have money would in some way make up for the old
+half-forgotten humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and
+would set it on a more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had
+provided, grew and influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly
+he kept at his efforts to get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of
+dollars. Jane McPherson had herself a passion for frugality. In spite
+of Windy's incompetence and her own growing ill health, she would
+not permit the family to go into debt, and although, in the long hard
+winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush until his mind revolted at the
+thought of a corn field, yet was the rent of the little house paid on
+the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to increase the totals in the
+yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the death of his wife had lived
+in a loft above his shop and who was a blacksmith of the old days, a
+workman first and a money maker later, did not despise the thought of
+gain.
+
+"It is money makes the mare go," he said with a kind of reverence as
+banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of
+Wildman's grocery.
+
+Of John Telfer's attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain.
+The man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.
+
+"That's right," he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express
+opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly
+that the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their
+achievements, "Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big
+world! Get your name up for a modern, high-class American!"
+
+And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to
+berate the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that
+the day would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning,
+he shouted, "Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old
+clerkliness lies asleep!"
+
+Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who
+had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a
+man, was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they
+talked to him of the city and of the money to be made there.
+
+"It is the place for a live young man," they said.
+
+Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their
+affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into
+his nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the
+great ways filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching
+the sky, the men running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks
+going on year after year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of,
+and yet not understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises
+that supported them.
+
+In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of
+life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a
+sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing,
+had he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he
+not introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the
+Saturday night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the
+totals in the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He
+felt within him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and
+would do.
+
+"I will be richer than any man in town here," he declared in his pride.
+"I will be richer than Ed Walker."
+
+Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks
+in the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn
+venders, for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses
+close by the beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the
+farmers, and the labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth
+to mingle with their fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores,
+the sidewalks, and drinking places, and men stood about in groups
+talking while young girls with their lovers walked up and down. In
+the hall over Geiger's drug store a dance went on and the voice of the
+caller-off rose above the clatter of voices and the stamping of horses
+in the street. Now and then a fight broke out among the roisterers in
+Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was killed with a knife.
+
+In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.
+
+"Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon," he said, pushing a paper
+into the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. "Recipes for cooking new
+dishes," he urged to the farmer's wife. "There is a page of new fashions
+in dress," he told the young girl.
+
+Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and
+the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Saturday
+paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day's business.
+
+And it was on a Saturday night that he decided to drop paper selling.
+
+"I will take you into business with me," announced Freedom Smith,
+stopping him as he hurried by. "You are getting too old to sell papers
+and you know too much."
+
+Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday
+night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year
+he had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he
+nodded his head as he hurried away.
+
+"It is the end of romance," shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom
+Smith before Geiger's drug store and who had heard the offer. "A boy,
+who has seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe
+and Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am
+overcome by the thought."
+
+The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to
+Sam of the matter at length.
+
+"For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place," he
+declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time
+to time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. "For any boy
+I put money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who
+despise money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she
+puts into the selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been
+the making of her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without
+the millinery business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon
+clothes and with it she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to
+her."
+
+Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the
+ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking
+thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the
+boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret
+regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face
+by throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue,
+making the words roll and tumble from his lips.
+
+"No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes
+many virtues that are forever on men's lips," he declared fiercely as
+though trying to down an opponent. "It is one of the virtues that proves
+man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power
+to make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys
+fear. Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings
+into men's lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go
+adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.
+
+"Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
+wealth," he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. "No doubt
+the things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the
+instinct to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of
+poverty, the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim
+silences of the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient,
+and the defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid
+rich man's city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a
+factory at the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty
+than you and I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious,
+and who has not acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables
+him to get on, may build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is
+diseased and decaying."
+
+Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his
+eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.
+
+"The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that
+makes our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for
+shrewd money getting or it will destroy itself," he declared. "And the
+really great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve
+in garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages
+on Fifth Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for
+yourself. Visit the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to
+one that you will find him not only incapable in money getting but also
+incapable in the very art for which he starves."
+
+After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer
+for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted
+a chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and
+hides he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged
+persistency with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank
+had caught Freedom's imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the
+fact.
+
+Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty
+dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn
+business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with
+the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business,
+backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the
+cashier telling of Sam's record as a depositor, and the seven hundred
+dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with
+Freedom, Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his
+savings as he had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was
+impressed. He thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a
+week Sam had seen the silent suggestive power of cash.
+
+The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to
+more than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have
+two-thirds of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other
+hand was to furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam
+was to take care of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things
+bought were to be fixed each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at
+less than the prices named two-thirds of the savings went to him. The
+arrangement was suggested by Sam, who thought he would make more from
+the saving than from the wage.
+
+Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice,
+roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great
+inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man,
+woman and child he knew and liked. "Old Maybe-Not" he called Windy
+McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed
+rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low
+phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip
+in the top. To Sam's knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed
+during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying.
+Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar
+until the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him.
+And then haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his
+way while the farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward
+child.
+
+Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton's best
+streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked
+him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing
+and roaring about it. "Good morning, Mary," he would shout at the neat
+German woman across the street. "Wait and you'll see me clean up about
+here. I'm going at it right now. I'm going to brush the flies off the
+fence first."
+
+Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the
+county.
+
+Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and
+agricultural implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard,
+gathering rust and decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the
+lot were a half dozen buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction
+engine, a mowing machine, several farm wagons and other farm tools gone
+beyond naming. Every few days he came home bringing a new prize. They
+overflowed the yard and crept onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell
+any of this stuff. He had at one time sixteen sets of harness all broken
+and unrepaired in the barn and in a shed back of the house. A great
+flock of chickens and two or three pigs wandered about among this junk
+and all the children of the neighbourhood joined Freedom's four and ran
+howling and shouting over and under the mass.
+
+Freedom's wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house.
+She had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally
+stood at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at
+evening as he stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both
+she and Freedom treated him with great respect.
+
+As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling.
+He was a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very
+systematically and within a year more than doubling the bulk of
+Freedom's purchases.
+
+There is a little of Windy McPherson's grotesque pretentiousness in
+every man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of
+it. He let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value
+of their goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they
+had recovered from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam's day,
+farmers did not watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets
+were not systematised and regulated as they were later, and the skill
+of the buyer was of the first importance. Having the skill, Sam used
+it constantly to put money into his pockets, but in some way kept the
+confidence and respect of the men with whom he traded.
+
+The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading
+ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the
+streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.
+
+"Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy," he would shout to the
+loafers in the store.
+
+Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his
+own affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom's
+affairs, but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and
+apples, butter and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working
+always to swell his commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business
+and many times profited little, but the two liked and respected each
+other and it was through Freedom's efforts that Sam finally got out of
+Caxton and into larger affairs.
+
+One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam
+stood taking the harness off his horse.
+
+"Here is a chance for you, my boy," he said, putting his hand
+affectionately on Sam's shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his
+voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the
+things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had
+replied making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might
+hope for in Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.
+
+When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for
+him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at
+last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in
+the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the
+door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his
+thumb to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told
+him that in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and
+filled with uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom's
+stable wishing that he also might be gone.
+
+Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken
+from the horse upon a peg in the wall.
+
+"I will be glad to go," he said heavily.
+
+Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who
+had come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man
+of eighteen. He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago
+company because of his affection for the boy and because he believed him
+capable of something more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence
+holding the lantern aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the
+yard, filled with regrets.
+
+By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who,
+putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her
+eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street,
+Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From
+a street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could
+see them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom's hand and the
+slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving
+March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom's hand. At the
+front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on
+the gate and looking at the sky.
+
+"We shall have a rain," he said in a quavering voice, as though giving
+a decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an
+answer went along a narrow path into the house.
+
+The incident brought a smile to Sam's lips followed by a kind of
+weariness of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had,
+day after day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking
+at the sky. The man was one of Sam's old newspaper customers who stood
+as a kind of figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he
+had been a gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part
+in more than one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he
+had come to end his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself
+by keeping year after year a carefully tabulated record of weather
+variations. Once or twice a month during the warm season he stumbled
+into Wildman's and, sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the
+accuracy of his records and the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at
+his heels. In his present mood the endless sameness and uneventfulness
+of the man's life seemed to Sam amusing and in some way sad.
+
+"To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point
+to a day--to look forward to and depend upon that--what deadliness!" he
+thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt with pleasure
+the letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much of the big
+outside world to him.
+
+In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he
+felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought
+on by his mother's approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of
+confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost
+cheerful. The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom
+was renewed by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at
+the sky.
+
+"I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching
+a mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer," he
+thought.
+
+The three years in Freedom Smith's service had taught Sam not to doubt
+his ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his
+way. He knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business
+man, one of the men who direct and control the affairs in which they
+are concerned because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He
+recalled with pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped
+calling him a bright boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.
+
+At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these
+things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old
+man he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his
+mother's life had been as barren as that of the man who depended for
+companionship upon a dog and a thermometer.
+
+"Indeed," he said to himself, pursuing the thought, "it has been worse.
+She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the
+remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the
+last days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old
+man watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house
+chasing playthings." The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the
+wind singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional
+drop of rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with
+his mother. During the last two or three years he had been trying to
+make things up to her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the
+beginning of his success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub
+and since the beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after
+evening with her instead of going to Wildman's to sit with the four
+friends and hear the talk that went on among them. No more did he walk
+with Telfer or Mary Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the
+bedside of the sick woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an
+arm chair upon the grass plot at the front of the house.
+
+The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an
+understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to
+the ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together,
+the mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much
+speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it
+unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought
+of the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had
+been made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which
+he had been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the
+doings of the pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane's illness
+continued to go off after pension day for long periods of drunkenness,
+and who only came home to weep and wail through the house, when the
+pension money was gone, regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the
+loss of both the washwoman and the wife.
+
+"She has been the most wonderful woman in the world," he told himself
+and tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend,
+John Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy
+trotting beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of
+her long gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A
+picture of George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness
+in the kitchen of Freedom Smith's house, had caught his eye some days
+before, and in the darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his
+lips, realising that in some indescribable way it was like his mother
+as she had been before her illness. Freedom's wife had given him the
+picture and he had been carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on
+lonely stretches of road as he went about his work.
+
+Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of
+an attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue
+the thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details
+of a long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It
+was extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could
+remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her
+youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy's
+mind. She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of
+a thin-lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a
+farm, and of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved
+to buy books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a
+school teacher, and of her marriage to Windy--then John McPherson.
+
+Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in
+the town's life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man
+who walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and
+who taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.
+
+When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him
+eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should
+have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.
+
+"And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour
+and unhappiness for me," the sick woman had told her son.
+
+After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton
+where he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the
+store into the sheriff's hands and his wife into the position of town
+laundress.
+
+In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted
+across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy
+and another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the
+state giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs
+and had written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the
+applause that greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances,
+the little dimly-lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces
+shining in the light of the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted
+Windy running here and there, talking the jargon of stageland, arraying
+himself in his motley and strutting upon the little stage.
+
+"And all winter he did not send me a penny," the sick woman had said,
+interrupting his thoughts.
+
+Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth,
+the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been
+killed in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an
+anecdote, touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her
+son.
+
+The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for
+an hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old
+woman looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter
+feel she had been a fool to come.
+
+At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The
+story ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding
+the woman alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman,
+then in her prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house.
+The railroad agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and
+laughed.
+
+"She knocked him out, too," he said, "knocked him cold upon the ground
+and then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town
+declaring her the finest woman in the state."
+
+In the darkness by the broken shed Sam's mind turned from thoughts of
+his mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young
+farmer. He thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of
+the failings of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of
+the house to wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of
+war talk always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of
+the night when, getting a rig from Culvert's livery, she had driven off
+alone into the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show
+her wedding ring.
+
+Before him there rose a picture of a summer afternoon when he had seen
+a part of the love making that had preceded this. He had gone into the
+store to see his sister when the young farmer came in, looked awkwardly
+about and pushed a new gold watch across the counter to Kate. A sudden
+wave of respect for his sister had pervaded the boy. "What a sum it must
+have cost," he thought, and looked with new interest at the back of the
+lover and at the flushed cheek and shining eyes of his sister. When the
+lover, turning, had seen young McPherson standing at the counter, he
+laughed self-consciously and walked out at the door. Kate had been
+embarrassed and secretly pleased and flattered by the look in her
+brother's eyes, but had pretended to treat the gift lightly, twirling
+it carelessly back and forth on the counter and walking up and down
+swinging her arms.
+
+"Don't go telling," she had said.
+
+"Then don't go pretending," the boy had answered.
+
+Sam thought that his sister's indiscretion, which had brought her a babe
+and a husband in the same month had, after all, ended better than the
+indiscretion of his mother in her marriage with Windy.
+
+Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for
+the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of
+his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.
+
+Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and
+presently returned, bringing a daughter.
+
+There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in
+a house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an
+attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code,
+if she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The
+thought amused and saddened him.
+
+"You would have thought her safe," he mused. She was fifty, small,
+nervous and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled
+as she talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue
+because of nervousness.
+
+In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the
+door holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of
+himself.
+
+"My wife--my wife is dying. She may die any day," he wailed, tears
+standing in his eyes.
+
+The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed
+had been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with
+anger and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and
+began sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped
+and Sam could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as
+the man turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels
+rose a voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had
+begun to rain.
+
+"He has got into the wrong street," thought the boy stupidly.
+
+Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs
+echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air
+of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother's ironing board stood
+against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering
+in Sam's heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store
+doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of
+his father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate's wedding, when
+Windy had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and
+the mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house,
+sick with humiliation.
+
+The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores
+replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy's anger. Sam began thinking
+again of his mother's life.
+
+The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now
+seemed utterly fruitless. "I would like to repay him," he thought,
+shaken with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him.
+The cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages
+on the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol
+of the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he
+turned his face and stared at the wall.
+
+He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith's house.
+Freedom had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just
+as to-night he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and
+just as Sam was shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the
+stable door had come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy
+girl of fourteen with the strength of a man and an inclination to burst
+out of her clothes at unexpected places, they had come charging into the
+stables to carry Sam off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them
+on, his voice roaring in the stable so that the horses jumped about in
+their stalls. Into the house they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of
+four, sitting astride his back and beating on his head with a woollen
+cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern and giving an occasional helpful
+push with his hand.
+
+A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of
+the big dining room in Freedom's house came back into the mind of
+the boy now sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted,
+badly-cooked food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great
+dishes heaped with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had
+always been just enough food for the single meal. The thing was nicely
+calculated, when you had finished the table was bare.
+
+How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a
+flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and
+passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh
+supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the
+children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the
+tomboy girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of
+the boy.
+
+"My mother never knew anything like that," he thought.
+
+The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking
+loudly--some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he talked
+of the cost of school books.
+
+"They change the books in the school too often," he declared in a loud
+voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an
+audience. "It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I
+will not stand it."
+
+Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a
+message upon it.
+
+"Be silent," he wrote. "If you say another word or make another sound to
+disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the
+street."
+
+Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a
+fork taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under
+the lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a
+desire to spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had
+brought his mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking
+at her very death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared
+about the kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.
+
+Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not
+understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his
+pocket.
+
+"A dog is dead, eh?" he shouted. "Well you're getting too big and smart,
+lad. What do I care for a dead dog?"
+
+Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put
+his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.
+
+"I must not kill," he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a
+stranger. "I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill."
+
+In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise,
+struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at
+him and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a
+start that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly
+it stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had
+become.
+
+"I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub
+by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with
+so little extra pressure," he thought.
+
+The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the
+forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon
+of drunken carousing.
+
+"If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it
+looks now all the days of my life," thought the boy.
+
+In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman
+speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the
+sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and
+went carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down
+upon him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind,
+shaking loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it
+against his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before
+the house he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into
+the road. Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the
+street.
+
+"I will go for Mary Underwood," he thought, his mind returning to the
+friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose
+friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer's tirades against all
+women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his
+bare head.
+
+"We need a woman in our house," he kept saying over and over to himself.
+"We need a woman in our house."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Leaning against the wall under the veranda of Mary Underwood's house,
+Sam tried to get in his mind a remembrance of what had brought him
+there. He had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along a
+country road. Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He
+had forgotten the purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The
+unexpected and terrible hatred of his father that had come upon him in
+the tense silence of the kitchen had so paralysed his brain that he now
+felt light-headed and wonderfully happy and carefree.
+
+"I have been doing something," he thought; "I wonder what it is."
+
+The house faced a grove of pine trees and was reached by climbing a
+little rise and following a winding road out beyond the graveyard and
+the last of the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled
+on the tin roof overhead, and Sam, his back closely pressed against the
+front of the house, fought to regain control of his mind.
+
+For an hour he stood there staring into the darkness and watched with
+delight the progress of the storm. He had--an inheritance from his
+mother--a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a boy
+and his mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the
+house singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did
+not hear, and in his bed upstairs Sam had lain awake listening to the
+noises--the rain on the roof, the occasional crash of thunder, the
+snoring of Windy, and the unusual and, he thought, beautiful sound of
+the mother singing in the storm.
+
+Now, lifting up his head, he looked about with delight. Trees in the
+grove in front of him bent and tossed in the wind. The inky blackness of
+the night was relieved by the flickering oil lamp in the road beyond
+the graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the
+windows of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which
+he stood made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees
+through which the raindrops fell gleaming and sparkling. An occasional
+flash of lightning lit up the trees and the winding road, and the
+cannonry of the skies rolled and echoed overhead. A kind of wild song
+sang in Sam's heart.
+
+"I wish it would last all night," he thought, his mind fixed on the
+singing of his mother in the dark house when he was a boy.
+
+The door opened and a woman stepped out upon the veranda and stood
+before him facing the storm, the wind tossing the soft kimono in which
+she was clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air
+was filled with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted
+her head and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her
+fine contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and
+going on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover
+riding through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the
+song--
+
+  "He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"
+
+sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch
+and leaning forward into the storm.
+
+Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who
+had been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind
+had turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman
+standing singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother
+singing on the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on,
+seeing pictures as he used to see them when a boy walking under
+the stars and listening to the talk of John Telfer. He saw a
+broad-shouldered man shouting defiance to the storm as he rode down a
+mountain path.
+
+"And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak," went on the voice of
+the singer.
+
+Mary Underwood's singing there in the rain made her seem near and
+likeable as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.
+
+"John Telfer was wrong about her," he thought.
+
+She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down
+across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating
+the spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon
+his clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation
+of surprise broke from her lips:
+
+"Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the
+rain."
+
+"I like it here," replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at
+the storm.
+
+Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary
+looked into the darkness.
+
+"You have been a long time coming to see me," she said, "come in."
+
+Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the
+veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon
+a table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the
+shelves along the walls. On a table burned a student's lamp and in the
+corners of the room lay heavy shadows.
+
+Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes.
+
+Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned
+clad in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began
+moving about the room picking up odds and ends of woman's clothing
+scattered on the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks
+piled in an open grate at the side of the room.
+
+"It was the storm made me want to sing," she said self-consciously, and
+then briskly, "we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in
+the road and got yourself covered with mud."
+
+From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into
+his mind.
+
+"I have come here courting," he thought; "I have come to ask Mary
+Underwood to be my wife and live in my house."
+
+The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused
+something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore,
+falling away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by
+the kimono, wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the
+soft grey hair and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks
+caused a jumping of his heart.
+
+"We are needing a woman in our house," he said heavily, repeating the
+words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept
+streets and along the mud-covered roads. "We are needing a woman in our
+house, and I have come to take you there.
+
+"I intend to marry you," he added, lurching across the room and grasping
+her roughly by the shoulders. "Why not? I am needing a woman."
+
+Mary Underwood was dismayed and frightened by the face looking down at
+her, and by the strong hands clenched upon her shoulders. In his youth
+she had conceived a kind of maternal passion for the newsboy and had
+planned a future for him. Her plans if followed would have made him a
+scholar, a man living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had
+chosen to live his life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about
+the country like Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen
+him driving at evening through the street to Freedom's house, going in
+and out of Wildman's, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim
+way she knew that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from
+the things of which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John
+Telfer, the talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had
+come back to her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of
+the road, and talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother,
+of marriage and of coming to live with him in his house. She stood,
+chilled, looking into the eager, strong face and the eyes with the
+pained, dazed look in them.
+
+Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to
+Sam, and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.
+
+"It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you," he began, "it was
+because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired
+of them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little
+schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew
+tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks
+and looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to
+get out of there and into the streets myself."
+
+Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and
+stared into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from
+his trousers legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to
+reconstruct an old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer's,
+that had years before come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and
+Telfer had made of the ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central
+figure, a stoop-shouldered, feeble old man stumbling along the street,
+muttering to himself and poking in a gutter with a stick. The picture
+was a caricature of puttering old Frank Huntley, superintendent of the
+Caxton schools.
+
+Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood's house, become, for the
+moment, a boy, facing a boy's problems, Sam did not want to be such a
+man. He wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the
+kind of man he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of
+the world and making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get
+expressed when he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind,
+he felt that he must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that
+the schools were not giving him what he wanted. His brain worked on the
+problem of how to tell her about it.
+
+Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: "I am going to quit the
+schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same."
+
+Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the
+chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the
+door opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called
+sharply, "Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here."
+
+A startled, trembling voice answered from above, "Who is it?"
+
+Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her
+hand gently on his shoulder, said, "It is your mother and you are only a
+sick, half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it."
+
+Sam shook his head. "She is still there in the bed, coughing." He roused
+himself and stood up. "I have just killed my father," he announced. "I
+choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the
+house. He made horrible noises in the kitchen and mother was tired and
+wanted to sleep."
+
+Mary Underwood began running about the room. From a little alcove under
+a stairway she took clothes, throwing them upon the floor about the
+room. She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam's presence,
+raised her skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the
+stockinged foot and the other on the bare one, she turned to him. "We
+will go back to your house. I think you are right. You need a woman
+there."
+
+In the street she walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall
+fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over
+Sam. He felt he had accomplished something--something he had set out to
+accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion
+that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith's, began planning
+the evening he would spend with her.
+
+"I will tell her of the letter from the Chicago company and of what I
+will do when I go to the city," he thought.
+
+At the gate before the McPherson house Mary looked into the road below
+the grassy bank that ran down from the fence, but in the darkness she
+could see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and
+shouted as it rushed through the bare branches of the trees. Sam went
+through the gate and around the house to the kitchen door intent upon
+getting to his mother's bedside.
+
+In the house the neighbour woman sat asleep in a chair before the
+kitchen stove. The daughter had gone.
+
+Sam went through the house to the parlour and sat down in a chair beside
+his mother's bed, picking up her hand and holding it in his own. "She
+must be asleep," he thought.
+
+At the kitchen door Mary Underwood stopped, and, turning, ran away into
+the darkness along the street. By the kitchen fire the neighbour
+woman still slept. In the parlour Sam, sitting on the chair beside his
+mother's bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little
+stand beside the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a
+tall, aristocratic-looking woman with rings on her fingers, that hung
+upon the wall. The picture belonged to Windy and was claimed by him as a
+portrait of his mother, and it had once brought on a quarrel between Sam
+and his sister.
+
+Kate had taken the portrait of the lady seriously, and the boy had come
+upon her sitting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands
+lying in her lap in imitation of the pose maintained so haughtily by the
+great lady who looked down at her.
+
+"It is a fraud," he had declared, irritated by what he believed his
+sister's devotion to one of the father's pretensions. "It is a fraud
+he has picked up somewhere and now claims as his mother to make people
+believe he is something big."
+
+The girl, ashamed at having been caught in the pose, and furious because
+of the attack upon the authenticity of the portrait, had gone into a
+spasm of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the
+floor with her foot. Then she had run across the room and dropped upon
+her knees before a little couch, buried her face in a pillow and shook
+with anger and grief.
+
+Sam had turned and walked out of the room. The emotions of the sister
+had seemed to him to have the flavour of one of Windy's outbreaks.
+
+"She likes it," he had thought, dismissing the incident. "She likes
+believing in lies. She is like Windy and would rather believe in them
+than not."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer's house and beat on
+the door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, holding a lamp
+above her head, appeared at the door. With Telfer she went back through
+the streets to the front of Sam's house thinking of the terrible choked
+and disfigured man they should find there. She went along clinging to
+Telfer's arm as she had clung to Sam's, unconscious of her bare head
+and scanty attire. In his hand Telfer carried a lantern secured from the
+stable.
+
+In the road before the house they found nothing. Telfer went up and down
+swinging the lantern and peering into gutters. The woman walked beside
+him, her skirts lifted and the mud splashing upon her bare leg.
+
+Suddenly Telfer threw back his head and laughed. Taking her hand he led
+Mary with a rush up the bank and through the gate.
+
+"What a muddle-headed old fool I am!" he cried. "I am getting old and
+addle-pated! Windy McPherson is not dead! Nothing could kill that old
+war horse! He was in at Wildman's grocery after nine o'clock to-night
+covered with mud and swearing he had been in a fight with Art Sherman.
+Poor Sam and you--to have come to me and to have found me a stupid ass!
+Fool! Fool! What a fool I have become!"
+
+In at the kitchen door ran Mary and Telfer, frightening the woman by
+the stove so that she sprang to her feet and began nervously making the
+false teeth rattle with her tongue. In the parlour they found Sam, his
+head upon the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand
+of Jane McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood stooped
+over and kissed his wet hair as the neighbour woman came in at the
+doorway bearing the kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, holding his finger to
+his lips, commanded silence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He
+thought that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become
+coarsened--she looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had
+an air of having quarrelled with her husband when they came out of
+their bedroom in the morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the
+parlour, astonished and irritated by the endless number of women that
+crowded into the house. They were everywhere, in the kitchen, the
+sleeping room back of the parlour; and in the parlour, where the
+dead woman lay in her coffin, they were massed. When the thin-lipped
+minister, holding a book in his hand, held forth upon the virtues of
+the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the floor and thought that thus
+they would have wept over the body of the dead Windy, had his fingers
+but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister would have talked
+in the same way--blatantly and without knowledge--of the virtues of the
+dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved husband, in new
+black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious undertaker kept
+moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his trade.
+
+During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the
+floor at Sam's feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to
+distract his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of
+the weeping women, none of whom had before been in the house and all
+of whom he thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of
+privacy. The note was from John Telfer.
+
+"I will not come to your mother's funeral," he wrote. "I respected your
+mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she
+is dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in
+Wildman's, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the
+moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore's shop, I will
+go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If
+he or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their
+friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know
+that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take
+them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of
+the dead."
+
+The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something
+that had slipped from him.
+
+"It is good sense, after all," he thought, and realised that even in the
+days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the
+fact that Jane McPherson's long, hard role was just being played out
+to the end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore
+was beating upon his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with
+a flourish. He arose, interrupting the minister's discourse. Mary
+Underwood had come in just as the minister began talking and had dropped
+into an obscure corner near the door leading into the street. Sam
+crowded past the women who stared and the minister who frowned and the
+baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands and, dropping the note into
+her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking and listening with
+breathless curiosity, "It is from John Telfer. Read it. Even he, hating
+women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door."
+
+In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their
+heads together and their hands before their faces, nodded toward
+the school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had
+created, went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting
+until the talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the
+streets should be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book.
+
+"I have become older than all of these people here," thought the youth.
+"They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of
+my hand."
+
+Mary Underwood, lacking Sam's unconsciousness of the people, looked
+about with burning cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and putting their
+heads together, a chill of fear ran through her. Into the room had been
+thrust the face of an old enemy to her--the scandal of a small town.
+Picking up the note she slipped out at the door and stole away along
+the street. The old maternal love for Sam had returned strengthened and
+ennobled by the terror through which she had passed with him that night
+in the rain. Going to her house she whistled the collie dog and set out
+along a country road. At the edge of a grove of trees she stopped, sat
+down on a log, and read Telfer's note. From the soft ground into which
+her feet sank there came the warm pungent smell of the new growth. Tears
+came into her eyes. She thought that in a few days much had come to her.
+She had got a boy upon whom she could pour out the mother love in her
+heart, and she had made a friend of Telfer, whom she had long regarded
+with fear and doubt.
+
+For a month Sam lingered in Caxton. It seemed to him there was something
+that wanted doing there. He sat with the men at the back of Wildman's,
+and walked aimlessly through the streets and out of the town along the
+country roads, where men worked all day in the fields behind sweating
+horses, ploughing the land. The thrill of spring was in the air, and
+in the evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree below his bedroom
+window. Sam walked and loitered in silence, looking at the ground.
+In his mind was the dread of people. The talk of the men in the store
+wearied him and when he went alone into the country he found himself
+accompanied by the voices of all of those he had come out of town to
+escape. On the street corner the thin-lipped, brown-bearded minister
+stopped him and talked of the future life as he had stopped and talked
+to a bare-legged newsboy.
+
+"Your mother," he said, "has but gone before. It is for you to get into
+the narrow path and follow her. God has sent this sorrow as a warning
+to you. He wants you also to get into the way of life and in the end to
+join her. Begin coming to our church. Join in the work of the Christ.
+Find truth."
+
+Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The
+minister's talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of
+which he got but one thought.
+
+"Find truth," he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his
+mind play with the idea. "The best men are all trying to do that. They
+spend their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth."
+
+He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the
+interpretation he had put upon the minister's words. The terrible
+moments in the kitchen followed by his mother's death had put a new
+look of seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of
+responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the
+street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become
+public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public
+affairs.
+
+"He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour's wife," said
+John Telfer.
+
+Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken
+him to its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had
+encouraged him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father,
+and patronised him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was
+a boy, scurrying between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a
+Saturday night, there was always some one to speak a word to him of his
+morals and to shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected
+to remain there, with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the
+Savings Bank--built to that during his years with Freedom Smith--he
+might soon become one of the town's solid men.
+
+He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and
+that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the
+train and be off.
+
+One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences,
+hearing the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the
+smell of the new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town
+and sat down on a low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the
+railroad station, to wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken
+on a new meaning to him since any day might see him on such a train
+bound into his new life.
+
+A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed
+by two women.
+
+"Here, watch these," he said to the women, setting the bags upon
+the platform; "I will go for the tickets," and disappeared into the
+darkness.
+
+The two women resumed their interrupted talk.
+
+"Ed's wife has been poorly these ten years," said one of them. "It will
+be better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long
+ride. I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to
+be train-sick."
+
+Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John
+Telfer's old talks with him.
+
+"They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away
+from here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain."
+
+He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending
+shoes on a side street back of Geiger's drug store and the two women,
+one short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery
+shop and were Eleanor Telfer's only competitors.
+
+"Well, the town knows her now for what she is," said the tall woman.
+"Milly Peters says she won't rest until she has put that stuck-up Mary
+Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house and
+it was her told Milly. I never heard such a story. To think of Jane
+McPherson working all these years and then having such goings-on in her
+house when she lay dying, Milly says that Sam went away early in the
+evening and came home late with that Underwood thing, half dressed,
+hanging on his arm. Milly's mother looked out of the window and saw
+them. Then she ran out by the kitchen stove and pretended to be asleep.
+She wanted to see what was up. And the bold hussy came right into the
+house with Sam. Then she went away, and after a while back she came with
+that John Telfer. Milly is going to see that Eleanor Telfer finds it
+out. I guess it will bring her down, too. And there is no telling
+how many other men in this town Mary Underwood is running with. Milly
+says----"
+
+The two women turned as out of the darkness came a tall figure roaring
+and swearing. Two hands flashed out and sank into their hair.
+
+"Stop it!" growled Sam, beating the two heads together, "stop your dirty
+lies!--you ugly she-beasts!"
+
+Hearing the two women screaming the man who had gone for the railroad
+tickets came running down the station platform followed by Jerry Donlin.
+Springing forward Sam knocked the shoemaker over the iron fence into a
+newly spaded flower bed and then turned to the baggage man.
+
+"They were telling lies about Mary Underwood," he shouted. "She tried to
+save me from killing my father and now they are telling lies about her."
+
+The two women picked up the bags and ran whimpering away along
+the station platform. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and
+confronted the surprised and frightened shoemaker.
+
+"What the Hell are you doing in my flower bed?" he growled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hurrying through the streets Sam's mind was in a ferment. Like the Roman
+emperor he wished that all the world had but one head that he might cut
+it off with a slash. The town that had seemed so paternal, so cheery, so
+intent upon wishing him well, now seemed horrible. He thought of it as a
+great, crawling, slimy thing lying in wait amid the cornfields.
+
+"To be saying that of her, of that white soul!" he exclaimed aloud in
+the empty street, all of his boyish loyalty and devotion to the woman
+who had put out a hand to him in his hour of trouble aroused and burning
+in him.
+
+He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a
+swinging blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to
+his own house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing
+meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets
+past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone
+and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and
+quiet. He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane
+McPherson's funeral.
+
+"It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another," he
+thought.
+
+For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy
+he saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with
+coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They
+were the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers.
+He remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the
+papers and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational
+murder cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive
+and the details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain
+their curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing
+the newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and
+over on their tongues.
+
+In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the
+thought of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small,
+unaired, unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and
+clothes--only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no
+clean thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in
+a darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such
+a yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these
+women come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat
+hurriedly and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of
+utter physical exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in
+stockinged feet before crawling away to sleep and oblivion.
+
+In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed
+ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the
+man they have snatched from society they cling also with a tenacity
+to be measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the
+craving for food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the
+despair of reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put
+the black dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, "The female of
+the species is more deadly than the male." At their worst they are to be
+seen drunk with emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution
+or immersed in the secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious
+persecution. At their best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth
+coming to them, they throw themselves into garish display of it and
+flash upon the sight of Newport or Palm Beach. In their native lair in
+the close little houses, they sleep in the bed of the man who has put
+clothes upon their backs and food into their mouths because that is the
+usage of their kind and give him of their bodies grudgingly or willingly
+as the laws of their physical needs direct. They do not love, they sell,
+instead, their bodies in the market place and cry out that man shall
+witness their virtue because they had had the joy of finding one buyer
+instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce animalism in them
+makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the days of its
+softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch again
+an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy, no
+longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite. Having
+passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of emotions
+and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the eloquence of
+evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell--the call to the one being
+brother to the call of the other--crying upon the troubled air of hot
+little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of vulgarity, "The
+weight of my sins is heavy on my soul." Along streets they go lifting
+heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel to roll
+upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the life
+of a Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its
+offal. Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air,
+dream dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of
+animal youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door
+to kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has
+found a carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it
+forward to the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the
+fine emotion of achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having
+hysteria rather than reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of
+femininity--and none of it. For the most part they live and die unseen,
+unknown, eating rank food, sleeping overmuch, and sitting through
+summer afternoons rocking in chairs and looking at people passing in the
+street. In the end they die full of faith, hoping for a life to come.
+
+Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making
+on Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields
+that lay beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness
+and he thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that
+had been marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and
+shivered as he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air
+aggravating the dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the
+assurance of the days before his mother's illness and to get again the
+strong belief in his own destiny that had kept him at the money making
+and saving and had urged him to the efforts to rise above the level of
+the man who bred him. He didn't succeed. The feeling of age that had
+settled upon him in the midst of the people mourning over the body of
+his mother came back, and, turning, he went along the road toward the
+town, saying to himself: "I will go and talk to Mary Underwood."
+
+While he waited on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided
+that after all a marriage with her might lead to happiness. The half
+spiritual, half physical love of woman that is the glory and mystery of
+youth was gone from him. He thought that if he could only drive from her
+presence the fear of the faces that had been coming and going in his own
+mind he would, for his own part, be content to live his life as a worker
+and money maker, one without dreams.
+
+Mary Underwood came to the door wearing the same heavy long coat she had
+worn on that other night and taking her by the hand Sam led her to the
+edge of the veranda. He looked with content at the pine trees before
+the house, thinking that some benign influence must have guided the hand
+that planted them there to stand clothed and decent amid the barrenness
+of the land at the end of winter.
+
+"What is it, boy?" asked the woman, and her voice was filled with
+anxiety. The maternal passion again glowing in her had for days coloured
+all her thoughts, and with all the ardour of an intense nature she had
+thrown herself into her love of Sam. Thinking of him, she felt in fancy
+the pangs of birth, and in her bed at night relived with him his boyhood
+in the town and built again her plans for his future. In the day time
+she laughed at herself and said tenderly, "You are an old fool."
+
+Brutally and frankly Sam told her of the thing he had heard on the
+station platform, looking past her at the pine trees and gripping the
+veranda rail. From the dead land there came again the smell of the new
+growth as it had come to him on the road before the revelation at the
+railroad station.
+
+"Something kept telling me not to go away," he said. "It must have been
+in the air--this thing. Already these evil crawling things were at work.
+Oh, if only all the world, like you and Telfer and some of the others
+here, had an appreciation of the sense of privacy."
+
+Mary Underwood laughed quietly.
+
+"I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making
+you a man at work upon the things of the mind," she said. "The sense of
+privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer's method was
+better than my own. He has given you the knack of saying things with a
+flourish."
+
+Sam shook his head.
+
+"Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh," he said
+stoutly. "Here is something at you--it is tearing at you--it has got to
+be met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter over
+in their minds. To-morrow they will be at you again. There is but one
+way and we must take it. You and I will have to marry."
+
+Mary looked at the serious new lines of his face.
+
+"What a proposal!" she cried.
+
+On an impulse she began singing, her voice fine and strong running
+through the quiet night.
+
+  "He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"
+
+she sang, and laughed again.
+
+"You should come like that," she said, and then, "you poor muddled boy.
+Don't you know that I am your new mother?" she added, taking hold of
+his two arms and turning him about facing her. "Don't be absurd. I don't
+want a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him.
+I adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick
+and covered with mud. As for these women--away with them--I'll face them
+down--I did it once before and I'll do it again. Go to your city and
+make your fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman's fight."
+
+"It is horrible. You don't understand," Sam protested.
+
+A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood's face.
+
+"I understand," she said. "I have been on that battlefield. It is to be
+won only by silence and tireless waiting. Your very effort to help would
+make the matter worse."
+
+The woman and the tall boy, suddenly become a man, stood in thought.
+She was thinking of the end toward which her life was drifting.
+How differently she had planned it. She thought of the college in
+Massachusetts and of the men and women walking under the elm trees
+there.
+
+"But I have got me a son and I am going to keep him," she said aloud,
+putting her hand on Sam's arm.
+
+Very serious and troubled, Sam went down the gravel path toward the
+road. He felt there was something cowardly in the part she had given him
+to play, but he could see no alternative.
+
+"After all," he reflected, "it is sensible--it is a woman's battle."
+
+Half way to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his
+arms and gave her a great hug.
+
+"Good-bye, little Mother," he cried and kissed her upon the lips.
+
+And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was
+overcome with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning
+against the house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling
+through her tears she called after him.
+
+"Did you crack their heads hard, boy?" she asked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From Mary's house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had
+come to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen
+table with pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the
+parlour he could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and
+writing again. Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read
+over and over what he had written, and putting on his coat went through
+the dawn to the house of Tom Comstock, editor of the _Caxton Argus_, and
+roused him out of bed.
+
+"I'll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won't cost you anything,"
+Comstock promised. "But why run it? Let the matter drop."
+
+"I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago,"
+Sam thought.
+
+Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at
+Valmore's suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter's jewelry store. For an
+hour they bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When
+the choice was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a
+box on the counter Telfer made a speech.
+
+"I will talk straight to that boy," he declared, laughing. "I am not
+going to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have
+him fail me. I shall tell him that if he doesn't make money in that
+Chicago I shall come and take the watch from him."
+
+Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along
+the street to Eleanor's shop. He strutted through the display room and
+into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.
+
+"What am I going to do, Eleanor?" he demanded, standing with legs spread
+apart and frowning down upon her, "what am I going to do without Sam?"
+
+A freckle-faced boy opened the shop door and threw a newspaper on the
+floor. The boy had a ringing voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer went
+again through the display room, touching with his cane the posts upon
+which hung the finished hats, and whistling. Standing before the shop,
+with the cane hooked upon his arm, he rolled a cigarette and watched the
+boy running from door to door along the street.
+
+"I shall have to be adopting a new son," he said musingly.
+
+After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood in his white nightgown and re-read
+the statement just given him. He read it over and over, and then, laying
+it on the kitchen table, filled and lighted a corncob pipe. A draft of
+wind blew into the room under the kitchen door chilling his thin shanks
+so that he drew his bare feet, one after the other, up behind the
+protective walls of his nightgown.
+
+"On the night of my mother's death," ran the statement, "I sat in the
+kitchen of our house eating my supper when my father came in and began
+shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother who was asleep. I
+put my hand at his throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, and
+carried him around the house and threw him into the road. Then I ran to
+the house of Mary Underwood, who was once my schoolteacher, and told her
+what I had done. She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went
+to look for the body of my father, who was not dead after all. John
+McPherson knows this is true, if he can be made to tell the truth."
+
+Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous woman with red cheeks,
+who set up type in the shop, did her own housework, and gathered most of
+the news and advertising for _The Argus_.
+
+"Ain't that a slasher?" he asked, handing her the statement Sam had
+written.
+
+"Well, it ought to stop the mean things they are saying about Mary
+Underwood," she snapped. Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and
+looking at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her much help
+with _The Argus_, was the best checker player in Caxton and had once
+been to a state tournament of experts in that sport, she added, "Poor
+Jane McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better father for him
+than that liar Windy. Choked him, eh? Well, if the men of this town had
+any spunk they would finish the job."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns
+in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like
+Freedom Smith, bought the farmers' products. On Sundays he sat in chairs
+before country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or,
+getting back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown
+streets and among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on
+the road. From time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with
+the men in Wildman's, stealing away later for an evening with Mary
+Underwood.
+
+In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the
+farmer's widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In
+the store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose--the same John Telfer
+had watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show
+Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker
+barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging
+cane and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer
+had not got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad
+station and make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the
+loss of that opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and
+thinking of many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour
+to the speech he had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam,
+while the gift had touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind
+the essential solid goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he
+lost much of the bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood,
+had been able to make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his
+room in Chicago he had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting
+in and taking out flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of
+thanks.
+
+Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now
+that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom
+Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in
+the wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore's shop as the blacksmith
+walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.
+
+"What has happened to Sam--he has changed so much?" he asked, dropping
+a foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel. "Already the
+city has changed him," he added regretfully.
+
+Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.
+
+"He bites off his words," continued Valmore; "he sits for an hour in the
+store and then goes away, and doesn't come back to say good-bye when he
+leaves town. What has got into him?"
+
+Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust
+of the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had
+been hurled at him.
+
+"If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all
+right," he exploded. "He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes
+to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like
+it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing,
+hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy
+from the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the
+money-maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems
+of life and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great
+game in which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited
+patiently until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would
+possess. With the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they
+pounced and Sam felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with
+country buyers used it ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look
+that came into the eyes of unsuccessful business men at critical moments
+and watched for it and took advantage of it as a successful prize
+fighter watches for a similar vague, uncertain look in the eyes of an
+opponent.
+
+He had found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that
+comes with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the
+successful business men about him is the stroke also of the master
+painter, scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of
+Whistler, Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been
+in him when as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook,
+and now and then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road.
+In the city where men of wealth and power in affairs rubbed elbows with
+him in the street cars and walked past him in hotel lobbies he watched
+and waited saying to himself, "I also will be such a one."
+
+Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked
+on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of
+himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a
+knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of
+vast work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but
+for the most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about
+him, keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.
+
+During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton
+family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but
+that still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer
+vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed
+him during the month after his mother's death, and letters regarding him
+had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down
+to dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and
+talk of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.
+
+"I was thinking of old John Moore to-day--does he still drive that
+team of black ponies?" the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman
+of thirty, would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a
+conversation of baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new
+office building to be erected in the Loop.
+
+"No, he don't," Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in
+a machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake
+been the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that
+he looked upon Sam as an intruder. "John told me last summer when I was
+home that he intended to sell the blacks and buy mules," he would add,
+looking at the youth challengingly.
+
+The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar
+and bustle of Chicago's vast west side, it still turned with hungry
+heart toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for
+Jake, its mainstay, could be found in that paradise.
+
+Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey
+moustache, and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so
+that they stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of
+a lawn, worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night,
+going to bed at nine o'clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling,
+from room to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers,
+or sitting in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the
+habits formed in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home
+with his pay in his pocket, settled with the two sisters for the
+week's living, sat down to dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then
+disappeared upon the troubled waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening
+he re-appeared, with empty pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and
+a noisy attempt at self-possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl
+into bed in preparation for another week of toil and respectability. The
+man had a certain Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new
+ladies met on his weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall.
+He once took Sam upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half
+around the room.
+
+Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of
+thirty-five who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and
+blessed with a remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical
+student in the front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired
+woman stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer
+from a wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little
+Southern wife.
+
+The women in the Pergrin house seemed to Sam tremendously concerned
+about their health and each evening talked of the matter, he thought,
+more than his mother had talked during her illness. While Sam lived with
+them they were all under the influence of a strange sort of faith healer
+and took what they called "Health Suggestion" treatments. Twice each
+week the faith healer came to the house, laid his hands upon their backs
+and took their money. The treatment afforded Jake a never-ending source
+of amusement and in the evening he went through the house putting his
+hands upon the backs of the women and demanding money from them, but
+the dry-goods buyer's wife, who for years had coughed at night, slept
+peacefully after some weeks of the treatment and the cough did not
+return while Sam remained in the house.
+
+In the house Sam had a standing. Glowing tales of his shrewdness in
+business, his untiring industry, and the size of his bank account, had
+preceded him from Caxton, and these tales the Pergrins, in their loyalty
+to the town and to all the products of the town, did not allow to shrink
+in the re-telling. The housekeeping sister, a kindly woman, became fond
+of Sam, and in his absence would boast of him to chance callers or to
+the boarders gathered in the living room in the evening. She it was who
+laid the foundation of the medical student's belief that Sam was a kind
+of genius in money matters, a belief that enabled him later to make a
+successful assault upon a legacy which came to that young man.
+
+Frank Eckardt, the medical student, Sam took as a friend. On Sunday
+afternoons they went to walk in the streets, or, taking two girl friends
+of Frank's, who were also students at the medical school, on their arms,
+they went to the park and sat upon benches under the trees.
+
+For one of these young women Sam conceived a regard that approached
+tenderness. Sunday after Sunday he spent with her, and once, walking
+through the park on an evening in the late fall, the dry brown leaves
+rustling under their feet and the sun going down in red splendour before
+their eyes, he took her hand and walked in silence, feeling tremendously
+alive and vital as he had felt on that other night walking under the
+trees of Caxton with the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker.
+
+That nothing came of the affair and that after a time he did not see
+the girl again was due, he thought, to his own growing interest in money
+making and to the fact that there was in her, as in Frank Eckardt, a
+blind devotion to something that he could not himself understand.
+
+Once he had a talk with Eckardt of the matter. "She is fine and
+purposeful like a woman I knew in my home town," he said, thinking of
+Eleanor Telfer, "but she will not talk to me of her work as sometimes
+she talks to you. I want her to talk. There is something about her that
+I do not understand and that I want to understand. I think that she
+likes me and once or twice I have thought she would not greatly mind my
+making love to her, but I do not understand her just the same."
+
+One day in the office of the company for which he worked Sam became
+acquainted with a young advertising man named Jack Prince, a brisk, very
+much alive young fellow who made money rapidly, spent it lavishly, and
+had friends and acquaintances in every office, every hotel lobby, every
+bar room and restaurant in the down-town section of the city. The chance
+acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. The clever, witty Prince made
+a kind of hero of Sam, admiring his reserve and good sense and boasting
+of him far and wide through the town. With Prince, Sam occasionally went
+on mild carouses, and, once, in the midst of thousands of people sitting
+about tables and drinking beer at the Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, he and
+Prince got into a fight with two waiters, Prince declaring he had been
+cheated and Sam, although he thought his friend in the wrong, striking
+out with his fist and dragging Prince through the door and into a
+passing street car in time to avoid a rush of other waiters hurrying to
+the aid of the one who lay dazed and sputtering on the sawdust floor.
+
+After these evenings of carousal, carried on with Jack Prince and with
+young men met on trains and about country hotels, Sam spent hour after
+hour walking about town absorbed in his own thoughts and getting his own
+impressions of what he saw. In the affairs with the young men he played,
+for the most part, a passive r�le, going with them from place to place
+and drinking until they became loud and boisterous, or morose and
+quarrelsome, and then slipping away to his own room, amused or irritated
+as the circumstances, or the temperament of his companions, had made
+or marred the joviality of the evening. On his nights alone, he put his
+hands into his pockets and walked for endless miles through the lighted
+streets, getting in a dim way a realisation of the hugeness of life. All
+of the faces going past him, the women in their furs, the young men
+with cigars in their mouths going to the theatres, the bald old men with
+watery eyes, the boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and
+the slim prostitutes lurking in the hallways, should have interested him
+deeply. In his youth, and with the pride of sleeping power in him, he
+saw them only as so many individuals that might some day test their
+ability against his own. And if he peered at them closely and marked
+down face after face in the crowds it was as a sitter in the great game
+of business that he looked, exercising his mind by imagining this or
+that one arrayed against him in deals, and planning the method by which
+he would win in the imaginary struggle.
+
+There was at that time in Chicago a place, to be reached by a bridge
+above the Illinois Central Railroad track, that Sam sometimes visited
+on stormy nights to watch the lake lashed by the wind. Great masses
+of water moving swiftly and silently broke with a roar against wooden
+piles, backed by hills of stone and earth, and the spray from the broken
+waves fell upon Sam's face and on winter nights froze on his coat. He
+had learned to smoke, and leaning upon the railing of the bridge would
+stand for hours with a pipe in his mouth looking at the moving water,
+filled with awe and admiration of the silent power of it.
+
+One night in September, when he was walking alone in the streets, an
+incident happened that showed him also a silent power within himself,
+a power that startled and for the moment frightened him. Walking into
+a little street back of Dearborn, he was suddenly aware of the faces of
+women looking out at him through small square windows cut in the fronts
+of the houses. Here and there, before and behind him, were the faces;
+voices called, smiles invited, hands beckoned. Up and down the street
+went men looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their
+necks, their hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces
+of the women pressed against the little squares of glass and then,
+turning, suddenly, sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued.
+Among the walkers on the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats
+whose feet scuffled as they hurried along, and young boys with the pink
+of virtue in their cheeks. In the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It
+got into Sam's brain and he stood hesitating and uncertain, startled,
+nerveless, afraid. He remembered a story he had once heard from John
+Telfer, a story of the disease and death that lurks in the little side
+streets of cities, and ran into Van Buren Street and from that into
+lighted State. He climbed up the stairway of the elevated railroad and
+jumping on the first train went away south to walk for hours on a gravel
+roadway at the edge of the lake in Jackson Park. The wind from the lake
+and the laughter and talk of people passing under the lights cooled
+the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the eloquence of John
+Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his voice marshalling
+the armies of the standing corn.
+
+Into Sam's mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great
+masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there
+was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of,
+moving always forward, silent, powerful--the force of sex. He wondered
+how the force would be broken in his own case, against what breakwater
+it would spend itself. At midnight, he went home across the city and
+crept into his alcove in the Pergrin house, puzzled and for the time
+utterly tired. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and
+resolutely closing his eyes tried to sleep. "There are things not to
+be understood," he told himself. "To live decently is a matter of good
+sense. I will keep thinking of what I want to do and not go into such a
+place again."
+
+One day, when he had been in Chicago two years, there happened an
+incident of another sort, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, so full
+of youth, that for days after it happened he thought of it with delight,
+and walked in the streets or sat in a passenger train laughing joyfully
+at the remembrance of some new detail of the affair.
+
+Sam, who was the son of Windy McPherson and who had more than once
+ruthlessly condemned all men who put liquor into their mouths, got
+drunk, and for eighteen hours went shouting poetry, singing songs, and
+yelling at the stars like a wood god on the bend.
+
+Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in
+DeJonge's restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before
+him on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers,
+talked to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.
+
+"He will be late, of course," he exclaimed, refilling Sam's glass. "The
+man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would
+take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from
+the cheeks of a maiden."
+
+Sam had already seen the man for whom they waited. He was thirty-five,
+small and narrow-shouldered, with a little wrinkled face, a huge nose,
+and a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. Sam had seen him in
+a Michigan Avenue club with Prince solemnly pitching silver dollars at a
+chalk mark on the floor with a group of serious, solid-looking old men.
+
+"They are the crowd that have just put through the big deal in Kansas
+oil stock and the little one is Morris, who handled the publicity for
+them," Prince had explained.
+
+Later, when they were walking down Michigan Avenue, Prince talked at
+length of Morris, whom he admired immensely. "He is the best advertising
+and publicity man in America," he declared. "He isn't a four-flusher,
+as I am, and does not make as much money, but he can take another man's
+ideas and express them so simply and forcibly that they tell the
+man's story better than he knew it himself. And that's all there is to
+advertising."
+
+He began laughing.
+
+"It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the
+man for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every
+pat phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He
+will howl like a beast at paying Tom's bill, and then the next time he
+will try to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so
+that he has to send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like
+shelling corn off the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him."
+
+Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge
+pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. "I am on my way
+to the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company," he
+explained to Prince. "I can't stop at all. I have here the layout of
+a circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common
+stock of theirs that hasn't paid a dividend for ten years."
+
+Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. "Never mind
+the Biscuit Machine people and their stock," he commanded; "they will
+always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to
+meet McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help
+him with."
+
+Morris reached across the table and took Sam's hand; his own was small
+and soft like that of a woman. "I am worked to death," he complained;
+"I have my eye on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am going down there to
+live."
+
+For an hour the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked of
+a place in Wisconsin where the fish should be biting. "A man has told me
+of the place twenty times," he declared; "I am sure I could find it on
+a railroad folder. I have never been fishing nor have you, and Sam here
+comes from a place to which they carry water in wagons over the plains."
+
+The little man who had been drinking copiously of the wine looked from
+Prince to Sam. From time to time he took off his glasses and wiped them
+with a handkerchief. "I don't understand your being in such society," he
+announced; "you have the solid, substantial look of a bucket-shop man.
+Prince here will get nowhere. He is honest, sells wind and his charming
+society, and spends the money that he gets, instead of marrying and
+putting it in his wife's name."
+
+Prince arose. "It is useless to waste time in persiflage," he began
+and then turning to Sam, "There is a place in Wisconsin," he said
+uncertainly.
+
+Morris picked up the portfolio and with a grotesque effort at steadiness
+started for the door followed by Prince and Sam walking with wavering
+steps. In the street Prince took the portfolio out of the little man's
+hand. "Let your mother carry it, Tommy," he said, shaking his finger
+under Morris's nose. He began singing a lullaby. "When the bough bends
+the cradle will fall."
+
+The three men walked out of Monroe and into State Street, Sam's head
+feeling strangely light. The buildings along the street reeled against
+the sky. A sudden fierce longing for wild adventure seized him. On a
+corner Morris stopped, took the handkerchief from his pocket and again
+wiped his glasses. "I want to be sure that I see clearly," he said; "it
+seems to me that in the bottom of that last glass of wine I saw three
+of us in a cab with a basket of life oil on the seat between us going
+to the station to catch the train for that place Jack's friend told fish
+lies about."
+
+The next eighteen hours opened up a new world to Sam. With the fumes of
+liquor rising in his brain, he rode for two hours on a train, tramped
+in the darkness along dusty roads and, building a bonfire in a woods,
+danced in the light of it upon the grass, holding the hands of Prince
+and the little man with the wrinkled face. Solemnly he stood upon a
+stump at the edge of a wheatfield and recited Poe's "Helen," taking on
+the voice, the gestures and even the habit of spreading his legs apart,
+of John Telfer. And then overdoing the last, he sat down suddenly on the
+stump, and Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand said, "Fill
+the lamp, man--the light of reason has gone out."
+
+From the bonfire in the woods and Sam's recital from the stump, the
+three friends emerged again upon the road, and a belated farmer driving
+home half asleep on the seat of his wagon caught their attention. With
+the skill of an Indian boy the diminutive Morris sprang upon the wagon
+and thrust a ten dollar bill into the farmer's hand. "Lead us, O man of
+the soil!" he shouted, "Lead us to a gilded palace of sin! Take us to a
+saloon! The life oil gets low in the can!"
+
+Beyond the long, jolting ride in the wagon Sam never became quite clear.
+In his mind ran vague notions of a wild carousal in a country tavern, of
+himself acting as bartender, and a huge red-faced woman rushing here and
+there under the direction of a tiny man, dragging reluctant rustics to
+the bar and commanding them to keep on drinking the beer that Sam drew
+until the last of the ten dollars given to the man of the wagon should
+have gone into her cash drawer. Also, he thought that Jack Prince
+had put a chair upon the bar and that he sat on it explaining to the
+hurrying drawer of beer that although the Egyptian kings had built great
+pyramids to celebrate themselves they never built anything more gigantic
+than the jag Tom Morris was building among the farm hands in the room.
+
+Later Sam thought that he and Jack Prince tried to sleep under a pile of
+grain sacks in a shed and that Morris came to them weeping because every
+one in the world was asleep and most of them lying under tables.
+
+And then, his head clearing, Sam found himself with the two others
+walking again upon the dusty road in the dawn and singing songs.
+
+On the train, with the help of a Negro porter, the three men tried
+to efface the dust and the stains of the wild night. The pasteboard
+portfolio containing the circular for the Biscuit Machine Company was
+still under Jack Prince's arm and the little man, wiping and re-wiping
+his glasses, peered at Sam.
+
+"Did you come with us or are you a child we have adopted here in these
+parts?" he asked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street in Chicago where Sam
+came to make his business start in the city, and it was proof of the dry
+unresponsiveness in him that he did not sense more fully its meaning and
+its message. All day the food stuff of a vast city flowed through the
+narrow streets. Blue-shirted, broad-shouldered teamsters from the tops
+of high piled wagons bawled at scurrying pedestrians. On the sidewalks
+in boxes, bags, and barrels, lay oranges from Florida and California,
+figs from Arabia, bananas from Jamaica, nuts from the hills of Spain and
+the plains of Africa, cabbages from Ohio, beans from Michigan, corn
+and potatoes from Iowa. In December, fur-coated men hurried through the
+forests of northern Michigan gathering Christmas trees that found
+their way to warm firesides through the street. And summer and winter a
+million hens laid the eggs that were gathered there, and the cattle on
+a thousand hills sent their yellow butter fat packed in tubs and piled
+upon trucks to add to the confusion.
+
+Into this street Sam walked, thinking little of the wonder of these
+things and thinking haltingly, getting his sense of the bigness of it in
+dollars and cents. Standing in the doorway of the commission house for
+which he was to work, strong, well clad, able and efficient, he looked
+through the streets, seeing and hearing the hurry and the roar and the
+shouting of voices, and then with a smile upon his lips went inside. In
+his brain was an unexpressed thought. As the old Norse marauders looked
+at the cities sitting in their splendour on the Mediterranean so looked
+he. "What loot!" a voice within him said, and his brain began devising
+methods by which he should get his share of it.
+
+Years later, when Sam was a man of big affairs, he drove one day in
+a carriage through the streets and turning to his companion, a
+grey-haired, dignified Boston man who sat beside him, said, "I worked
+here once and used to sit on a barrel of apples at the edge of the
+sidewalk thinking how clever I was to make more money in one month than
+the man who raised the apples made in a year."
+
+The Boston man, stirred by the sight of so much foodstuff and moved to
+epigram by his mood, looked up and down the street.
+
+"The foodstuff of an empire rattling o'er the stones," he said.
+
+"I should have made more money here," answered Sam dryly.
+
+The commission firm for which Sam worked was a partnership, not a
+corporation, and was owned by two brothers. Of the two Sam thought that
+the elder, a tall, bald, narrow-shouldered man, with a long narrow face
+and a suave manner, was the real master, and represented most of the
+ability in the partnership. He was oily, silent, tireless. All day he
+went in and out of the office and warehouses and up and down the crowded
+street, sucking nervously at an unlighted cigar. He was a great worker
+in a suburban church, but a shrewd and, Sam suspected, an unscrupulous
+business man. Occasionally the minister or some of the women of the
+suburban church came into the office to talk with him, and Sam was
+amused at the thought that Narrow Face, when he talked of the affairs of
+the church, bore a striking resemblance to the brown-bearded minister of
+the church in Caxton.
+
+The other brother was a far different sort, and, in business, Sam
+thought, a much inferior man. He was a heavy, broad-shouldered,
+square-faced man of about thirty, who sat in the office dictating
+letters and who stayed out two or three hours to lunch. He sent out
+letters signed by him on the firm's stationery with the title of
+General Manager, and Narrow Face let him do it. Broad Shoulders had
+been educated in New England and even after several years away from
+his college seemed more interested in it than in the welfare of the
+business. For a month or more in the spring he took most of the time
+of one of the two stenographers employed by the firm writing letters to
+graduates of Chicago high schools to induce them to go East to finish
+their education; and when a graduate of the college came to Chicago
+seeking employment, he closed his desk and spent entire days going from
+place to place, introducing, urging, recommending. Sam noticed, however,
+that when the firm employed a new man in their own office or on the road
+it was Narrow-Face who chose the man.
+
+Broad-shoulders had been a famous football player in his day and wore
+an iron brace on his leg. The offices, like most of the offices on the
+street, were dark and narrow, and smelled of decaying vegetables
+and rancid butter. Noisy Greek and Italian hucksters wrangled on the
+sidewalk in front, and among these went Narrow-Face hurrying about
+making deals.
+
+In South Water Street Sam did well, multiplying his thirty-six hundred
+dollars by ten during the three years that he stayed there, or went out
+from there to towns and cities directing a part of the great flowing
+river of foodstuff through his firm's front door.
+
+With almost his first day on the street he began seeing on all sides of
+him opportunity for gain, and set himself industriously at work to get
+his hand upon money with which to take advantage of the chances that
+he thought lay so invitingly about. Within a year he had made much
+progress. From a woman on Wabash Avenue he got six thousand dollars, and
+he planned and executed a coup that gave him the use of twenty thousand
+dollars that had come as a legacy to his friend, the medical student,
+who lived at the Pergrin house.
+
+Sam had eggs and apples lying in warehouse against a rise; game,
+smuggled across the state line from Michigan and Wisconsin, lay frozen
+in cold storage tagged with his name and ready to be sold at a long
+profit to hotels and fashionable restaurants; and there were even secret
+bushels of corn and wheat lying in other warehouses along the Chicago
+River ready to be thrown on the market at a word from him, or, the
+margins by which he kept his hold on the stuff not being forthcoming, at
+a word from a LaSalle Street broker.
+
+Getting the twenty thousand dollars out of the hands of the medical
+student was a turning point in Sam's life. Sunday after Sunday he walked
+with Eckardt in the streets or loitered with him in the parks thinking
+of the money lying idle in the bank and of the deals he might be turning
+with it in the street or on the road. Daily he saw more clearly the
+power of cash. Other commission merchants along South Water Street came
+running into the office of his firm with tense, anxious faces asking
+Narrow-Face to help them over rough spots in the day's trading.
+Broad-Shoulders, who had no business ability but who had married a rich
+woman, went on month after month taking half the profits brought in by
+the ability of his tall, shrewd brother, and Narrow-Face, who had taken
+a liking for Sam and who occasionally stopped for a word with him, spoke
+of the matter often and eloquently.
+
+"Spend your time with no one who hasn't money to help you," he said; "on
+the road look for the men with money and then try to get it. That's all
+there is to business--money-getting." And then looking across to the
+desk of his brother he would add, "I would kick half the men in business
+out of it if I could, but I myself must dance to the tune that money
+plays."
+
+One day Sam went to the office of an attorney named Webster, whose
+reputation for the shrewd drawing of contracts had come to him from
+Narrow-Face.
+
+"I want a contract drawn that will give me absolute control of twenty
+thousand dollars with no risk on my part if I lose the money and no
+promise to pay more than seven per cent if I do not lose," he said.
+
+The attorney, a slender, middle-aged man with a swarthy skin and black
+hair, put his hands on the desk before him and looked at the tall young
+man.
+
+"What collateral?" he asked.
+
+Sam shook his head. "Can you draw such a contract that will be legal and
+what will it cost me?" he asked.
+
+The lawyer laughed good naturedly. "I can draw it of course. Why not?"
+
+Sam, taking a roll of bills from his pocket, counted the amount upon the
+table.
+
+"Who are you anyway?" asked Webster. "If you can get twenty thousand and
+without collateral you're worth knowing. I might be getting up a gang to
+rob a mail train."
+
+Sam did not answer. He put the contract in his pocket and went home to
+his alcove at the Pergrins. He wanted to get by himself and think. He
+did not believe that he would by any chance lose Frank Eckardt's money,
+but he knew that Eckardt himself would draw back from the kind of deals
+that he expected to make with the money, that they would frighten and
+alarm him, and he wondered if he was being honest.
+
+In his own room after dinner Sam studied carefully the agreement drawn
+by Webster. It seemed to him to cover what he wanted covered, and
+having got it well fixed in his mind he tore it up. "There is no use his
+knowing I have been to a lawyer," he thought guiltily.
+
+Getting into bed, he began building plans for the future. With more than
+thirty thousand dollars at his command he thought that he should be able
+to make headway rapidly. "In my hands it will double itself every year,"
+he told himself and getting out of bed he drew a chair to the window and
+sat down, feeling strangely alive and awake like a young man in love. He
+saw himself going on and on, directing, managing, ruling men. It seemed
+to him that there was nothing he could not do. "I will run factories
+and banks and maybe mines and railroads," he thought and his mind leaped
+forward so that he saw himself, grey, stern, and capable, sitting at
+a broad desk high in a great stone building, a materialisation of John
+Telfer's word picture--"You will be a big man of dollars--it is plain."
+
+And then into Sam's mind came another picture. He remembered a Saturday
+afternoon when a young man had come running into the office on South
+Water Street, a young man who owed Narrow-Face a sum of money and could
+not pay it. He remembered the unpleasant tightening of the mouth and the
+sudden shrewd hard look in his employer's long narrow face. He had not
+heard much of the talk, but he was aware of a strained pleading quality
+in the voice of the young man who had said over and over slowly and
+painfully, "But, man, my honour is at stake," and of a coldness in the
+answering voice replying persistently, "With me it is not a matter of
+honour but of dollars, and I am going to get them."
+
+From the alcove window Sam looked out upon a vacant lot covered
+with patches of melting snow. Beyond the lot facing him stood a flat
+building, and the snow, melting on the roof, made a little stream that
+ran down some hidden pipe and rattled out upon the ground. The noise
+of the falling water and the sound of distant footsteps going homeward
+through the sleeping city brought back thoughts of other nights when as
+a boy in Caxton he had sat thus, thinking disconnected thoughts.
+
+Without knowing it Sam was fighting one of the real battles of his life,
+a battle in which the odds were very much against the quality in him
+that got him out of bed to look at the snow-clad vacant lot.
+
+There was in the youth much of the brute trader, blindly intent
+upon gain; much of the quality that has given America so many of its
+so-called great men. It was the quality that had sent him in secret
+to Lawyer Webster to protect himself without protecting the simple
+credulous young medical student, and that had made him say as he came
+home with the contract in his pocket, "I will do what I can," when in
+truth he meant, "I will get what I can."
+
+There may be business men in America who do not get what they can, who
+simply love power. One sees men here and there in banks, at the heads of
+great industrial trusts, in factories and in great mercantile houses of
+whom one would like to think thus. They are the men who one dreams have
+had an awakening, who have found themselves; they are the men hopeful
+thinkers try to recall again and again to the mind.
+
+To these men America is looking. It is asking them to keep the faith,
+to stand themselves up against the force of the brute trader, the dollar
+man, the man who with his one cunning wolf quality of acquisitiveness
+has too long ruled the business of the nation.
+
+I have said that the sense of equity in Sam fought an unequal battle.
+He was in business, and young in business, in a day when all America was
+seized with a blind grappling for gain. The nation was drunk with it,
+trusts were being formed, mines opened; from the ground spurted oil and
+gas; railroads creeping westward opened yearly vast empires of new land.
+To be poor was to be a fool; thought waited, art waited; and men at
+their firesides gathered their children around them and talked glowingly
+of men of dollars, holding them up as prophets fit to lead the youth of
+the young nation.
+
+Sam had in him the making of the new, the commanding man of business. It
+was that quality in him that made him sit by the window thinking before
+going to the medical student with the unfair contract, and the same
+quality had sent him forth night after night to walk alone in the
+streets when other young men went to theatres or to walk with girls in
+the park. He had, in truth, a taste for the lonely hours when thought
+grows. He was a step beyond the youth who hurries to the theatre or
+buries himself in stories of love or adventure. He had in him something
+that wanted a chance.
+
+In the flat building across the vacant lot a light appeared at a window
+and through the lighted window he saw a man clad in pajamas who propped
+a sheet of music against a dressing-table and who had a shining silver
+horn in his hand. Sam watched, filled with mild curiosity. The man,
+not reckoning on an onlooker at so late an hour, began an elaborate and
+amusing schedule of personation. He opened the window, put the horn to
+his lips and then turning bowed before the lighted room as before an
+audience. He put his hand to his lips and blew kisses about, then put
+the horn to his lips and looked again at the sheet of music.
+
+The note that came out of the window on the still air was a failure,
+it flattened into a squawk. Sam laughed and pulled down the window. The
+incident had brought back to his mind another man who bowed to a crowd
+and blew upon a horn. Getting into bed he pulled the covers about him
+and went to sleep. "I will get Frank's money if I can," he told himself,
+settling the matter that had been in his mind. "Most men are fools and
+if I do not get his money some other man will."
+
+On the next afternoon Eckardt had lunch down town with Sam. Together
+they went to a bank where Sam showed the profits of deals he had made
+and the growth of his bank account, going afterward into South Water
+Street where Sam talked glowingly of the money to be made by a shrewd
+man who knew the ways of the street and had a head upon his shoulders.
+
+"That's just it," said Frank Eckardt, falling quickly into the trap
+Sam had set, and hungering for profits; "I have money but no head on my
+shoulders for using it. I wish you would take it and see what you can
+do."
+
+With a thumping heart Sam went home across the city to the Pergrin
+house, Eckardt beside him in the elevated train. In Sam's room the
+agreement was written out by Sam and signed by Eckardt. At dinner time
+they had the drygoods buyer in to sign as witness.
+
+And the agreement turned out to Eckardt's advantage. In no year did
+Sam return him less than ten per cent, and in the end gave back the
+principal more than doubled so that Eckardt was able to retire from
+the practice of medicine and live upon the interest of his capital in a
+village near Tiffin, Ohio.
+
+With the thirty thousand dollars in his hands Sam began to reach out
+and extend the scope of his ventures. He bought and sold constantly, not
+only eggs, butter, apples, and grain, but also houses and building lots.
+Through his head marched long rows of figures. Deals worked themselves
+out in detail in his brain as he went about town drinking with young
+men, or sat at dinner in the Pergrin house. He even began working over
+in his head various schemes for getting into the firm by which he was
+employed, and thought that he might work upon Broad-Shoulders, getting
+hold of his interest and forcing himself into control. And then, the
+fear of Narrow-Face holding him back and his growing success in deals
+keeping his mind occupied, he was suddenly confronted by an opportunity
+that changed entirely the plans he was making for himself.
+
+Through Jack Prince's suggestion Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey
+Arms Company sent for him and offered him a position as buyer of all the
+materials used in their factories.
+
+It was the kind of connection Sam had unconsciously been seeking--a
+company, strong, old, conservative, known throughout the world. There
+was, in the talk with Colonel Tom, a hint of future opportunities to get
+stock in the company and perhaps to become eventually an official--these
+things were of course remote--to be dreamed of and worked toward--the
+company made it a part of its policy.
+
+Sam said nothing, but already he had decided to accept the place, and
+was thinking of a profitable arrangement touching percentages on the
+amount saved in buying that had worked out so well for him during his
+years with Freedom Smith.
+
+Sam's work for the firearms company took him off the road and confined
+him to an office all day long. In a way he regretted this. The
+complaints he had heard among travelling men in country hotels with
+regard to the hardship of travel meant nothing to his mind. Any kind of
+travel was a keen pleasure to him. Against the hardships and discomforts
+he balanced the tremendous advantages of seeing new places and faces
+and getting a look into many lives, and he looked back with a kind of
+retrospective joy on the three years of hurrying from place to place,
+catching trains, and talking with chance acquaintances met by the way.
+Also, the years on the road had given him many opportunities for secret
+and profitable deals of his own.
+
+Over against these advantages the place at Rainey's threw him into close
+and continuous association with men of big affairs. The offices of the
+Arms Company occupied an entire floor of one of Chicago's newest and
+biggest skyscrapers and millionaire stockholders and men high in the
+service of the state and of the government at Washington came in and
+went out at the door. Sam looked at them closely. He wanted to have a
+tilt with them and try if his Caxton and South Water Street shrewdness
+would keep the head upon his shoulders in LaSalle Street. The
+opportunity seemed to him a big one and he went about his work quietly
+and ably, intent upon making the most of it.
+
+The Rainey Arms Company, at the time of Sam's coming with it, was still
+largely owned by the Rainey family, father and daughter. Colonel Rainey,
+a grey-whiskered military looking man with a paunch, was the president
+and largest individual stockholder. He was a pompous, swaggering old
+fellow with a habit of making the most trivial statement with the air
+of a judge pronouncing the death sentence, and sat dutifully at his desk
+day after day looking very important and thoughtful, smoking long black
+cigars and signing personally piles of letters brought him by the heads
+of various departments. He looked upon himself as a silent but very
+important spoke in the government at Washington and every day issued
+many orders which the men at the heads of departments received with
+respect and disregarded in secret. Twice he had been prominently
+mentioned in connection with cabinet positions in the national
+government, and in talks with his cronies at clubs and restaurants he
+gave the impression of having actually refused an offer of appointment
+on both occasions.
+
+Having got himself established as a factor in the management of the
+business, Sam found many things that surprised him. In every company of
+which he knew there was some one man to whom all looked for guidance,
+who at critical moments became dominant, saying "Do this, or that," and
+making no explanations. In the Rainey Company he found no such man, but,
+instead, a dozen strong departments, each with its own head and each
+more or less independent of the others.
+
+Sam lay in his bed at night and went about in the evening thinking of
+this and of its meaning. Among the department heads there was a great
+deal of loyalty and devotion to Colonel Tom, and he thought that among
+them were a few men who were devoted to other interests than their own.
+
+At the same time he told himself there was something wrong. He himself
+had no such feeling of loyalty and although he was willing to give
+lip service to the resounding talk of the colonel about the fine old
+traditions of the company, he could not bring himself to a belief in the
+idea of conducting a vast business on a system founded upon lip service
+to traditions, or upon loyalty to an individual.
+
+"There must be loose ends lying about everywhere," he thought and
+followed the thought with another. "A man will come along, pick up these
+loose ends, and run the whole shop. Why not I?"
+
+The Rainey Arms Company had made its millions for the Rainey and
+Whittaker families during the Civil War. Whittaker had been an inventor,
+making one of the first practical breech-loading guns, and the original
+Rainey had been a dry-goods merchant in an Illinois town who backed the
+inventor.
+
+It proved itself a rare combination. Whittaker developed into a
+wonderful shop manager for his day, and, from the first, stayed at home
+building rifles and making improvements, enlarging the plant, getting
+out the goods. The drygoods merchant scurried about the country, going
+to Washington and to the capitals of the individual states, pulling
+wires, appealing to patriotism and state pride, taking big orders at fat
+prices.
+
+In Chicago there is a tradition that more than once he went south of the
+Dixie line and that following these trips thousands of Rainey-Whittaker
+rifles found their way into the hands of Confederate soldiers, but this
+story which increased Sam's respect for the energetic little drygoods
+merchant, Colonel Tom, his son, indignantly denied. In reality Colonel
+Tom would have liked to think of the first Rainey as a huge, Jove-like
+god of arms. Like Windy McPherson of Caxton, given a chance, he would
+have invented a new ancestor.
+
+After the Civil War, and Colonel Tom's growing to manhood, the Rainey
+and Whittaker fortunes were merged into one through the marriage of Jane
+Whittaker, the last of her line, to the only surviving Rainey, and upon
+her death her fortune, grown to more than a million, stood in the name
+of Sue Rainey, twenty-six, the only issue of the marriage.
+
+From the first day, Sam began to forge ahead in the Rainey Company. In
+the buying end he found a rich field for spectacular money saving and
+money making and made the most of it. The position as buyer had for
+ten years been occupied by a distant cousin to Colonel Tom, now dead.
+Whether the cousin was a fool or a knave Sam could never quite decide
+and did not greatly care, but after he had got the situation in hand
+he felt that the man must have cost the company a tremendous sum, which
+_he_ intended to save.
+
+Sam's arrangement with the company gave him, besides a fair salary, half
+he saved in the fixed prices of standard materials. These prices had
+stood fixed for years and Sam went into them, cutting right and left,
+and making for himself during his first year twenty-three thousand
+dollars. At the end of the year, when the directors asked to have an
+adjustment made and the percentage contract annulled, he got a generous
+slice of company stock, the respect of Colonel Tom Rainey and the
+directors, the fear of some of the department heads, the loyal devotion
+of others, and the title of Treasurer of the company.
+
+The Rainey Arms Company was in truth living largely upon the reputation
+built up for it by the first pushing energetic Rainey, and the inventive
+genius of his partner, Whittaker. Under Colonel Tom it had found
+new conditions and new competition which he had ignored, or met in a
+half-hearted way, standing on its reputation, its financial strength,
+and on the glory of its past achievements. Dry rot ate at its heart.
+The damage done was not great, but was growing greater. The heads of the
+departments, in whose hands so much of the running of the business lay,
+were many of them incompetent men with nothing to commend them but long
+years of service. And in the treasurer's office sat a quiet young man,
+barely turned twenty, who had no friends, wanted his own way, and who
+shook his head over the office traditions and was proud of his unbelief.
+
+Seeing the absolute necessity of working through Colonel Tom, and having
+a head filled with ideas of things he wanted done, Sam began working
+to get suggestions into the older man's mind. Within a month after his
+elevation the two men were lunching together daily and Sam was spending
+many extra hours behind closed doors in Colonel Tom's office.
+
+Although American business and manufacturing had not yet achieved the
+modern idea of efficiency in shop and office management, Sam had many of
+these ideas in his mind and expounded them tirelessly to Colonel Tom. He
+hated waste; he cared nothing for company tradition; he had no idea, as
+did the heads of other departments, of getting into a comfortable berth
+and spending the rest of his days there, and he was bent on managing the
+great Rainey Company, if not directly, then through Colonel Tom, who, he
+felt, was putty in his hands.
+
+From his new position as treasurer Sam did not drop his work as buyer,
+but, after a talk with Colonel Tom, merged the two departments, put in
+capable assistants of his own, and went on with his work of effacing
+the tracks of the cousin. For years the company had been overpaying for
+inferior material. Sam put his own material inspectors into the west
+side factories and brought several big Pennsylvania steel companies
+scurrying to Chicago to make restitution. The restitution was stiff, but
+when Colonel Tom was appealed to, Sam went to lunch with him, bought a
+bottle of wine, and stiffened his back.
+
+One afternoon in a room in the Palmer House a scene was played out that
+for days stayed in Sam's mind as a kind of realisation of the part he
+wanted to play in the business world. The president of a lumber company
+took Sam into the room, and, laying five one thousand dollar bills upon
+a table, walked to the window and stood looking out.
+
+For a moment Sam stood looking at the money on the table and at the
+back of the man by the window, burning with indignation. He felt that
+he should like to take hold of the man's throat and press as he had once
+pressed on the throat of Windy McPherson. And then a cold gleam coming
+into his eyes he cleared his throat and said, "You are short here; you
+will have to build this pile higher if you expect to interest me."
+
+The man by the window shrugged his shoulders--he was a slender,
+young-looking man in a fancy waistcoat--and then turning and taking a
+roll of bills from his pocket he walked to the table, facing Sam.
+
+"I shall expect you to be reasonable," he said, as he laid the bills on
+the table.
+
+When the pile had reached twenty thousand, Sam reached out his hand and
+taking it up put it in his pocket. "You will get a receipt for this
+when I get back to the office," he said; "it is about what you owe our
+company for overcharges and crooked material. As for our business, I
+made a contract with another company this morning."
+
+Having got the buying end of the Rainey Arms Company straightened out
+to his liking, Sam began spending much time in the shops and, through
+Colonel Tom, forced big changes everywhere. He discharged useless
+foremen, knocked out partitions between rooms, pushed everywhere for
+more and better work. Like the modern efficiency man, he went about with
+a watch in his hand, cutting out lost motion, rearranging, getting his
+own way.
+
+It was a time of great agitation. The offices and shops buzzed like bees
+disturbed and black looks followed him about. But Colonel Tom rose to
+the situation and went about at Sam's heels, swaggering, giving orders,
+throwing back his shoulders like a man remade. All day long he was at
+it, discharging, directing, roaring against waste. When a strike broke
+out in one of the shops because of innovations Sam had forced upon the
+workmen there, he got upon a bench and delivered a speech--written by
+Sam--on a man's place in the organisation and conducting of a great
+modern industry and his duty to perfect himself as a workman.
+
+Silently, the men picked up their tools and started again for their
+benches and when he saw them thus affected by his words Colonel Tom
+brought what threatened to be a squally affair to a hurrahing climax by
+the announcement of a five per cent increase in the wage scale--that was
+Colonel Tom's own touch and the rousing reception of it brought a glow
+of pride to his cheeks.
+
+Although the affairs of the company were still being handled by Colonel
+Tom, and though he daily more and more asserted himself, the officers
+and shops, and later the big jobbers and buyers as well as the rich
+LaSalle Street directors, knew that a new force had come into the
+company. Men began dropping quietly into Sam's office, asking questions,
+suggesting, seeking favours. He felt that he was getting hold. Of the
+department heads, about half fought him and were secretly marked for
+slaughter; the others came to him, expressed approval of what was going
+on and asked him to look over their departments and to make suggestions
+for improvements through them. This Sam did eagerly, getting by it their
+loyalty and support which later stood him in good stead.
+
+In choosing the new men that came into the company Sam also took a hand.
+The method used was characteristic of his relations with Colonel Tom. If
+a man applying for a place suited him, he got admission to the colonel's
+office and listened for half an hour to a talk anent the fine old
+traditions of the company. If a man did not suit Sam, he did not get to
+the colonel. "You can't have your time taken up by them," Sam explained.
+
+In the Rainey Company, the various heads of departments were
+stockholders in the company, and selected from among themselves two men
+to sit upon the board, and in his second year Sam was chosen as one of
+these employee directors. During the same year five heads of departments
+resigning in a moment of indignation over one of Sam's innovations--to
+be replaced later by two--their stock by a prearranged agreement came
+back into the company's hands. This stock and another block, secured for
+him by the colonel, got into Sam's hands through the use of Eckardt's
+money, that of the Wabash Avenue woman, and his own snug pile.
+
+Sam was a growing force in the company. He sat on the board of
+directors, the recognised practical head of the business among its
+stockholders and employees; he had stopped the company's march toward a
+second place in its industry and had faced it about. All about him, in
+offices and shops, there was the swing and go of new life and he felt
+that he was in a position to move on toward real control and had begun
+laying lines with that end in view. Standing in the offices in LaSalle
+Street or amid the clang and roar of the shops he tilted up his chin
+with the same odd little gesture that had attracted the men of Caxton
+to him when he was a barefoot newsboy and the son of the town drunkard.
+Through his head went big ambitious projects. "I have in my hand a great
+tool," he thought; "with it I will pry my way into the place I mean to
+occupy among the big men of this city and this nation."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Sam McPherson, who stood in the shops among the thousands of employees
+of the Rainey Arms Company, who looked with unseeing eyes at the faces
+of the men intent upon the operation of machines and saw in them but so
+many aids to the ambitious projects stirring in his brain, who, while
+yet a boy, had because of the quality of daring in him, combined with a
+gift of acquisitiveness, become a master, who was untrained, uneducated,
+knowing nothing of the history of industry or of social effort, walked
+out of the offices of his company and along through the crowded streets
+to the new apartment he had taken on Michigan Avenue. It was Saturday
+evening at the end of a busy week and as he walked he thought of things
+he had accomplished during the week and made plans for the one to come.
+Through Madison Street he went and into State, seeing the crowds of men
+and women, boys and girls, clambering aboard the cable cars, massed upon
+the pavements, forming in groups, the groups breaking and reforming, and
+the whole making a picture intense, confusing, awe-inspiring. As in
+the shops among the men workers, so here, also, walked the youth with
+unseeing eyes. He liked it all; the mass of people; the clerks in their
+cheap clothing; the old men with young girls on their arms going to dine
+in restaurants; the young man with a wistful look in his eyes waiting
+for his sweetheart in the shadow of the towering office building. The
+eager, straining rush of the whole, seemed no more to him than a kind of
+gigantic setting for action; action controlled by a few quiet, capable
+men--of whom he intended to be one--intent upon growth.
+
+In State Street he stopped at a shop and buying a bunch of roses came
+out again upon the crowded street. In the crowd before him walked a
+woman--tall, freewalking, with a great mass of reddish-brown hair on
+her head. As she passed through the crowd men stopped and looked back at
+her, their eyes ablaze with admiration. Seeing her, Sam sprang forward
+with a cry.
+
+"Edith!" he called, and running forward thrust the roses into her hand.
+"For Janet," he said, and lifting his hat walked beside her along State
+to Van Buren Street.
+
+Leaving the woman at a corner Sam came into a region of cheap theatres
+and dingy hotels. Women spoke to him; young men in flashy overcoats and
+with a peculiar, assertive, animal swing to their shoulders loitered
+before the theatres or in the doorways of the hotels; from an upstairs
+restaurant came the voice of another young man singing a popular song of
+the street. "There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night," sang the
+voice.
+
+Over a cross street Sam went into Michigan Avenue, faced by a long
+narrow park and beyond the railroad tracks by the piles of new earth
+where the city was trying to regain its lake front. In the cross
+street, standing in the shadow of the elevated railroad, he had passed
+a whining, intoxicated old woman who lurched forward and put a hand
+upon his coat. Sam had flung her a quarter and passed on shrugging his
+shoulders. Here also he had walked with unseeing eyes; this too was
+a part of the gigantic machine with which the quiet, competent men of
+growth worked.
+
+From his new quarters in the top floor of the hotel facing the lake, Sam
+walked north along Michigan Avenue to a restaurant where Negro men went
+noiselessly about among white-clad tables, serving men and women who
+talked and laughed under the shaded lamps had an assured, confident air.
+Passing in at the door of the restaurant, a wind, blowing over the
+city toward the lake, brought the sound of a voice floating with it.
+"There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night," again insisted the
+voice.
+
+After dining Sam got on a grip car of the Wabash Avenue Cable, sitting
+on the front seat and letting the panorama of the town roll up to him.
+From the region of cheap theatres he passed through streets in which
+saloons stood massed, one beside another, each with its wide garish
+doorway and its dimly lighted "Ladies' Entrance," and into a region of
+neat little stores where women with baskets upon their arms stood by the
+counters and Sam was reminded of Saturday nights in Caxton.
+
+The two women, Edith and Janet Eberly, met through Jack Prince, to one
+of whom Sam had sent the roses at the hands of the other, and from whom
+he had borrowed the six thousand dollars when he was new in the city,
+had been in Chicago for five years when Sam came to know them. For all
+of the five years they had lived in a two-story frame building that had
+been a residence in Wabash Avenue near Thirty-ninth Street and that
+was now both a residence and a grocery store. The apartment upstairs,
+reached by a stairway at the side of the grocery, had in the five years,
+and under the hand of Janet Eberly, become a thing of beauty, perfect in
+the simplicity and completeness of its appointment.
+
+The two women were the daughters of a farmer who had lived in one of the
+middle western states facing the Mississippi River. Their grandfather
+had been a noted man in the state, having been one of its first
+governors and later serving it in the senate in Washington. There was a
+county and a good-sized town named for him and he had once been talked
+of as a vice-presidential possibility but had died at Washington before
+the convention at which his name was to have been put forward. His one
+son, a youth of great promise, went to West Point and served brilliantly
+through the Civil War, afterward commanding several western army posts
+and marrying the daughter of another army man. His wife, an army belle,
+died after having borne him the two daughters.
+
+After the death of his wife Major Eberly began drinking, and to get away
+from the habit and from the army atmosphere where he had lived with his
+wife, whom he loved intensely, took the two little girls and returned to
+his home state to settle on a farm.
+
+About the county where the two girls grew to womanhood, their father,
+Major Eberly, got the name of a character, seeing people but seldom and
+treating rudely the friendly advances of his farmer neighbours. He would
+sit in the house for days poring over books, of which he had a great
+many, and hundreds of which were now on open shelves in the apartment
+of the two girls. These days of study, during which he would brook no
+intrusion, were followed by days of fierce industry during which he led
+team after team to the field, ploughing or reaping day and night with no
+rest except to eat.
+
+At the edge of the Eberly farm there was a little wooden country church
+surrounded by a hay field, and on Sunday mornings during the summer the
+ex-army man was always to be found in the field, running some noisy,
+clattering agricultural implement up and down under the windows of the
+church and disturbing the worship of the country folk; in the winter he
+drew a pile of logs there and went on Sunday mornings to split firewood
+under the church windows. While his daughters were small he was several
+times haled into court and fined for cruel neglect of his animals. Once
+he locked a great herd of fine sheep in a shed and went into the house
+and stayed for days intent upon his books so that many of them suffered
+cruelly for want of food and water. When he was taken into court
+and fined, half the county came to the trial and gloated over his
+humiliation.
+
+To the two girls the father was neither cruel nor kind, leaving them
+largely to themselves but giving them no money, so that they went about
+in dresses made over from those of the mother, that lay piled in trunks
+in the attic. When they were small, an old Negro woman, an ex-servant of
+the army belle, lived with and mothered them, but when Edith was a girl
+of ten this woman went off home to Tennessee, so that the girls were
+thrown on their own resources and ran the house in their own way.
+
+Janet Eberly was, at the beginning of her friendship with Sam, a slight
+woman of twenty-seven with a small expressive face, quick nervous
+fingers, black piercing eyes, black hair and a way of becoming so
+absorbed in the exposition of a book or the rush of a conversation
+that her little intense face became transfigured and her quick fingers
+clutched the arm of her listener while her eyes looked into his and she
+lost all consciousness of his presence or of the opinions he may have
+expressed. She was a cripple, having fallen from the loft of a barn in
+her youth injuring her back so that she sat all day in a specially made
+reclining wheeled chair.
+
+Edith was a stenographer, working in the office of a publisher down
+town, and Janet trimmed hats for a milliner a few doors down the street
+from the house in which they lived. In his will the father left the
+money from the sale of the farm to Janet, and Sam used it, insuring his
+life for ten thousand dollars in her name while it was in his possession
+and handling it with a caution entirely absent from his operations with
+the money of the medical student. "Take it and make money for me,"
+the little woman had said impulsively one evening shortly after the
+beginning of their acquaintance and after Jack Prince had been talking
+flamboyantly of Sam's ability in affairs. "What is the good of having a
+talent if you do not use it to benefit those who haven't it?"
+
+Janet Eberly was an intellect. She disregarded all the usual womanly
+points of view and had an attitude of her own toward life and people. In
+a way she had understood her hard-driven, grey-haired father and during
+the time of her great physical suffering they had built up a kind of
+understanding and affection for each other. After his death she wore a
+miniature of him, made in his boyhood, on a chain about her neck. When
+Sam met her the two immediately became close friends, sitting for hours
+in talk and coming to look forward with great pleasure to the evenings
+spent together.
+
+In the Eberly household Sam McPherson was a benefactor, a wonder-worker.
+In his hands the six thousand dollars was bringing two thousand a year
+into the house and adding immeasurably to the air of comfort and good
+living that prevailed there. To Janet, who managed the house, he was
+guide, counsellor, and something more than friend.
+
+Of the two women it was the strong, vigorous Edith, with the
+reddish-brown hair and the air of physical completeness that made men
+stop to look at her on the street, who first became Sam's friend.
+
+Edith Eberly was strong of body, given to quick flashes of anger, stupid
+intellectually and hungry to the roots of her for wealth and a place in
+the world. She had heard, through Jack Prince, of Sam's money making
+and of his ability and prospects and, for a time, had designs upon his
+affections. Several times when they were alone together she gave his
+hand a characteristically impulsive squeeze and once upon the stairway
+beside the grocery store offered him her lips to kiss. Later there
+sprang up between her and Jack Prince a passionate love affair, dropped
+finally by Prince through fear of her violent fits of anger. After Sam
+had met Janet Eberly and had become her loyal friend and henchman all
+show of affection or even of interest between him and Edith was at an
+end and the kiss upon the stairs was forgotten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Going up the stairway after the ride in the cable car Sam stood beside
+Janet's wheel chair in the room at the front of the apartment facing
+Wabash Avenue. The chair was by the window and faced an open coal
+fire in a grate she had had built into the wall of the house. Outside,
+through an open arched doorway, Edith moved noiselessly about taking
+dishes from a little table. He knew that after a time Jack Prince would
+come and take her to the theatre, leaving Janet and him to finish their
+talk.
+
+Sam lighted his pipe and between puffs began talking, making a statement
+that he knew would arouse her, and Janet, putting her hand impulsively
+on his shoulder, began tearing the statement to bits.
+
+"You talk!" she broke out. "Books are not full of pretence and lies; you
+business men are--you and Jack Prince. What do you know of books? They
+are the most wonderful things in the world. Men sit writing them and
+forget to lie, but you business men never forget. You and books! You
+haven't read books, not real ones. Didn't my father know; didn't he save
+himself from insanity through books? Do I not, sitting here, get the
+real feel of the movement of the world through the books that men
+write? Suppose I saw those men. They would swagger and strut and take
+themselves seriously just like you or Jack or the grocer down stairs.
+You think you know what's going on in the world. You think you are doing
+things, you Chicago men of money and action and growth. You are blind,
+all blind."
+
+The little woman, a light, half scorn, half amusement in her eyes,
+leaned forward and ran her fingers through Sam's hair, laughing down
+into the astonished face he turned up to her.
+
+"Oh, I'm not afraid, in spite of what Edith and Jack Prince say of you,"
+she went on impulsively. "I like you all right and if I were a well
+woman I should make love to you and marry you and then see to it there
+was something in this world for you besides money and tall buildings and
+men and machines that make guns."
+
+Sam grinned. "You are like your father, driving the mowing machine up
+and down under the church windows on Sunday mornings," he declared; "you
+think you could remake the world by shaking your fist at it. I should
+like to go and see you fined in a court room for starving sheep."
+
+Janet, closing her eyes and lying back in her chair, laughed with
+delight and declared that they would have a splendid quarrelsome
+evening.
+
+After Edith had gone out, Sam sat through the evening with Janet,
+listening to her exposition of life and what she thought it should mean
+to a strong capable fellow like himself, as he had been listening ever
+since their acquaintanceship began. In the talk, and in the many talks
+they had had together, talks that rang in his ears for years, the little
+black-eyed woman gave him a glimpse into a whole purposeful universe of
+thought and action of which he had never dreamed, introducing him to a
+new world of men: methodical, hard-thinking Germans, emotional, dreaming
+Russians, analytical, courageous Norwegians, Spaniards and Italians with
+their sense of beauty, and blundering, hopeful Englishmen wanting so
+much and getting so little; so that at the end of the evening he went
+out of her presence feeling strangely small and insignificant against
+the great world background she had drawn for him.
+
+Sam did not understand Janet's point of view. It was all too new and
+foreign to everything life had taught him, and in his mind he fought
+her ideas doggedly, clinging to his own concrete, practical thoughts and
+hopes, but on the train homeward bound, and in his own room later, he
+turned over and over in his mind the things she had said and tried in a
+dim way to grasp the bigness of the conception of human life she had got
+sitting in a wheel chair and looking down into Wabash Avenue.
+
+Sam loved Janet Eberly. No word of that had ever passed between them
+and he had seen her hand flash out and grasp the shoulder of Jack Prince
+when she was laying down to him some law of life as she saw it, as it
+had so often shot out and grasped his own, but had she been able to
+spring out of the wheel chair he should have taken her hand and gone
+with her to the clergyman within the hour and in his heart he knew that
+she would have gone with him gladly.
+
+Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam's work for the gun
+company without a direct declaration of affection from him, but during
+the years when they were much together he thought of her as in a sense
+his wife and when she died he was desolate, overdrinking night after
+night and wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets during hours
+when he should have been asleep. She was the first woman who ever got
+hold of and stirred his manhood, and she awoke something in him that
+made it possible for him later to see life with a broadness and scope of
+vision that was no part of the pushing, energetic young man of dollars
+and of industry who sat beside her wheeled chair during the evenings on
+Wabash Avenue.
+
+After Janet's death, Sam did not continue his friendship with Edith, but
+turned over to her the ten thousand dollars to which the six thousand of
+Janet's money had grown in his hands and did not see her again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+One night in April Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey Arms Company
+and his chief lieutenant, young Sam McPherson, treasurer and chairman of
+the board of directors of the company, slept together in a room in a St.
+Paul hotel. It was a double room with two beds, and Sam, lying on his
+pillow, looked across the bed to where the colonel's paunch protruding
+itself between him and the light from a long narrow window, made a round
+hill above which the moon just peeped. During the evening the two men
+had sat for several hours at a table in the grill down stairs while Sam
+discussed a proposition he proposed making to a St. Paul jobber the
+next day. The account of the jobber, a large one, had been threatened by
+Lewis, the Jew manager of the Edwards Arms Company, the Rainey Company's
+only important western rival, and Sam was full of ideas to checkmate the
+shrewd trade move the Jew had made. At the table, the colonel had been
+silent and taciturn, an unusual attitude of mind for him, and Sam lay in
+bed and looked at the moon gradually working its way over the undulating
+abdominal hill, wondering what was in his mind. The hill dropped,
+showing the full face of the moon, and then rose again obliterating it.
+
+"Sam, were you ever in love?" asked the colonel, with a sigh.
+
+Sam turned and buried his face in the pillow and the white covering
+of his bed danced up and down. "The old fool, has it come to that with
+him?" he asked himself. "After all these years of single life is he
+going to begin running after women now?"
+
+He did not answer the colonel's question. "There are breakers ahead for
+you, old boy," he thought, the figure of quiet, determined, little Sue
+Rainey, the colonel's daughter, as he had seen her on the rare occasions
+when he had dined at the Rainey home or she had come into the LaSalle
+Street offices, coming into his mind. With a quiver of enjoyment of the
+mental exercise, he tried to imagine the colonel as a swaggering blade
+among women.
+
+The colonel, oblivious of Sam's mirth and of his silence regarding his
+experience in the field of love, began talking, making amends for the
+silence in the grill. He told Sam that he had decided to take to himself
+a new wife, and confessed that the view of the matter his daughter might
+take worried him. "Children are so unfair," he complained; "they forget
+about a man's feelings and can't realise that his heart is still young."
+
+With a smile on his lips, Sam began trying to picture a woman's lying in
+his place and looking at the moon over the pulsating hill. The colonel
+continued talking. He grew franker, telling the name of his beloved and
+the circumstances of their meeting and courtship. "She is an actress, a
+working girl," he said feelingly. "I met her at a dinner given by Will
+Sperry one evening and she was the only woman there who did not drink
+wine. After the dinner we went for a drive together and she told me of
+her hard life, of her fight against temptations, and of her brother, an
+artist, she is trying to get started in the world. We have been together
+a dozen times and have written letters, and, Sam, we have discovered an
+affinity for each other."
+
+Sam sat up in bed. "Letters!" he muttered. "The old dog is going to get
+himself involved." He dropped again upon the pillow. "Well, let him. Why
+need I bother myself?"
+
+The colonel, having begun talking, could not stop. "Although we have
+seen each other only a dozen times, a letter has passed between us every
+day. Oh, if you could see the letters she writes. They are wonderful."
+
+A worried sigh broke from the colonel. "I want Sue to invite her to
+the house, but I am afraid," he complained; "I am afraid she will be
+wrong-headed about it. Women are such determined creatures. She and my
+Luella should meet and know each other, but if I go home and tell her
+she may make a scene and hurt Luella's feelings."
+
+The moon had risen, shedding its light in Sam's eyes, and he turned his
+back to the colonel and prepared to sleep. The naive credulity of the
+older man had touched a spring of mirth in him and from time to time the
+covering of his bed continued to quiver suggestively.
+
+"I would not hurt her feelings for anything. She is the squarest little
+woman alive," the voice of the colonel announced. The voice broke
+and the colonel, who habitually roared forth his sentiments, began to
+dither. Sam wondered if his feelings had been touched by the thoughts of
+his daughter or of the lady from the stage. "It is a wonderful thing,"
+half sobbed the colonel, "when a young and beautiful woman gives her
+whole heart into the keeping of a man like me."
+
+It was a week later before Sam heard more of the affair. Looking up
+from his desk in the offices in LaSalle Street one morning, he found Sue
+Rainey standing before him. She was a small athletic looking woman with
+black hair, square shoulders, cheeks browned by the sun and wind, and
+quiet grey eyes. She stood facing Sam's desk and pulled off a glove
+while she looked down at him with amused, quizzical eyes. Sam rose, and
+leaning over the flat-topped desk, took her hand, wondering what had
+brought her there.
+
+Sue Rainey did not mince matters, but plunged at once into an
+explanation of the purpose of her visit. From birth she had lived in an
+atmosphere of wealth. Although she was not counted a beautiful woman,
+she had, because of her wealth and the charm of her person, been much
+courted. Sam, who had talked briefly with her a half dozen times, had
+long had a haunting curiosity to know more of her personality. As she
+stood there before him looking so wonderfully well-kept and confident he
+thought her baffling and puzzling.
+
+"The colonel," she began, and then hesitated and smiled. "You, Mr.
+McPherson, have become a figure in my father's life. He depends upon
+you very much. He tells me that he has talked with you concerning a Miss
+Luella London from the theatre, and that you have agreed with him that
+the colonel and she should marry."
+
+Sam watched her gravely. A flicker of mirth ran through him, but his
+face was grave and disinterested.
+
+"Yes?" he said, looking into her eyes. "Have you met Miss London?"
+
+"I have," answered Sue Rainey. "Have you?"
+
+Sam shook his head.
+
+"She is impossible," declared the colonel's daughter, clutching the
+glove held in her hand and staring at the floor. A flush of anger rose
+in her cheeks. "She is a crude, hard, scheming woman. She colours her
+hair, she cries when you look at her, she hasn't even the grace to be
+ashamed of what she is trying to do, and she has got the colonel into a
+fix."
+
+Sam looked at the brown of Sue Rainey's cheek and thought the texture of
+it beautiful. He wondered why he had heard her called a plain woman.
+The heightened colour brought to her face by her anger had, he thought,
+transfigured her. He liked her direct, forceful way of putting the
+matter of the colonel's affair, and felt keenly the compliment implied
+by her having come to him. "She has self-respect," he told himself, and
+felt a thrill of pride in her attitude as though it had been inspired by
+himself.
+
+"I have been hearing of you a great deal," she continued, glancing up
+at him and smiling. "At our house you are brought to the table with the
+soup and taken away with the liqueur. My father interlards his
+table talk, and introduces all of his wise new axioms on economy and
+efficiency and growth, with a constant procession of 'Sam says' and
+'Sam thinks.' And the men who come to the house talk of you also.
+Teddy Foreman says that at directors' meetings they all sit about like
+children waiting for you to tell them what to do."
+
+She threw out her hand with an impatient little gesture. "I am in a
+hole," she said. "I might handle my father but I cannot handle that
+woman."
+
+While she had been talking to him Sam looked past her and out at a
+window. When her eyes wandered from his face he looked again at her
+brown firm cheeks. From the beginning of the interview he had been
+intending to help her.
+
+"Give me the lady's address," he said; "I'll go look her over."
+
+Three evenings later Sam took Miss Luella London to a midnight supper
+at one of the town's best restaurants. She knew the motive of his taking
+her, as he had been quite frank in the few minutes' talk near the stage
+door of the theatre when the engagement was made. As they ate, they
+talked of the plays at the Chicago theatres, and Sam told her a story
+of an amateur performance that had once taken place in the hall over
+Geiger's drug store in Caxton when he was boy. In the performance Sam
+had taken the r�le of a drummer boy killed on the field of battle by a
+swaggering villain in a grey uniform, and John Telfer, in the r�le of
+villain, had become so in earnest that, a pistol not exploding at a
+critical moment, he had chased Sam about the stage trying to hit him
+with the butt of the weapon while the audience roared with delight
+at the realism of Telfer's rage and at the frightened boy begging for
+mercy.
+
+Luella London laughed heartily at Sam's story and then, the coffee being
+served, she fingered the handle of the cup and a shrewd look came into
+her eyes.
+
+"And now you are a big business man and have come to see me about
+Colonel Rainey," she said.
+
+Sam lighted a cigar.
+
+"Just how much are you counting on this marriage between yourself and
+the colonel?" he asked bluntly.
+
+The actress laughed and poured cream into her coffee. A line came and
+went on her forehead between her eyes. Sam thought she looked capable.
+
+"I have been thinking of what you told me at the stage door," she
+said, and a childlike smile played about her lips. "Do you know, Mr.
+McPherson, I can't just figure you. I can't just see how you get into
+this. Where are your credentials, anyway?"
+
+Sam, keeping his eyes upon her face, took a jump into the dark.
+
+"It's this way," he said, "I'm something of an adventurer myself. I fly
+the black flag. I come from where you do. I had to reach out my hand and
+take what I wanted. I do not blame you in the least, but it just happens
+that I saw Colonel Tom Rainey first. He is my game and I do not propose
+to have you fooling around. I am not bluffing. You have got to get off
+him."
+
+Leaning forward, he stared at her intently, and then lowered his voice.
+"I've got your record. I know the man you used to live with. He's going
+to help me get you if you do not drop it."
+
+Sitting back in his chair Sam watched her gravely. He had taken the odd
+chance to win quickly by a bluff and had won. But Luella London was not
+to be defeated without a struggle.
+
+"You lie," she cried, half springing from her chair. "Frank has never--"
+
+"Oh yes, Frank has," answered Sam, turning as though to call a waiter;
+"I will have him here in ten minutes if you wish to be shown."
+
+Picking up a fork the woman began nervously picking holes in the table
+cloth and a tear appeared upon her cheek. She took a handkerchief from
+a bag that hung hooked over the back of a chair at the side of the table
+and wiped her eyes.
+
+"All right! All right!" she said, bracing herself, "I'll drop it. If
+you've dug up Frank Robson you've got me. He'll do anything you say for
+a piece of money."
+
+For some minutes the two sat in silence. A tired look had come into the
+woman's eyes.
+
+"I wish I was a man," she said. "I get whipped at everything I tackle
+because I'm a woman. I'm getting past my money-making days in the
+theatre and I thought the colonel was fair game."
+
+"He is," answered Sam dispassionately, "but you see I beat you to it.
+He's mine."
+
+Glancing cautiously about the room, he took a roll of bills from his
+pocket and began laying them one at a time upon the table.
+
+"Look here," he said, "you've done a good piece of work. You should have
+won. For ten years half the society women of Chicago have been trying
+to marry their daughters or their sons to the Rainey fortune. They
+had everything to help them, wealth, good looks, and a standing in the
+world. You have none of these things. How did you do it?
+
+"Anyway," he went on, "I'm not going to see you trimmed. I've got ten
+thousand dollars here, as good Rainey money as ever was printed. You
+sign this paper and then put the roll in your purse."
+
+"That's square," said Luella London, signing, and with the light coming
+back into her eyes.
+
+Sam beckoned to the proprietor of the restaurant whom he knew and had
+him and a waiter sign as witnesses.
+
+Luella London put the roll of bills into her purse.
+
+"What did you give me that money for when you had me beat anyway?" she
+asked.
+
+Sam lighted a fresh cigar and folding the paper put it in his pocket.
+
+"Because I like you and I admire your skill," he said, "and anyway I did
+not have you beaten until right now."
+
+They sat studying the people getting up from the tables and going
+through the door to waiting carriages and automobiles, the well-dressed
+women with assured airs serving Sam's mind to make a contrast for the
+woman who sat with him.
+
+"I presume you are right about women," he said musingly, "it must be a
+stiff game for you if you like winning on your own hook."
+
+"Winning! We don't win." The lips of the actress drew back showing her
+white teeth. "No woman ever won who tried to play a straight fighting
+game for herself."
+
+Her voice grew tense and the lines upon her forehead reappeared.
+
+"Woman can't stand alone," she went on, "she is a sentimental fool. She
+reaches out her hand to some man and that in the end beats her. Why,
+even when she plays the game as I played it against the colonel some rat
+of a man like Frank Robson, for whom she has given up everything worth
+while to a woman, sells her out."
+
+Sam looked at her hand, covered with rings, lying on the table.
+
+"Let's not misunderstand each other," he said quietly, "do not blame
+Frank for this. I never knew him. I just imagined him."
+
+A puzzled look came into the woman's eyes and a flush rose in her
+cheeks.
+
+"You grafter!" she sneered.
+
+Sam called to a passing waiter and ordered a fresh bottle of wine.
+
+"What's the use being sore?" he asked. "It's simple enough. You staked
+against a better mind. Anyway you have the ten thousand, haven't you?"
+
+Luella reached for her purse.
+
+"I don't know," she said, "I'll look. Haven't you decided to steal it
+back yet?"
+
+Sam laughed.
+
+"I'm coming to that," he said, "don't hurry me."
+
+For several minutes they sat eyeing each other, and then, with an
+earnest ring in his voice and a smile on his lips, Sam began talking
+again.
+
+"Look here!" he said, "I'm no Frank Robson and I do not like giving
+a woman the worst of it. I have been studying you and I can't see you
+running around loose with ten thousand dollars of real money on you. You
+do not fit into the picture and the money will not last a year in your
+hands.
+
+"Give it to me," he urged; "let me invest it for you. I'm a winner. I'll
+double it for you in a year."
+
+The actress stared past Sam's shoulder to where a group of young men sat
+about a table drinking and talking loudly. Sam began telling an anecdote
+of an Irish baggage man in Caxton. When he had finished he looked at her
+and laughed.
+
+"As that shoemaker looked to Jerry Donlin so you, as the colonel's wife,
+looked to me," he said. "I had to make you get out of my flower bed."
+
+A gleam of resolution came into the wandering eyes of Luella London and
+she took the purse from the back of the chair and brought out the roll
+of bills.
+
+"I'm a sport," she said, "and I'm going to lay a bet on the best horse I
+ever saw. You may trim me, but I always would take a chance."
+
+Turning, she called a waiter and, handing him a bill from her purse,
+threw the roll on the table.
+
+"Take the pay for the spread and the wine we have had out of that," she
+said, handing him the loose bill and then turning to Sam. "You ought to
+beat the world. Anyway your genius gets recognition from me. I pay for
+this party and when you see the colonel say good-bye to him for me."
+
+The next day, at his request, Sue Rainey called at the offices of the
+Arms Company and Sam handed her the paper signed by Luella London. It
+was an agreement on her part to divide with Sam, half and half, any
+money she might be able to blackmail out of Colonel Rainey.
+
+The colonel's daughter glanced from the paper to Sam's face.
+
+"I thought so," she said, and a puzzled look came into her eyes. "But I
+do not understand this. What does this paper do and what did you pay for
+it?"
+
+"The paper," Sam answered, "puts her in a hole and I paid ten thousand
+dollars for it."
+
+Sue Rainey laughed and taking a checkbook from her handbag laid it on
+the desk and sat down.
+
+"Do you get your half?" she asked.
+
+"I get it all," answered Sam, and then leaning back in his chair
+launched into an explanation. When he had told her of the talk in the
+restaurant she sat with the checkbook lying before her and with the
+puzzled look still in her eyes.
+
+Without giving her time for comment, Sam plunged into the midst of what
+had been in his mind to say to her.
+
+"The woman will not bother the colonel any more," he declared; "if that
+paper won't hold her something else will. She respects me and she is
+afraid of me. We had a talk after she had signed the paper and she gave
+me the ten thousand dollars to invest for her. I promised to double it
+for her within a year and I want to make good. I want you to double it
+now. Make the check for twenty thousand."
+
+Sue Rainey wrote the check, making it payable to bearer, and pushed it
+across the table.
+
+"I cannot say that I understand yet," she confessed. "Did you also fall
+in love with her?"
+
+Sam grinned. He was wondering whether he would be able to get into words
+just what he wanted to tell her of the actress soldier of fortune. He
+looked across the table at her frank grey eyes and then on an impulse
+decided that he would tell it straight out as though she had been a man.
+
+"It's like this," he said. "I like ability and good brains and that
+woman has them. She isn't a good woman, but nothing in her life has made
+her want to be good. All her life she has been going the wrong way, and
+now she wants to get on her feet and squared around. That's what she was
+after the colonel for. She did not want to marry him, she wanted to
+make him give her the start she was after. I got the best of her because
+somewhere there is a snivelling little whelp of a man who has taken all
+the good and the fineness out of her and who now stands ready to sell
+her out for a few dollars. I imagined there would be such a man when I
+saw her and I bluffed my way through to him. But I do not want to whip a
+woman, even in such an affair, through the cheapness of some man. I want
+to do the square thing by her. That's why I asked you to make that check
+for twenty thousand."
+
+Sue Rainey rose and stood by the desk looking down at him. He was
+thinking how wonderfully clear and honest her eyes.
+
+"And what about the colonel?" she asked. "What will he think of all
+this?"
+
+Sam walked around the desk and took her hand.
+
+"We'll have to agree not to consider him," he said. "We really did that
+you know when we started this thing. I think we can depend upon Miss
+London's putting the finishing touches on the job."
+
+And Miss London did. She sent for Sam a week later and put tweny-five
+hundred dollars into his hand.
+
+"That's not to invest for me," she said, "that's for yourself. By the
+agreement I signed with you we were to split anything I got out of the
+colonel. Well, I went light. I only got five thousand dollars."
+
+With the money in his hand Sam stood by the side of a little table in
+her room looking at her.
+
+"What did you tell the colonel?" he asked.
+
+"I called him up here to my room last night and lying here in bed I told
+him that I had just discovered I was the victim of an incurable disease.
+I told him that within a month I would be in bed for keeps and asked
+him to marry me at once and to take me away with him to some quiet place
+where I could die in his arms."
+
+Coming over to Sam, Luella London put a hand upon his arm and laughed.
+
+"He began to beg off and make excuses," she went on, "and then I brought
+out his letters to me and talked straight. He wilted at once and paid
+the five thousand dollars I asked for the letters without a murmur. I
+might have made it fifty and with your talent you ought to get all he
+has in six months."
+
+Sam shook hands with her and told her of his success in doubling the
+money she had put into his hands. Then putting the twenty-five hundred
+dollars in his pocket he went back to his desk. He did not see her
+again and when, through a lucky market turn, he had increased the twenty
+thousand dollars she had left with him to twenty-five, he placed it
+in the hands of a trust company for her and forgot the incident.
+Years later he heard that she was running a fashionable dressmaking
+establishment in a western city.
+
+And Colonel Tom Rainey, who had for months talked of nothing but factory
+efficiency and of what he and young Sam McPherson were going to do
+in the way of enlarging the business, began the next morning a tirade
+against women that lasted the rest of his life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Sue Rainey had long touched the fancy of the youths of Chicago society
+who, while looking at her trim little figure and at the respectable
+size of the fortune behind it, were yet puzzled and disconcerted by her
+attitude toward themselves. On the wide porches at golf clubs, where
+young men in white trousers lounged and smoked cigarettes, and in
+the down-town clubs, where the same young men spent winter afternoons
+playing Kelly pool, they spoke of her, calling her an enigma. "She'll
+end by being an old maid," they declared, and shook their heads at the
+thought of so good a connection dangling loosely in the air just without
+their reach. From time to time, one of the young men tore himself loose
+from the group that contemplated her, and, with an opening volley of
+books, candy, flowers and invitations to theatres, charged down upon
+her, only to have the youthful ardour of his attack cooled by her
+prolonged attitude of indifference. When she was twenty-one, a young
+English cavalry officer, who came to Chicago to ride in the horse show
+had, for some weeks, been seen much in her company and a report of their
+engagement had been whispered through the town and talked of about the
+nineteenth hole at the country clubs. The rumour proved to be without
+foundation, the attraction to the cavalry officer having been a certain
+brand of rare old wine the colonel had stored in his cellar and a
+feeling of brotherhood with the swaggering old gun maker, rather than
+the colonel's quiet little daughter.
+
+After the beginning of his acquaintanceship with her, and all during
+the days when he stirred things up in the offices and shops of the
+gun company, tales of the assiduous and often needy young men who were
+camped on her trail reached Sam's ears. They would be in at the office
+to see and talk with the colonel, who had several times confided to Sam
+that his daughter Sue was already past the age at which right-minded
+young women should marry, and in the absence of the father two or three
+of them had formed a habit of stopping for a word with Sam, whom they
+had met through the colonel or Jack Prince. They declared that they were
+"squaring themselves with the colonel." Not a difficult thing to do, Sam
+thought, as he drank the wine, smoked the cigars, and ate the dinners
+of all without prejudice. Once, at luncheon, Colonel Tom discussed
+these young men with Sam, pounding on a table so that the glasses jumped
+about, and calling them damned upstarts.
+
+For his own part, Sam did not feel that he knew Sue Rainey, and
+although, after their first meeting one evening at the Rainey house, he
+had been pricked by a mild curiosity concerning her, no opportunity
+to satisfy it had presented itself. He knew that she was athletic,
+travelled much, rode, shot, and sailed a boat; and he had heard Jack
+Prince speak of her as a woman of brains, but, until the incident of
+the colonel and Luella London threw them for the moment into the same
+enterprise and started him thinking of her with real interest, he had
+seen and talked with her for but brief passing moments brought about by
+their mutual interest in the affairs of her father.
+
+After Janet Eberly's sudden death, and while he was yet in the midst of
+his grief at her loss, Sam had his first long talk with Sue Rainey. It
+was in Colonel Tom's office, and Sam, walking hurriedly in, found her
+sitting at the colonel's desk and staring out of the window at a broad
+expanse of flat roofs. A man, climbing a flag pole to replace a slipped
+rope, caught his attention and standing by the window looking at the
+minute figure clinging to the swaying pole, he began talking of the
+absurdity of human endeavour.
+
+The colonel's daughter listened respectfully to his rather obvious
+banalities and getting up from her chair came to stand beside him. Sam
+turned slyly to look at her firm brown cheeks as he had looked on the
+morning when she had come to see him about Luella London and was struck
+by the thought that she in some faint way reminded him of Janet Eberly.
+In a moment, and rather to his own surprise, he burst into a long speech
+telling of Janet, of the tragedy of her loss and something of the beauty
+of her life and character.
+
+The nearness of his loss and the nearness also of what he thought might
+be a sympathetic listener spurred him and he found himself getting a
+kind of relief for the aching sense of loss for his dead comrade by
+heaping praises upon her life.
+
+When he had finished saying what was in his mind, he stood by the window
+feeling awkward and embarrassed. The man who climbed the flag pole
+having put the rope through the ring at the top slid suddenly down the
+pole and thinking for the moment that he had fallen Sam made a quick
+clutch at the air with his hand. His gripping fingers closed over Sue
+Rainey's hand.
+
+He turned, amused by the incident, and began making a halting
+explanation. There were tears in Sue Rainey's eyes.
+
+"I wish I had known her," she said and drew her hand from between his
+fingers. "I wish you had known me better that I also might have known
+your Janet. They are rare--such women. They are worth much to know. Most
+women like most men--"
+
+She made an impatient gesture with her hand and Sam, turning, walked
+toward the door. He felt that he might not trust himself to answer her.
+For the first time since coming to manhood he felt that tears might
+at any moment come into his eyes. Grief for the loss of Janet surged
+through him disconcerting and engulfing him.
+
+"I have been doing you an injustice," said Sue Rainey, looking at the
+floor. "I have thought of you as something different from what you are.
+There is a story I heard of you which gave me a wrong impression."
+
+Sam smiled. Having conquered the commotion within himself, he laughed
+and explained the incident of the man who had slid down the pole.
+
+"What was the story you heard?" he asked.
+
+"It was a story a young man told at our house," she explained
+hesitatingly, refusing to be carried away from her mood of seriousness.
+"It was about a little girl you saved from drowning and a purse made up
+and given you. Why did you take the money?"
+
+Sam looked at her squarely. The story was one that Jack Prince had
+delight in telling. It concerned an incident of his early business life
+in the city.
+
+One afternoon, when he was still in the employ of the commission firm,
+he had taken a party of men for a trip on an excursion steamer on the
+lake. He had a project into which he wanted them to go with him and
+had taken them aboard the steamer to get them together and present the
+merits of his scheme. During the trip a little girl had fallen overboard
+and Sam, springing after her, had brought her safely aboard the boat.
+
+On the excursion steamer a cheer had arisen. A young man in a
+broad-brimmed cowboy hat ran about taking up a collection. People
+crowded forward to grasp Sam's hand and he had accepted the money
+collected and had put it in his pocket.
+
+Among the men aboard the boat were several who, while they did not draw
+back from going into Sam's project, had thought his taking the money
+not manly. They had told the story, and it had come to the ears of Jack
+Prince, who never tired of repeating it and always ended the story with
+the request that the listener ask Sam why he had taken the money.
+
+Now in Colonel Tom's office facing Sue Rainey, Sam made the explanation
+that had so delighted Jack Prince.
+
+"The crowd wanted to give me the money," he said, slightly perplexed.
+"Why shouldn't I have taken it? I did not save the little girl for the
+money, but because she was a little girl; and the money paid for my
+ruined clothes and the expenses of the trip."
+
+With his hand on the doorknob he looked steadily at the woman before
+him.
+
+"And I wanted the money," he announced, a ring of defiance in his voice.
+"I have always wanted money, any money I could get."
+
+Sam went back to his own office and sat down at his desk. He had been
+surprised by the cordiality and friendliness Sue Rainey had shown toward
+him. On an impulse, he wrote a letter, defending his position in the
+matter of the money taken on the excursion steamer and setting forth
+something of the attitude of his mind toward money and business affairs.
+
+"I cannot see myself believing in the rot most business men talk," he
+wrote at the end of the letter. "They are full of sentiment and ideals
+which are not true. Having a thing to sell they always say it is the
+best, although it may be third rate. I do not object to that. What I do
+object to is the way they have of nursing a hope within themselves that
+the third rate thing is first rate until the hope becomes a belief. In
+the talk I had with that actress Luella London I told her that I myself
+flew the black flag. Well, I do. I would lie about goods to sell them,
+but I would not lie to myself. I will not stultify my own mind. If a man
+crosses swords with me in a business deal and I come out of the affair
+with the money, it is no sign that I am the greater rascal, rather it is
+a sign that I am the keener man."
+
+With the note lying before him on the desk Sam wondered why he had
+written it. It seemed to him an accurate and straightforward statement
+of the business creed he had adopted for himself, but a rather absurd
+note to write to a woman. And then, not allowing himself time to
+reconsider his action, he addressed an envelope and going out into the
+general offices dropped it into the mail chute.
+
+"It will let her know where I stand anyway," he thought, with a return
+of the defiant mood in which he had told her the motive of his action on
+the boat.
+
+Within the next ten days after the talk in Colonel Tom's office Sam saw
+Sue Rainey several times coming to or going from her father's office.
+Once, meeting in the little lobby by the office entrance, she stopped
+and put out her hand which Sam took awkwardly. He had a feeling that she
+would not have regretted an opportunity to continue the sudden little
+intimacy that had sprung up between them in the few minutes' talk of
+Janet Eberly. The feeling did not come from vanity but from a belief in
+Sam that she was in some way lonely and wanting companionship. Although
+she had been much courted she lacked, he thought, the talent for
+comradeship or quick friendliness. "Like Janet she is more than half
+intellect," he told himself, and felt a pang of regret for the slight
+disloyalty of the further thought that there was in Sue a something more
+substantial and solid than there had been in Janet.
+
+Suddenly Sam began wondering whether or not he would like to marry Sue
+Rainey. His mind played with the idea. He took it with him to bed, and
+it went with him all day in his hurried trips through offices and shops.
+The thought having come to him persisted, and he began seeing her in a
+new light. The odd half awkward little movements of her hands, and their
+expressiveness, the brown fine texture of her cheeks, the clearness and
+honesty of her grey eyes, the quick sympathy and understanding of his
+feeling for Janet, and the subtle flattery of the notion he had got that
+she was interested in him--all of these things came and went in his mind
+while he ran through columns of figures and laid plans for the expansion
+of the business of the Arms Company. Unconsciously he began to make her
+a part of his plans for the future.
+
+Later, Sam discovered that during the days after the first talk together
+the thought of a marriage between them was in Sue's mind also. After
+the talk she went home and stood for an hour before the glass studying
+herself and she once told Sam that in her bed that night she shed
+tears because she had never been able to arouse in a man the note of
+tenderness that had been in his voice when he talked to her of Janet.
+
+And then two months after the first talk they had another. Sam, who had
+not allowed his grief over the loss of Janet or his nightly efforts
+to drown the sting of it in hard drinking, to check the big forward
+movement that he felt he was getting into the work of the offices and
+shops, sat one afternoon deeply absorbed in a pile of factory cost
+sheets. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his white
+muscular forearms. He was absorbed, intent upon the sheets.
+
+"I stepped in," said a voice above his head.
+
+Glancing up quickly, Sam sprang to his feet. "She must have been there
+some minutes looking down at me," he thought, and had a thrill of
+pleasure in the thought.
+
+Into his mind came the contents of the letter he had written her, and he
+wondered if after all he had been a fool, and whether the thoughts of a
+marriage with her were but vagaries. "Perhaps it would not be attractive
+to either her or myself when we came up to it," he decided.
+
+"I stepped in," she began again. "I have been thinking. Some things
+you said--in the letter and when you talked of your friend Janet who
+died--some things of men and women and work. You may not remember them.
+I--I got interested. I--are you a socialist?"
+
+"I believe not," Sam answered, wondering what had given her that
+thought. "Are you?"
+
+She laughed and shook her head.
+
+"Just what are you?" she went on. "What do you believe? I am curious to
+know. I thought your note--you will pardon me--I thought it a kind of
+pretence."
+
+Sam winced. A shadow of doubt of the sincerity of his business
+philosophy crossed his mind accompanied by the swaggering figure of
+Windy McPherson. He came around the desk and leaning against it looked
+at her. His secretary had gone out of the room and they were alone
+together. Sam laughed.
+
+"There was a man in the town where I was raised used to say that I was a
+little mole working underground, intent upon worms," he said, and then,
+waving his arms toward the papers on the desk, added, "I am a business
+man. Isn't that enough? If you could go with me through some of these
+cost sheets you would agree they are needed."
+
+He turned and faced her again.
+
+"What should I be doing with beliefs?" he asked.
+
+"Well, I think you have them--some kind of beliefs," she insisted, "you
+must have them. You get things done. You should hear the men talk
+of you. Sometimes at the house they are quite foolish about what a
+wonderful fellow you are and what you are doing here. They say that you
+drive on and on. What drives you? I want to know."
+
+For the moment Sam half suspected that she was secretly laughing at
+him. Finding her quite serious he started to reply and then stopped,
+regarding her.
+
+The silence between them went on and on. A clock on the wall ticked
+loudly.
+
+Sam stepped nearer to her and stood looking down into the face she
+slowly turned up to his.
+
+"I want to have a talk with you," he said, and his voice broke. He had
+the illusion of a hand gripping at his throat.
+
+In a flash he had definitely decided that he would try to marry her.
+Her interest in the motives of his life had clinched the sort of half
+decision he had made. In an illuminating moment during the prolonged
+silence between them he had seen her in a new light. The feeling of
+vague intimacy brought to him by his thoughts of her became a fixed
+belief that she belonged to him--was a part of him--and he was charmed
+with her manner, and her person, standing there, as with a gift given
+him.
+
+And then into his mind came a hundred other thoughts, clamouring
+thoughts, come out of the hidden parts of him. He began to think that
+she could lead the way on a road he wanted to travel. He thought of her
+wealth and what it would mean to a man filled with his hunger for power.
+And through these thoughts shot others. Something in her had taken hold
+of him--something that had been also in Janet. He was curious concerning
+her curiosity about his beliefs, and wanted to question her concerning
+her own beliefs. He could see none of Colonel Tom's blustering
+incompetence in her and thought her filled with truth as a deep spring
+is filled with clear water. He believed she would give him something,
+something that all his life he had been wanting. An old aching hunger
+that had haunted his nights as a boy came back and he thought that at
+her hand it might be fed.
+
+"I--I must read a book about socialism," he said lamely.
+
+Again they stood in silence, she looking at the floor, he past her head
+and out at the window. He could not bring himself to speak again of the
+proposed talk. He had a boyish dread of having her notice the tremor in
+his voice.
+
+Colonel Tom came into the room, bursting with an idea Sam had given him
+at the lunch hour and which in working its way into his mind had
+become to the colonel's entirely honest belief an idea of his own. The
+interruption brought to Sam an intense feeling of relief and he began
+talking of the colonel's idea as though it had taken him unawares.
+
+Sue, walking to a window, began tying and untying the curtain cord. When
+Sam, raising his eyes, looked at her, he caught her eyes watching him
+intently and she smiled, continuing to look at him squarely. It was his
+eyes that first broke away.
+
+From that day Sam's mind was afire with thoughts of Sue Rainey. In his
+room he sat, or going into Grant Park stood by the lake, looking at the
+silent, moving water as he had looked in the days when he first came to
+the city. He did not dream of having her in his arms or of kissing her
+lips; he thought, instead, with a glowing heart, of a life lived with
+her. He wanted to walk beside her through the streets, to have her come
+suddenly in at his office door, to look into her eyes and to have her
+question him, as she had questioned, concerning his beliefs and his
+hopes. He thought that in the evening he would like to go to a house of
+his own and find her sitting there waiting for him. All the charm of his
+aimless, half-dissolute way of life died in him, and he believed that
+with her he could begin to live more fully and completely. From the
+moment when he had definitely decided that he wanted Sue as a wife, Sam
+stopped overdrinking, going to his room or walking through the streets
+or in the parks instead of seeking his old companions in the clubs and
+drinking places. Sometimes pushing his bed to the window overlooking the
+lake, he would undress immediately after dinner and opening the window
+would spend half the night watching the lights of boats far away over
+the water and thinking of her. He would imagine her in the room, moving
+here and there, and coming occasionally to put her hand in his hair and
+look down at him as Janet had done, helping by her sane talk and quiet
+ways to get his life straightened out for good living.
+
+And when he had fallen asleep the face of Sue Rainey came to visit his
+dreams. One night he thought she had become blind and sat in the room
+with sightless eyes saying over and over like one demented, "Truth,
+truth, give me back the truth that I may see," and he awoke sick with
+horror at the thought of the look of suffering that had been in her
+face. Never did Sam dream of having her in his arms or of raining kisses
+on her lips and neck as he had dreamed of other women who in the past
+had won his favour.
+
+For all that he thought of her so constantly and built so confidently
+his dream of a life to be spent with her, months passed before he saw
+her again. Through Colonel Tom he learned that she had gone for a visit
+to the East and he went earnestly about his work, keeping his mind on
+his business during the day and only in the evening allowing himself to
+become absorbed in thoughts of her. He had a feeling that although he
+had said nothing she knew of his desire for her and that she wanted time
+to think it over. Several times in the evening in his room he wrote her
+long letters filled with minute, boyish explanations of his thoughts and
+motives, letters which after writing he immediately destroyed. A woman
+of the west side, with whom he had once had an affair, met him one day
+on the street, and put her hand familiarly on his arm and for the moment
+reawakened in him an old desire. After leaving her he did not go back to
+the office, but taking a south-bound car, spent the afternoon walking
+in Jackson Park, watching the children at play on the grass, sitting
+on benches under the trees, getting out of his body and his mind the
+insistent call of the flesh that had come back to him.
+
+Then in the evening, he came suddenly upon Sue riding a spirited black
+horse in a bridle path at the upper end of the park. It was just at the
+grey beginning of night. Stopping the horse, she sat looking at him and
+going to her he put a hand on the bridle.
+
+"We might have that talk," he said.
+
+She smiled down at him and the colour began to rise in her brown cheeks.
+
+"I have been thinking of it," she said, the familiar serious look coming
+into her eyes. "After all what have we to say to each other?"
+
+Sam watched her steadily.
+
+"I have a lot of things to say to you," he announced. "That is to
+say--well--I have, if things are as I hope." She got off the horse and
+they stood together by the side of the path. Sam never forgot the few
+minutes of silence that followed. The wide prospects of green sward, the
+golf player trudging wearily toward them through the uncertain light,
+his bag upon his shoulder, the air of physical fatigue with which he
+walked, bending slightly forward, the faint, soft sound of waves washing
+over a low beach, and the intense waiting look on the face she turned
+up to him, made an impression on his mind that stayed with him through
+life. It seemed to him that he had arrived at a kind of culmination, a
+starting point, and that all the vague shadowy uncertainties that had,
+in reflective moments, flitted through his mind, were to be brushed
+away by some act, some word, from the lips of this woman. With a rush he
+realised how consistently he had been thinking of her and how enormously
+he had been counting on her falling in with his plans, and the
+realisation was followed by a sickening moment of fear. How little he
+actually knew of her and of her way of thought. What assurance had he
+that she would not laugh, jump back upon the horse, and ride away? He
+was afraid as he had never been afraid before. Dumbly his mind groped
+about for a way to begin. Expressions he had caught and noted in her
+strong serious little face when he had achieved but a mild curiosity
+concerning her came back to visit his mind and he tried desperately to
+build an instant idea of her from these. And then turning his face from
+her he plunged directly into his thoughts of the past months as though
+she had been sharing talking to the colonel.
+
+"I have been thinking we might marry, you and I," he said, and cursed
+himself for the blundering bluntness of the declaration.
+
+"You do get things done, don't you?" she replied, smiling.
+
+"Why should you have been thinking anything of the sort?"
+
+"Because I want to live with you," he said; "I have been talking to the
+colonel."
+
+"About marrying me?" She seemed about to begin laughing.
+
+He hurried on. "No, not that. We talked about you. I could not let him
+alone. He might have known. I kept making him talk. I made him tell me
+about your ideas. I felt I had to know."
+
+Sam faced her.
+
+"He thinks your ideas absurd. I do not. I like them. I like you. I think
+you are beautiful. I do not know whether I love you or not, but for
+weeks I have been thinking of you and clinging to you and saying over
+and over to myself, 'I want to live my life with Sue Rainey.' I did not
+expect to go at it this way. You know me. What you do not know I will
+tell you."
+
+"Sam McPherson, you are a wonder," she said, "and I do not know but that
+I will marry you in the end, but I can't tell now. I want to know a lot
+of things. I want to know if you are ready to believe what I believe and
+to live for what I want to live."
+
+The horse, growing restless, began tugging at the bridle and she spoke
+to him sharply. She plunged into a description of a man she had seen on
+the lecture platform during her visit to the East and Sam looked at her
+with puzzled eyes.
+
+"He was beautiful," she said. "He was past sixty but looked like a boy
+of twenty-five, not in his body, but in an air of youth that hung over
+him. He stood there before the people talking, quiet, able, efficient.
+He was clean. He had lived clean, body and mind. He had been companion
+and co-worker with William Morris, and once he had been a mine boy in
+Wales, but he had got hold of a vision and lived for it. I did not hear
+what he said, but I kept thinking, 'I want a man like that.'
+
+"Can you accept my beliefs and live for what I want to live?" she
+persisted.
+
+Sam looked at the ground. It seemed to him that he was going to lose
+her, that she would not marry him.
+
+"I am not accepting beliefs or ends in life blindly," he said stoutly,
+"but I want them. What are your beliefs? I want to know. I think I
+haven't any myself. When I reach for them they are gone. My mind shifts
+and changes. I want something solid. I like solid things. I want you."
+
+"When can we meet and talk everything over thoroughly?"
+
+"Now," answered Sam bluntly, some look in her face changing his whole
+viewpoint. Suddenly it seemed as though a door had been opened, letting
+in a strong light upon the darkness of his mind. His confidence had come
+back to him. He wanted to strike and keep on striking. The blood rushed
+through his body and his brain began working rapidly. He felt sure of
+ultimate success.
+
+Taking her hand, and leading the horse, he began walking with her along
+the path. Her hand trembled in his and as though answering a thought in
+his mind she looked up at him and said,
+
+"I am not different from other women, although I do not accept your
+offer. This is a big moment for me, perhaps the biggest moment of my
+life. I want you to know that I feel that, though I do want certain
+things more than I want you or any other man."
+
+There was a suggestion of tears in her voice and Sam had a feeling that
+the woman in her wanted him to take her into his arms, but something
+within him told him to wait and to help her by waiting. Like her he
+wanted something more than the feel of a woman in his arms. Ideas rushed
+through his head; he thought that she was going to give him some bigger
+idea than he had known. The figure she had drawn for him of the old man
+who stood on the platform, young and beautiful, the old boyish need of
+a purpose in life, the dreams of the last few weeks--all of these were a
+part of the eager curiosity in him. They were like hungry little animals
+waiting to be fed. "We must have it all out here and now," he told
+himself. "I must not let myself be swept away by a rush of feeling and I
+must not let her be.
+
+"Do not think," he said, "that I haven't tenderness for you. I am filled
+with it. But I want to have our talk. I want to know what you expect me
+to believe and how you want me to live."
+
+He felt her hand stiffen in his.
+
+"Whether or not we are worth while to each other," she added.
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+And then she began to talk, telling him in a quiet steady voice that
+steadied something in him what she wanted to make out of her life. Her
+idea was one of service to mankind through children. She had seen girl
+friends of hers, with whom she had gone to school, grow up and marry.
+They had wealth and education, fine well-trained bodies, and they had
+been married only to live lives more fully devoted to pleasure. One or
+two who had married poor men had only done so to satisfy a passion
+in themselves, and after marriage had joined the others in the hungry
+pursuit of pleasure.
+
+"They do nothing at all," she said, "to repay the world for the things
+given them, the wealth and well-trained bodies and the disciplined
+minds. They go through life day after day and year after year wasting
+themselves and come in the end to nothing but indolent, slovenly
+vanity."
+
+She had thought it all out and had tried to plan for herself a life with
+other ends, and wanted a husband in accord with her ideas.
+
+"That isn't so difficult," she said, "I can find a man whom I can
+control and who will believe as I believe. My money gives me that power.
+But I want him to be a real man, a man of ability, a man who does things
+for himself, one fitted by his life and his achievements to be the
+father of children who do things. And so I began thinking about you. I
+got the men who come to the house to talk of you."
+
+She hung her head and laughed like a bashful boy.
+
+"I know much of the story of your early life out in that Iowa town," she
+said. "I got the story of your life and your achievements out there from
+some one who knew you well."
+
+The idea seemed wonderfully simple and beautiful to Sam. It seemed to
+add tremendously to the dignity and nobility of his feeling for her. He
+stopped in the path and swung her about facing him. They were alone in
+that end of the park. The soft darkness of the summer night had settled
+over them. In the grass at their feet a cricket sang loudly. He made a
+movement to take her into his arms.
+
+"It is wonderful," he said.
+
+"Wait," she demanded, putting her hand against his shoulder. "It isn't
+so simple. I am wealthy. You are able and you have a kind of undying
+energy in you. I want to give both my wealth and your ability to
+children--our children. That will not be easy for you. It means giving
+up your dreams of power. Perhaps I shall lose courage. Women do after
+two or three have come. You will have to furnish that. You will have to
+make a mother of me and keep making a mother of me. You will have to be
+a new kind of father with something maternal in you. You will have to be
+patient and studious and kind. You will have to think of these things at
+night instead of thinking of your own advancement. You will have to live
+wholly for me because I am to be their mother, giving me your strength
+and courage and your good sane outlook on things. And then when they
+come you will have to give all these things to them day after day in a
+thousand little ways."
+
+Sam took her into his arms and for the first time in his memory the hot
+tears stood in his eyes.
+
+The horse, unattended, wheeled, threw up his head and trotted off down
+the path. They let him go, walking along after him hand in hand like two
+happy children. At the entrance to the park they came up to him, held by
+a park policeman. She got on the horse and Sam stood beside her looking
+up.
+
+"I'll tell the colonel in the morning," he said.
+
+"What will he say?" she murmured, musingly.
+
+"Damned ingrate," Sam mimicked the colonel's blustering throat tones.
+
+She laughed and picked up the reins. Sam laid his hand on hers.
+
+"How soon?" he asked.
+
+She put her head down near his.
+
+"We'll waste no time," she said, blushing.
+
+And then in the presence of a park policeman, in the street by the
+entrance to the park with the people passing up and down, Sam had his
+first kiss from Sue Rainey's lips.
+
+After she rode away Sam walked. He had no sense of the passing of time,
+wandering through street after street, rearranging and readjusting his
+outlook on life. What she had said had stirred every vestige of sleeping
+nobility in him. He thought that he had got hold of the thing he had
+unconsciously been seeking all his life. His dreams of control of the
+Rainey Arms Company and the other big things he had planned in business
+seemed, in the light of their talk, so much nonsense and vanity. "I will
+live for this! I will live for this!" he kept saying over and over to
+himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue's
+arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish
+together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting
+in the darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and
+thought they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the
+earth.
+
+At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame
+houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his
+boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving
+forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the
+arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.
+
+"I must go to her--I must go to her at her house--now--tonight--and tell
+her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me," he thought.
+
+And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.
+
+"It cleanses me! this cleanses me!" he said to himself.
+
+He remembered the men who had sat about the stove in Wildman's grocery
+when he was a boy and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered how
+he, as a boy in the city, had run through the crowded streets fleeing
+from the terror of lust. He began to understand how distorted, how
+strangely perverted, his whole attitude toward women and sex had been.
+"Sex is a solution, not a menace--it is wonderful," he told himself
+without knowing fully the meaning of the word that had sprung to his
+lips.
+
+When, at last, he turned into Michigan Avenue and went toward his
+apartment, the late moon was just mounting the sky and a clock in one of
+the sleeping houses was striking three.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+One evening, six weeks after the talk in the gathering darkness in
+Jackson Park, Sue Rainey and Sam McPherson sat on the deck of a Lake
+Michigan steamer watching the lights of Chicago blink out in the
+distance. They had been married that afternoon in Colonel Tom's big
+house on the south side; and now they sat on the deck of the boat, being
+carried out into darkness, vowed to motherhood and to fatherhood, each
+more or less afraid of the other. They sat in silence, looking at
+the blinking lights and listening to the low voices of their fellow
+passengers, also sitting in the chairs along the deck or strolling
+leisurely about, and to the wash of the water along the sides of the
+boat, eager to break down a little reserve that the solemnity of the
+marriage service had built up between them.
+
+A picture floated in Sam's mind. He saw Sue, all in white, radiant and
+wonderful, coming toward him down a broad stairway, toward him, the
+newsboy of Caxton, the smuggler of game, the roisterer, the greedy
+moneygetter. All during those six weeks he had been waiting for this
+hour when he should sit beside the little grey-clad figure, getting from
+her the help he wanted in the reconstruction of his life. Without being
+able to talk as he had thought of talking, he yet felt assured and easy
+in his mind. In the moment when she had come down the stairway he had
+been half overcome by a feeling of intense shame, a return of the shame
+that had swept over him that night when she had given her word and he
+had walked hour after hour through the streets. It had seemed to him
+that from among the guests standing about should arise a voice crying,
+"Stop! Do not go on! Let me tell you of this fellow--this McPherson!"
+And then he had seen her holding to the arm of swaggering, pretentious
+Colonel Tom and he had taken her hand to become one with her, two
+curious, feverish, strangely different human beings, taking a vow in the
+name of their God, with the flowers banked about them and the eyes of
+people upon them.
+
+When Sam had gone to Colonel Tom the morning after that evening in
+Jackson Park, there had been a scene. The old gun maker had blustered
+and roared and forbidden, pounding on his desk with his fist. When Sam
+remained cool and unimpressed, he had stormed out of the room slamming
+the door and shouting, "Upstart! Damned upstart!" and Sam had gone
+smiling back to his desk, mildly disappointed. "I told Sue he would say
+'Ingrate,'" he thought, "I am losing my skill at guessing just what he
+will do and say."
+
+The colonel's rage had been short-lived. Within a week he was boasting
+of Sam to chance callers as "the best business man in America," and
+in the face of a solemn promise given Sue was telling news of the
+approaching marriage to every newspaper man he knew. Sam suspected
+him of secretly calling on the telephone those newspapers whose
+representatives had not crossed his trail.
+
+During the six waiting weeks there had been little of love making
+between Sue and Sam. They had talked instead, or, going into the country
+or to the parks, had walked under the trees consumed with a curious
+eager passion of suspense. The idea she had given him in the park grew
+in Sam's brain. To live for the young things that would presently come
+to them, to be simple, direct, and natural, like the trees or the
+beasts of the field, and then to have the native honesty of such a life
+illuminated and ennobled by a mutual intelligent purpose to make their
+young something finer and better than the things in Nature by the
+intelligent use of their own good minds and bodies. In the shops and
+on the streets the hurrying men and women took on a new significance to
+him. He wondered what secret mighty purpose might be in their lives,
+and read a newspaper report of an engagement or a marriage with a little
+jump of the heart. He looked at the girls and the women at work over
+the typewriting machines in the office, with questioning eyes, asking
+himself why they did not seek marriage openly and determinedly, and
+saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material, as a machine
+for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in the great
+workshop of the universe. "Marriage is a port, a beginning, a point of
+departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage of
+life," he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. "All that
+goes before is but a preparation, a building. The pains and the triumphs
+of all unmarried people are but the good oak planks being driven into
+place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage." Or, again, one night
+when they were in a rowboat on the lagoon in the park and all about
+them in the darkness was the plash of oars in the water, the screams of
+excited girls, and the sound of voices calling, he let the boat float in
+against the shores of a little island and crept along the boat to kneel,
+with his head in her lap and whisper, "It is not the love of a woman
+that grips me, Sue, but the love of life. I have had a peep into the
+great mystery. This--this is why we are here--this justifies us."
+
+Now that she sat beside him, her shoulder against his own, being carried
+away with him into darkness and privacy, the personal side of his love
+for her ran through Sam like a flame and, turning, he drew her head down
+upon his shoulder.
+
+"Not yet, Sam," she whispered, "not with these hundreds of people
+sleeping and drinking and thinking and going about their affairs almost
+within touch of our hands."
+
+They got up and walked along the swaying deck. Out of the north the
+clean wind called to them, the stars looked down upon them, and in the
+darkness in the bow of the boat they parted for the night silently,
+speechless with happiness and with a dear, unmentioned secret between
+them.
+
+At dawn they landed at a little lumbering town, where boat, blankets,
+and camping kit had gone before. A river flowed down out of the woods
+passing the town, going under a bridge and turning the wheel of a
+sawmill that stood by the shore of the river facing the lake. The clean
+sweet smell of the new-cut logs, the song of the saws, the roar of
+the water tumbling over a dam, the cries of the blue-shirted lumbermen
+working among the floating logs above the dam, filled the morning air,
+and above the song of the saws sang another song, a breathless, waiting
+song, the song of love and of life singing in the hearts of husband and
+wife.
+
+In a little roughly-built lumberman's hotel they ate breakfast in a room
+overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced
+woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the
+breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing
+the door behind her. Through the open window they looked at the cold
+swiftly-flowing river and at a freckled-faced boy who carried packages
+wrapped in blankets and put them in a long canoe tied to a little
+wharf beside the hotel. They ate and sat staring at each other like two
+strange boys, saying nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his
+breast.
+
+On the river he sank his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the
+current. During the six weeks' waiting in Chicago she had taught him the
+essentials of the canoeist's art and, now, as he shot the canoe under
+the bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a
+superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the
+prow of the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and
+straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine
+trees, and piles of cut logs lay at the foot of the hills along the
+shore.
+
+At sunset they landed in a little cleared space at the foot of a hill
+and on the top of the hill, with the wind blowing across it, they
+made their first camp. Sam brought boughs and spread them, lapped like
+feathers in the wings of a bird, and carried blankets up the hill, while
+Sue, at the foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared
+their first cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out
+her rifle and gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness
+making the lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the
+young night, with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold
+wind blowing into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under
+the trees to where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the
+stormy waters of a great sea before their eyes, and lay down together
+for their first long tender embrace.
+
+There is a special kind of fine pleasure in getting one's first
+knowledge of the great outdoors in the company of a woman a man loves
+and to have that woman an expert, with a keen appetite for the life,
+adds point and flavour to the experience. In his busy striving,
+nickel-seeking boyhood in the town surrounded by hot cornfields, and in
+his young manhood of scheming and money hunger in the city, Sam had not
+thought of vacations and resting places. He had walked on country roads
+with John Telfer and Mary Underwood, listening to their talk, absorbing
+their ideas, blind and deaf to the little life in the grass, in the
+leafy branches of the trees and in the air about him. In clubs, and
+about hotels and barrooms in the city, he had heard men talk of life
+in the open, and had said to himself, "When my time comes I will taste
+these things."
+
+And now he did taste them, lying on his back on the grass along the
+river, floating down quiet little side streams in the moonlight,
+listening to the night call of birds, or watching the flight of
+frightened wild things as he pushed the canoe into the quiet depths of
+the great forest about them.
+
+At night, under the little tent they had brought, or beneath the
+blankets under the stars, he slept lightly, awakening often to look at
+Sue lying beside him. Perhaps the wind had blown a wisp of hair across
+her face and her breath played with it, tossing it about; perhaps just
+the quiet of her expressive little face charmed and held him, so that he
+turned reluctantly to sleep again thinking that he might, with pleasure,
+go on looking at her all night.
+
+For Sue the days also passed lightly. She also awoke in the night and
+lay looking at the man sleeping beside her, and once she told Sam that
+when he awoke she feigned sleep dreading to rob him of the pleasure that
+she knew these secret love passages gave to both.
+
+They were not alone in those northern woods. Everywhere along the rivers
+and on the shores of little lakes they found people, to Sam a new kind
+of people, who dropped all the ordinary things of life, and ran away
+to the woods and the streams to spend long happy months in the open.
+He discovered with surprise that these adventurers were men of modest
+fortunes, small manufacturers, skilled workingmen, retail merchants. One
+with whom he talked was a grocer from a town in Ohio, and when Sam asked
+him if the coming to the woods with his family for an eight-weeks stay
+did not endanger the success of his business he agreed with Sam that it
+did, nodding his head and laughing.
+
+"But there would be a lot more danger in not leaving it," he said, "the
+danger of having my boys grow up to be men without my having any real
+fun with them."
+
+Among all of the people they met Sue passed with a sort of happy freedom
+that confounded Sam, as he had formed a habit of thinking of her always
+as one shut within herself. Many of the people they saw she knew, and
+he came to believe that she had chosen the place for their love making
+because she admired and held in high favour the lives of these people of
+the out-of-doors and wanted her lover to be in some way like them. Out
+of the solitude of the woods, along the shores of little lakes, they
+called to her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show
+her husband, and among them she sat talking of other seasons and of the
+inroads of the lumber men upon their paradise. "The Burnhams were
+this year on the shores of Grant Lake, the two school teachers from
+Pittsburgh would come early in August, the Detroit man with the crippled
+son was building a cabin on the shores of Bone River."
+
+Sam sat among them in silence, renewing constantly his admiration for
+the wonder of Sue's past life. She, the daughter of Colonel Tom, the
+woman rich in her own right, to have made her friends among these
+people; she, who had been pronounced an enigma by the young men of
+Chicago, to have been secretly all of these years the companion and
+fellow spirit of these campers by the lakes.
+
+For six weeks they led a wandering, nomadic life in that half wild land,
+for Sue six weeks of tender love making, and of the expression of
+every thought and impulse of her fine nature, for Sam six weeks of
+readjustment and freedom, during which he learned to sail a boat, to
+shoot, and to get the fine taste of that life into his being.
+
+And then one morning they came again to the little lumber town at the
+mouth of the river and sat upon the pier waiting for the Chicago boat.
+They were bound once more into the world, and to that life together that
+was the foundation of their marriage and that was to be the end and aim
+of their two lives.
+
+If Sam's life from boyhood had been, on the whole, barren and empty of
+many of the sweeter things, his life during the next year was strikingly
+full and complete. In the office he had ceased being the pushing upstart
+tramping on the toes of tradition and had become the son of Colonel Tom,
+the voter of Sue's big stock holdings, the practical, directing head and
+genius of the destinies of the company. Jack Prince's loyalty had been
+rewarded, and a huge advertising campaign made the name and merits of
+the Rainey Arms Company's wares known to all reading Americans. The
+muzzles of Rainey-Whittaker rifles, revolvers, and shotguns looked
+threateningly out at one from the pages of the great popular magazines,
+brown fur-clad hunters did brave deeds before one's eyes, kneeling upon
+snow-topped crags preparing to speed winged death to waiting mountain
+sheep; huge open-mouthed bears rushed down from among the type at the
+top of the pages and seemed about to devour cool deliberate sportsmen
+who stood undaunted, swinging their trusty Rainey-Whittakers into place,
+and presidents, explorers, and Texas gun fighters loudly proclaimed the
+merits of Rainey-Whittakers to a gun-buying world. It was for Sam
+and for Colonel Tom a time of big dividends, mechanical progress, and
+contentment.
+
+Sam stayed diligently at work in the offices and in the shops, but kept
+within himself a reserve of strength and resolution that might have gone
+into the work. With Sue he took up golf and morning rides on horseback,
+and with Sue he sat during the long evenings, reading aloud, absorbing
+her ideas and her beliefs. Sometimes for days they were like two
+children, going off together to walk on country roads and to sleep in
+country hotels. On these walks they went hand in hand or, bantering each
+other, raced down long hills to lie panting in the grass by the roadside
+when they were out of breath.
+
+Near the end of the first year she told him one night of the realisation
+of their hopes and they sat through the evening alone by the fire in her
+room, filled with the white wonder of it, renewing to each other all the
+fine vows of their early love-making days.
+
+Sam never succeeded in recapturing the flavour of those days. Happiness
+is a thing so vague, so indefinite, so dependent on a thousand little
+turns of the events of the day, that it only visits the most fortunate
+and at rare intervals, but Sam thought that he and Sue touched almost
+ideal happiness constantly during that time. There were weeks and even
+months of their first year together that later passed out of Sam's
+memory entirely, leaving only a sense of completeness and well being.
+He could remember, perhaps, a winter walk in the moonlight by the frozen
+lake, or a visitor who sat and talked an evening away by their fire. But
+at the end he had to come back to this: that something sang in his
+heart all day long and that the air tasted better, the stars shone more
+brightly, and the wind and the rain and the hail upon the window panes
+sang more sweetly in his ears. He and the woman who lived with him had
+wealth, position, and infinite delight in the presence and the persons
+of each other, and a great idea burned like a lamp in a window at the
+end of the road they travelled.
+
+Meanwhile, in the world about him events came and went. A president
+was elected, the grey wolves were being hunted out of the Chicago city
+council, and a strong rival to his company flourished in his own
+city. In other days he would have been down upon this rival fighting,
+planning, working for its destruction. Now he sat at Sue's feet,
+dreaming and talking to her of the brood that under their care should
+grow into wonderful reliant men and women. When Lewis, the talented
+sales manager of the Edwards Arms Company, got the business of a
+Kansas City jobber, he smiled, wrote a sharp letter to his man in that
+territory, and went for an afternoon of golf with Sue. He had completely
+and wholly accepted Sue's conception of life. "We have wealth for any
+emergency," he said to himself, "and we will live our lives for service
+to mankind through the children that will presently come into our
+house."
+
+After their marriage Sam found that Sue, for all her apparent coldness
+and indifference, had in Chicago, as in the northern woods, her own
+little circle of men and women. Some of these people Sam had met during
+the engagement, and now they began gradually coming to the house for an
+evening with the McPhersons. Sometimes there would be several of them
+for a quiet dinner at which there was much good talk, and after which
+Sue and Sam sat for half the night, continuing some vein of thought
+brought to them. Among the people who came to them, Sam shone
+resplendent. In some indefinable way he thought they paid court to him
+and the thought flattered him immensely. The college professor who had
+talked brilliantly through an evening turned to Sam for approval of his
+conclusions, a writer of tales of cowboy life asked him to help him over
+a difficulty in the stock market, and a tall black-haired painter paid
+him the rare compliment of repeating one of Sam's remarks as his own. It
+was as though, in spite of their talk, they thought him the most gifted
+of them all, and for a time he was puzzled by their attitude. Jack
+Prince came, sat at one of the dinner parties, and explained.
+
+"You have got what they want and cannot get--the money," he said.
+
+After the evening when Sue told him the great news they gave a dinner.
+It was a sort of welcoming party for the coming guest, and, while the
+people at the table ate and talked, Sue and Sam, from opposite ends
+of the table, lifted high their glasses and, looking into each other's
+eyes, drank off the health of him who was to come, the first of the
+great family, the family that was to have two lives lived for its
+success.
+
+At the table sat Colonel Tom with his broad white shirt front, his
+white, pointed beard, and his grandiloquent flow of talk; at Sue's side
+sat Jack Prince, pausing in his open admiration of Sue to cast an eye
+on the handsome New York girl at Sam's end of the table or to puncture,
+with a flash of his terse common sense, some balloon of theory launched
+by Williams of the University, who sat on the other side of Sue; the
+artist, who hoped for a commission to paint Colonel Tom, sat opposite
+him bewailing the dying out of fine old American families; and a
+serious-faced little German scientist sat beside Colonel Tom smiling
+as the artist talked. The man, Sam fancied, was laughing at them both,
+perhaps at all of them. He did not mind. He looked at the scientist and
+at the other faces up and down the table and then at Sue. He saw her
+directing and leading the talk; he saw the play of muscles about her
+strong neck and the fine firmness of her straight little body, and his
+eyes grew moist and a lump came into his throat at the thought of the
+secret that lay between them.
+
+And then his mind ran back to another night in Caxton when first he sat
+eating among strange people at Freedom Smith's table. He saw again the
+tomboy girl and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom's
+hand in the close little stable; he saw the absurd housepainter trying
+to blow the bugle in the street; and the mother talking to her boy of
+death through the summer evening; the fat foreman making the record
+of his loves on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commission man
+rubbing his hands before a group of Greek hucksters, and then this--this
+home with its safety and its secret high aim and him sitting there at
+the head of it all. Like the novelist, it seemed to him that he should
+admire and bow his head before the romance of destiny. He thought his
+station, his wife, his country, his end in life, when rightly seen, the
+very apex of life on the earth, and to him in his pride it seemed that
+he was in some way the master and maker of it all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Late one evening, some weeks after the McPhersons had given the dinner
+party in secret celebration of the future arrival of what was to be the
+first of the great family, they came together down the steps of a north
+side house to their waiting carriage. They had spent, Sam thought, a
+delightful evening. The Grovers were people of whose friendship he was
+particularly proud and since his marriage with Sue he had taken her
+often for an evening to the house of the venerable surgeon. Doctor
+Grover was a scholar, a man of note in the medical world, and a rapid
+and absorbing talker and thinker on any subject that aroused his
+interest. A certain youthful enthusiasm in his outlook on life had
+attracted to him the devotion of Sue, who, since meeting him through
+Sam, had counted him a marked addition to their little group of friends.
+His wife, a white-haired, plump little woman, was, though apparently
+somewhat diffident, in reality his intellectual equal and companion,
+and Sue in a quiet way had taken her as a model in her own effort toward
+complete wifehood.
+
+During the evening, spent in a rapid exchange of opinions and ideas
+between the two men, Sue had sat in silence. Once when he looked at her
+Sam thought that he had surprised an annoyed look in her eyes and was
+puzzled by it. During the remainder of the evening her eyes refused
+to meet his and she looked instead at the floor, a flush mounting her
+cheeks.
+
+At the door of the carriage Frank, Sue's coachman, stepped on the hem
+of her gown and tore it. The tear was slight, the incident Sam thought
+entirely unavoidable, and as much due to a momentary clumsiness on the
+part of Sue as to the awkwardness of Frank. The man had for years been a
+loyal servant and a devoted admirer of Sue's.
+
+Sam laughed and taking Sue by the arm started to help her in at the
+carriage door.
+
+"Too much gown for an athlete," he said, pointlessly.
+
+In a flash Sue turned and faced the coachman.
+
+"Awkward brute," she said, through her teeth.
+
+Sam stood on the sidewalk dumb with astonishment as Frank turned and
+climbed to his seat without waiting to close the carriage door. He felt
+as he might have felt had he, as a boy, heard profanity from the lips
+of his mother. The look in Sue's eyes as she turned them on Frank struck
+him like a blow and in a moment his whole carefully built-up conception
+of her and of her character had been shaken. He had an impulse to slam
+the carriage door after her and walk home.
+
+They drove home in silence, Sam feeling as though he rode beside a new
+and strange being. In the light of passing street lamps he could see her
+face held straight ahead and her eyes staring stonily at the curtain in
+front. He didn't want to reproach her; he wanted to take hold of her arm
+and shake her. "I should like to take the whip from in front of Frank's
+seat and give her a sound beating," he told himself.
+
+At the house Sue jumped out of the carriage and, running past him in at
+the door, closed it after her. Frank drove off toward the stables and
+when Sam went into the house he found Sue standing half way up the
+stairs leading to her room and waiting for him.
+
+"I presume you do not know that you have been openly insulting me all
+evening," she cried. "Your beastly talk there at the Grovers--it was
+unbearable--who are these women? Why parade your past life before me?"
+
+Sam said nothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at
+her and then, turning, just as she, running up the stairs, slammed the
+door of her own room, he went into the library. A wood fire burned in
+the grate and he sat down and lighted his pipe. He did not try to think
+the thing out. He felt that he was in the presence of a lie and that the
+Sue who had lived in his mind and in his affections no longer existed,
+that in her place there was this other woman, this woman who had
+insulted her own servant and had perverted and distorted the meaning of
+his talk during the evening.
+
+Sitting by the fire filling and refilling his pipe, Sam went carefully
+over every word, gesture, and incident of the evening at the Grovers and
+could get hold of no part of it that he thought might in fairness serve
+as an excuse for the outburst. In the upper part of the house he could
+hear Sue moving restlessly about and he had satisfaction in the thought
+that her mind was punishing her for so strange a seizure. He and Grover
+had perhaps been somewhat carried away, he told himself; they had talked
+of marriage and its meaning and had both declared somewhat hotly against
+the idea that the loss of virginity in women was in any sense a bar to
+honourable marriage, but he had said nothing that he thought could have
+been twisted into an insult to Sue or to Mrs. Grover. He had thought the
+talk rather good and clearly thought out and had come out of the house
+exhilarated and secretly preening himself with the thought that he had
+talked unusually forcefully and well. In any event what had been said
+had been said before in Sue's presence and he thought that he could
+remember her having, in the past, expressed similar ideas with
+enthusiasm.
+
+Hour after hour he sat in the chair before the dying fire. He dozed and
+his pipe dropped from his hand and fell upon the stone hearth. A kind
+of dumb misery and anger was in him as over and over endlessly his mind
+kept reviewing the events of the evening.
+
+"What has made her think she can do that to me?" he kept asking himself.
+
+He remembered certain strange silences and hard looks from her eyes
+during the past weeks, silences and looks that in the light of the
+events of the evening became pregnant with meaning.
+
+"She has a temper, a beast of a temper. Why shouldn't she have been
+square and told me?" he asked himself.
+
+The clock had struck three when the library door opened quietly and Sue,
+clad in a dressing gown through which the new roundness of her lithe
+little figure was plainly apparent, came into the room. She ran across
+to him and putting her head down on his knee wept bitterly.
+
+"Oh, Sam!" she said, "I think I am going insane. I have been hating you
+as I have not hated since I was an evil-tempered child. A thing I worked
+years to suppress in me has come back. I have been hating myself and the
+baby. For days I have been fighting the feeling in me, and now it has
+come out and perhaps you have begun hating me. Can you love me again?
+Will you ever forget the meanness and the cheapness of it? You and poor
+innocent Frank--Oh, Sam, the devil was in me!"
+
+Reaching down, Sam took her into his arms and cuddled her like a child.
+A story he had heard of the vagaries of women at such times came back to
+him and was as a light illuminating the darkness of his mind.
+
+"I understand now," he said. "It is a part of the burden you carry for
+us both."
+
+For some weeks after the outbreak at the carriage door events ran
+smoothly in the McPherson house. One day as he stood in the stable door
+Frank came round the corner of the house and, looking up sheepishly from
+under his cap, said to Sam: "I understand about the missus. It is the
+baby coming. We have had four of them at our house," and Sam, nodding
+his head, turned and began talking rapidly of his plans to replace the
+carriages with automobiles.
+
+But in the house, in spite of the clearing up of the matter of Sue's
+ugliness at the Grovers, a subtle change had taken place in the
+relationship of the two. Although they were together facing the first
+of the events that were to be like ports-of-call in the great voyage of
+their lives, they were not facing it with the same mutual understanding
+and kindly tolerance with which they had faced smaller things in the
+past--a disagreement over the method of shooting a rapid in a river or
+the entertainment of an undesirable guest. The inclination to fits of
+temper loosens and disarranges all the little wires of life. The
+tune will not get itself played. One stands waiting for the discord,
+strained, missing the harmony. It was so with Sam. He began feeling that
+he must keep a check upon his tongue and that things of which they had
+talked with great freedom six months earlier now annoyed and irritated
+his wife when brought into an after-dinner discussion. To Sam, who,
+during his life with Sue, had learned the joy of free, open talk upon
+any subject that came into his mind and whose native interest in life
+and in the motives of men and women had blossomed in the large leisure
+and independence of the last year, this was trying. It was, he thought,
+like trying to hold free and open communion with the people of an
+orthodox family, and he fell into a habit of prolonged silences, a habit
+that later, he found, once formed, unbelievably hard to break.
+
+One day in the office a situation arose that seemed to demand Sam's
+presence in Boston on a certain date. For months he had been carrying
+on a trade war with some of the eastern manufacturers in his line and an
+opportunity for the settlement of the trouble in a way advantageous to
+himself had, he thought, arisen. He wanted to handle the matter himself
+and went home to explain to Sue. It was at the end of a day when nothing
+had occurred to irritate her and she agreed with him that he should not
+be compelled to trust so important a matter to another.
+
+"I am no child, Sam. I will take care of myself," she said, laughing.
+
+Sam wired his New York man asking him to make the arrangements for the
+meeting in Boston and picked up a book to spend the evening reading
+aloud to her.
+
+And then, coming home the next evening he found her in tears and when he
+tried to laugh away her fears she flew into a black fit of anger and ran
+out of the room.
+
+Sam went to the 'phone and called his New York man, thinking to instruct
+him in regard to the conference in Boston and to give up his own plans
+for the trip. When he had got his man on the wire, Sue, who had
+been standing outside the door, rushed in and put her hand over the
+mouthpiece of the 'phone.
+
+"Sam! Sam!" she cried. "Do not give up the trip! Scold me! Beat me! Do
+anything, but do not let me go on making a fool of myself and destroying
+your peace of mind! I shall be miserable if you stay at home because of
+what I have said!"
+
+Over the 'phone came the insistent voice of Central and putting her hand
+aside Sam talked to his man, letting the engagement stand and making
+some detail of the conference answer as his need of calling.
+
+Again Sue was repentant and again after her tears they sat before the
+fire until his train time, talking like lovers.
+
+To Buffalo in the morning came a wire from her.
+
+"Come back. Let business go. Cannot stand it," she had wired.
+
+While he sat reading the wire the porter brought another.
+
+"Please, Sam, pay no attention to any wire from me. I am all right and
+only half a fool."
+
+Sam was irritated. "It is deliberate pettiness and weakness," he
+thought, when an hour later the porter brought another wire demanding
+his immediate return. "The situation calls for drastic action and
+perhaps one good stinging reproof will stop it for all time."
+
+Going into the buffet car he wrote a long letter calling her attention
+to the fact that a certain amount of freedom of action was due him, and
+saying that he intended to act upon his own judgment in the future and
+not upon her impulses.
+
+Having begun to write Sam went on and on. He was not interrupted, no
+shadow crossed the face of his beloved to tell him he was hurting and
+he said all that was in his mind to say. Little sharp reproofs that had
+come into his mind but that had been left unsaid now got themselves said
+and when he had dumped his overloaded mind into the letter he sealed and
+mailed it at a passing station.
+
+Within an hour after the letter had left his hands Sam regretted it. He
+thought of the little woman bearing the burden for them both, and things
+Grover had told him of the unhappiness of women in her condition came
+back to haunt his mind so that he wrote and sent off to her a wire
+asking her not to read the letter he had mailed and assuring her that he
+would hurry through the Boston conference and get back to her at once.
+
+When Sam returned he knew that in an evil moment Sue had opened and
+read the letter sent from the train and was surprised and hurt by the
+knowledge. The act seemed like a betrayal. He said nothing, going about
+his work with a troubled mind and watching with growing anxiety her
+alternate fits of white anger and fearful remorse. He thought her
+growing worse daily and became alarmed for her health.
+
+And, then, after a talk with Grover he began to spend more and more time
+with her, forcing her to take with him daily, long walks in the open
+air. He tried valiantly to keep her mind fixed on cheerful things and
+went to bed happy and relieved when a day ended that did not bring a
+stormy passage between them.
+
+There were days during that period when Sam thought himself near
+insanity. With a light in her grey eyes that was maddening Sue would
+take up some minor thing, a remark he had made or a passage he had
+quoted from some book, and in a dead, level, complaining tone would talk
+of it until his head reeled and his fingers ached from the gripping of
+his hands to keep control of himself. After such a day he would steal
+off by himself and, walking rapidly, would try through pure physical
+fatigue to force his mind to give up the remembrance of the persistent,
+complaining voice. At times he would give way to fits of anger and
+strew impotent oaths along the silent street, or, in another mood, would
+mumble and talk to himself, praying for strength and courage to keep his
+own head during the ordeal through which he thought they were passing
+together. And when he returned from such a walk and from such a struggle
+with himself it often occurred that he would find her waiting in the arm
+chair before the fire in her room, her mind clear and her little face
+wet with the tears of her repentance.
+
+And then the struggle ended. With Doctor Grover it had been arranged
+that Sue should be taken to the hospital for the great event, and they
+drove there hurriedly one night through the quiet streets, the recurring
+pains gripping Sue and her hands clutching his. An exalted cheerfulness
+had hold of them. Face to face with the actual struggle for the new
+life Sue was transfigured. Her voice rang with triumph and her eyes
+glistened.
+
+"I am going to do it," she cried; "my black fear is gone. I shall give
+you a child--a man child. I shall succeed, my man Sam. You shall see. It
+will be beautiful."
+
+When the pain gripped she gripped at his hand, and a spasm of
+physical sympathy ran through him. He felt helpless and ashamed of his
+helplessness.
+
+At the entrance to the hospital grounds she put her face down upon his
+knees so that the hot tears ran through his hands.
+
+"Poor, poor old Sam, it has been horrible for you."
+
+At the hospital Sam walked up and down in the corridor through the
+swinging doors at the end of which she had been taken. Every vestige of
+regret for the trying months now lying behind had passed, and he paced
+up and down the corridor feeling that he had come to one of those huge
+moments when a man's brain, his grasp of affairs, his hopes and plans
+for the future, all of the little details and trivialities of his life,
+halt, and he waits anxious, breathless, expectant. He looked at a little
+clock on a table at the end of the corridor, half expecting it to stop
+also and wait with him. His marriage hour that had seemed so big and
+vital seemed now, in the quiet corridor, with the stone floor and the
+silent white-clad, rubber-shod nurses passing up and down and in the
+presence of this greater event, to have shrunk enormously. He walked up
+and down peering at the clock, looking at the swinging door and biting
+at the stem of his empty pipe.
+
+And then through the swinging door came Grover.
+
+"We can get the child, Sam, but to get it we shall have to take a chance
+with her. Do you want to do that? Do not wait. Decide."
+
+Sam sprang past him toward the door.
+
+"You bungler," he cried, and his voice rang through the long quiet
+corridor. "You do not know what this means. Let me go."
+
+Doctor Grover, catching him by the arm, swung him about. The two men
+stood facing each other.
+
+"You stay here," said the doctor, his voice remaining quiet and firm; "I
+will attend to things. Your going in there would be pure folly now. Now
+answer me--do you want to take the chance?"
+
+"No! No!" Sam shouted. "No! I want her--Sue--alive and well, back
+through that door."
+
+A cold gleam came into his eyes and he shook his fist before the
+doctor's face.
+
+"Do not try deceiving me about this. By God, I will----"
+
+Turning, Doctor Grover ran back through the swinging door leaving Sam
+staring blankly at his back. A nurse, one whom he had seen in Doctor
+Grover's office, came out of the door and taking his arm, walked beside
+him up and down the corridor. Sam put his arm around her shoulder and
+talked. An illusion that it was necessary to comfort her came to him.
+
+"Do not worry," he said. "She will be all right. Grover will take care
+of her. Nothing can happen to little Sue."
+
+The nurse, a small, sweet-faced, Scotch woman, who knew and admired Sue,
+wept. Some quality in his voice had touched the woman in her and the
+tears ran in a little stream down her cheeks. Sam continued talking, the
+woman's tears helping him to regain his grip upon himself.
+
+"My mother is dead," he said, an old sorrow revisiting him. "I wish that
+you, like Mary Underwood, would be a new mother to me."
+
+When the time came that he could be taken to the room where Sue lay, his
+self-possession had returned to him and his mind had begun blaming the
+little dead stranger for the unhappiness of the past months and for the
+long separation from what he thought was the real Sue. Outside the door
+of the room into which she had been taken he stopped, hearing her voice,
+thin and weak, talking to Grover.
+
+"Unfit--Sue McPherson unfit," said the voice, and Sam thought it was
+filled with an infinite weariness.
+
+He ran through the door and dropped on his knees by her bed. She turned
+her eyes to him smiling bravely.
+
+"The next time we'll make it," she said.
+
+The second child born to the young McPhersons arrived out of time. Again
+Sam walked, this time through the corridor of his own house and without
+the consoling presence of the sweet-faced Scotch woman, and again
+he shook his head at Doctor Grover who came to him consoling and
+reassuring.
+
+After the death of the second child Sue lay for months in bed. In his
+arms, in her own room, she wept openly in the presence of Grover and the
+nurses, crying out against her unfitness. For several days she refused
+to see Colonel Tom, harbouring in her mind the notion that he was in
+some way responsible for her physical inability to bear living children,
+and when she got up from her bed, she remained for months white and
+listless but grimly determined upon another attempt for the little life
+she so wanted to feel in her arms.
+
+During the days of her carrying the second baby she had again the fierce
+ugly attacks of temper that had shattered Sam's nerves, but having
+learned to understand, he went quietly about his work, trying as far
+as in him lay to close his ears to the stinging, hurtful things she
+sometimes said; and the third time, it was agreed between them that
+if they were again unsuccessful they would turn their minds to other
+things.
+
+"If we do not succeed this time we might as well count ourselves through
+with each other for good," she said one day in one of the fits of cold
+anger that were a part of child bearing with her.
+
+That second night when Sam walked in the hospital corridor he was beside
+himself. He felt like a young recruit called to face an unseen enemy and
+to stand motionless and inactive in the presence of the singing death
+that ran through the air. He remembered a story, told when he was a
+child by a fellow soldier who had come to visit his father, of the
+prisoners at Andersonville creeping in the darkness past armed sentries
+to a little pool of stagnant water beyond the dead line, and felt that
+he too was creeping unarmed and helpless in the neighbourhood of death.
+In a conference at his house between the three some weeks before, it had
+been decided, after tearful insistence on the part of Sue and a stand
+on the part of Grover, who declared that he would not remain on the case
+unless permitted to use his own judgment, that an operation should be
+performed.
+
+"Take the chances that need be taken," Sam had said to Grover after the
+conference; "she will never stand another defeat. Give her the child."
+
+In the corridor it seemed to Sam that hours had passed and still he
+stood motionless waiting. His feet felt cold and he had the impression
+that they were wet although the night was dry and a moon shone outside.
+When, from a distant part of the hospital, a groan reached his ears he
+shook with fright and had an inclination to cry out. Two young interns
+clad in white passed.
+
+"Old Grover is doing a Caesarian section," said one of them; "he is
+getting out of date. Hope he doesn't bungle it."
+
+In Sam's ears rang the remembrance of Sue's voice, the Sue who that
+first time had gone into the room behind the swinging doors with the
+determined smile on her face. He thought he could see again the white
+face looking up from the wheeled cot on which they had taken her through
+the door.
+
+"I am afraid, Dr. Grover--I am afraid I am unfit," he had heard her say
+as the door closed.
+
+And then Sam did a thing for which he cursed himself the rest of his
+life. On an impulse, and maddened by the intolerable waiting, he walked
+to the swinging doors and, pushing them open, stepped into the operating
+room where Grover was at work upon Sue.
+
+The room was long and narrow, with floors, walls and ceiling of white
+cement. A great glaring light, suspended from the ceiling, threw
+its rays directly down on a white-clad figure lying on a white metal
+operating table. On the walls of the room were other glaring lights set
+in shining glass reflectors. And, here and there through an intense,
+expectant atmosphere, moved and stood silently a group of men and women,
+faceless, hairless, with only their strangely vivid eyes showing through
+the white masks that covered their faces.
+
+Sam, standing motionless by the door, looked about with wild,
+half-seeing eyes. Grover worked rapidly and silently, taking from time
+to time little shining instruments from a swinging table close at his
+hand. The nurse standing beside him looked up toward the light and began
+calmly threading a needle. And in a white basin on a little stand at
+the side of the room lay the last of Sue's tremendous efforts toward new
+life, the last of their dreams of the great family.
+
+Sam closed his eyes and fell. His head, striking against the wall,
+aroused him and he struggled to his feet.
+
+Without stopping his work, Grover began swearing.
+
+"Damn it, man, get out of here."
+
+Sam groped with his hand for the door. One of the white-clad, ghoulish
+figures started toward him. And then with his head reeling and his eyes
+closed he backed through the door and, running along the corridor and
+down a flight of broad stairs, reached the open air and darkness. He had
+no doubt of Sue's death.
+
+"She is gone," he muttered, hurrying bareheaded along the deserted
+streets.
+
+Through street after street he ran. Twice he came out upon the shores
+of the lake, and, then turning, went back into the heart of the city
+through streets bathed in the warm moonlight. Once he turned quickly at
+a corner and stepping into a vacant lot stood behind a high board fence
+as a policeman strolled along the street. Into his head came the idea
+that he had killed Sue and that the blue-clad figure walking with heavy
+tread on the stone pavement was seeking him to take him back to where
+she lay white and lifeless. Again he stopped, before a little frame
+drugstore on a corner, and sitting down on the steps before it cursed
+God openly and defiantly like an angry boy defying his father. Some
+instinct led him to look at the sky through the tangle of telegraph
+wires overhead.
+
+"Go on and do what you dare!" he cried. "I will not follow you now. I
+shall never try to find you after this."
+
+Presently he began laughing at himself for the instinct that had led
+him to look at the sky and to shout out his defiance and, getting up,
+wandered on. In his wanderings he came to a railroad track where a
+freight train groaned and rattled over a crossing. When he came up to it
+he jumped upon an empty coal car, falling as he climbed, and cutting his
+face upon the sharp pieces of coal that lay scattered about the bottom
+of the car.
+
+The train ground along slowly, stopping occasionally, the engine
+shrieking hysterically.
+
+After a time he got out of the car and dropped to the ground. On all
+sides of him were marshes, the long rank marsh grasses rolling and
+tossing in the moonlight. When the train had passed he followed it,
+walking stumblingly along. As he walked, following the blinking lights
+at the end of the train, he thought of the scene in the hospital and
+of Sue lying dead for that--that ping livid and shapeless on the table
+under the lights.
+
+Where the solid ground ran up to the tracks Sam sat down under a tree.
+Peace came over him. "This is the end of things," he thought, and
+was like a tired child comforted by its mother. He thought of the
+sweet-faced nurse who had walked with him that other time in the
+corridor of the hospital and who had wept because of his fears, and
+then of the night when he had felt the throat of his father between
+his fingers in the squalid little kitchen. He ran his hands along
+the ground. "Good old ground," he said. A sentence came into his mind
+followed by the figure of John Telfer striding, stick in hand, along a
+dusty road. "Here is spring come and time to plant out flowers in the
+grass," he said aloud. His face felt swollen and sore from the fall in
+the freight car and he lay down on the ground under a tree and slept.
+
+When he woke it was morning and grey clouds were drifting across the
+sky. Within sight, down a road, a trolley car went past into the city.
+Before him, in the midst of the marsh, lay a low lake, and a raised
+walk, with boats tied to the posts on which it stood, ran down to the
+water. He went down the walk, bathed his bruised face in the water, and
+boarding a car went back into the city.
+
+In the morning air a new thought took possession of him. The wind ran
+along a dusty road beside the car track, picking up little handfuls of
+dust and playfully throwing them about. He had a strained, eager feeling
+like some one listening for a faint call out of the distance.
+
+"To be sure," he thought, "I know what it is, it is my wedding day. I am
+to marry Sue Rainey to-day."
+
+At the house he found Grover and Colonel Tom standing in the breakfast
+room. Grover looked at his swollen, distorted face. His voice trembled.
+
+"Poor devil!" he said. "You have had a night!"
+
+Sam laughed and slapped Colonel Tom on the shoulder.
+
+"We will have to begin getting ready," he said. "The wedding is at ten.
+Sue will be getting anxious."
+
+Grover and Colonel Tom took him by the arm and began leading him up the
+stairs, Colonel Tom weeping like a woman.
+
+"Silly old fool," thought Sam.
+
+When, two weeks later, he again opened his eyes to consciousness Sue sat
+beside his bed in a reclining chair, her little thin white hand in his.
+
+"Get the baby!" he cried, believing anything possible. "I want to see
+the baby!"
+
+She laid her head down on the pillow.
+
+"It was gone when you saw it," she said, and put an arm about his neck.
+
+When the nurse came back she found them, their heads together upon the
+pillow, crying weakly like two tired children.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The blow given the plan of life so carefully thought out and so eagerly
+accepted by the young McPhersons threw them back upon themselves. For
+several years they had been living upon a hill top, taking themselves
+very seriously and more than a little preening themselves with the
+thought that they were two very unusual and thoughtful people engaged
+upon a worthy and ennobling enterprise. Sitting in their corner immersed
+in admiration of their own purposes and in the thoughts of the vigorous,
+disciplined, new life they were to give the world by the combined
+efficiency of their two bodies and minds they were, at a word and a
+shake of the head from Doctor Grover, compelled to remake the outline of
+their future together.
+
+All about them the rush of life went on, vast changes were impending
+in the industrial life of the people, cities were doubling and tripling
+their population, a war was being fought, and the flag of their country
+flew in the ports of strange seas, while American boys pushed their way
+through the tangled jungles of strange lands carrying in their hands
+Rainey-Whittaker rifles. And in a huge stone house, set in a broad
+expanse of green lawns near the shores of Lake Michigan, Sam McPherson
+sat looking at his wife, who in turn looked at him. He was trying, as
+she also was trying, to adjust himself to the cheerful acceptance of
+their new prospect of a childless life.
+
+Looking at Sue across the dinner table or seeing her straight, wiry body
+astride a horse riding beside him through the parks, it seemed to Sam
+unbelievable that a childless womanhood was ever to be her portion, and
+more than once he had an inclination to venture again upon an effort for
+the success of their hopes. But when he remembered her still white
+face that night in the hospital, her bitter, haunting cry of defeat,
+he turned with a shudder from the thought, feeling that he could not go
+with her again through that ordeal; that he could not again allow her to
+look forward through weeks and months toward the little life that never
+came to lie upon her breast or to laugh up into her face.
+
+And yet Sam, son of that Jane McPherson who had won the admiration of
+the men of Caxton by her ceaseless efforts to keep her family afloat and
+clean handed, could not sit idly by, living upon the income of his own
+and Sue's money. The stirring, forward-moving world called to him; he
+looked about him at the broad, significant movements in business and
+finance, at the new men coming into prominence and apparently finding a
+way for the expression of new big ideas, and felt his youth stirring in
+him and his mind reaching out to new projects and new ambitions.
+
+Given the necessity for economy and a hard long-drawn-out struggle for
+a livelihood and competence, Sam could conceive of living his life
+with Sue and deriving something like gratification from just her
+companionship, and her partnership in his efforts--here and there during
+the waiting years he had met men who had found such gratification--a
+foreman in the shops or a tobacconist from whom he bought his
+cigars--but for himself he felt that he had gone with Sue too far upon
+another road to turn that way now with anything like mutual zeal or
+interest. At bottom, his mind did not run strongly toward the idea of
+the love of women as an end in life; he had loved, and did love, Sue
+with something approaching religious fervour, but the fervour was more
+than half due to the ideas she had given him and to the fact that with
+him she was to have been the instrument for the realisation of those
+ideas. He was a man with children in his loins and he had given up his
+struggles for business eminence for the sake of preparing himself for
+a kind of noble fatherhood of children, many children, strong children,
+fit gifts to the world for two exceptionally favoured lives. In all
+of his talks with Sue this idea had been present and dominant. He had
+looked about him and in the arrogance of his youth and in the pride
+of his good body and mind had condemned all childless marriages as a
+selfish waste of good lives. With her he had agreed that such lives were
+without point and purpose. Now he remembered that in the days of her
+audacity and daring she had more than once expressed the hope that in
+case of a childless issue to their marriage one or the other of them
+would have the courage to cut the knot that tied them and venture into
+another effort at right living at any cost.
+
+In the months after Sue's last recovery, and during the long evenings,
+as they sat together or walked under the stars in the park, the thought
+of these talks was often in Sam's mind and he found himself beginning
+to speculate on her present attitude and to wonder how bravely she
+would meet the idea of a separation. In the end he decided that no such
+thought was in her mind, that face to face with the tremendous
+actuality she clung to him with a new dependence, and a new need of his
+companionship. The conviction of the absolute necessity of children as
+a justification for a man and woman living together had, he thought,
+burned itself more deeply into his brain than into hers; to him it
+clung, coming back again and again to his mind, causing him to turn here
+and there restlessly, making readjustments, seeking new light. The old
+gods being dead he sought new gods.
+
+In the meantime he sat in his house facing his wife, losing himself in
+the books recommended to him years before by Janet, thinking his own
+thoughts. Often in the evening he would look up from his book or from
+his preoccupied staring at the fire to find her eyes looking at him.
+
+"Talk, Sam; talk," she would say; "do not sit there thinking."
+
+Or at another time she would come to his room at night and putting her
+head down on the pillow beside his would spend hours planning, weeping,
+begging him to give her again his love, his old fervent, devoted love.
+
+This Sam tried earnestly and honestly to do, going with her for long
+walks when the new call, the business had begun to make to him, would
+have kept him at his desk, reading aloud to her in the evening, urging
+her to shake off her old dreams and to busy herself with new work and
+new interests.
+
+Through the days in the office he went in a kind of half stupor. An old
+feeling of his boyhood coming back to him, it seemed to him, as it had
+seemed when he walked aimlessly through the streets of Caxton after
+the death of his mother, that there remained something to be done, an
+accounting to be made. Even at his desk with the clatter of typewriters
+in his ears and the piles of letters demanding his attention, his mind
+slipped back to the days of his courtship with Sue and to those days in
+the north woods when life had beat strong within him, and every young,
+wild thing, every new growth renewed the dream that filled his being.
+Sometimes on the street, or walking in the park with Sue, the cries of
+children at play cut across the sombre dulness of his mind and he shrank
+from the sound and a kind of bitter resentment took possession of him.
+When he looked covertly at Sue she talked of other things, apparently
+unconscious of his thoughts.
+
+Then a new phase of life presented itself. To his surprise he found
+himself looking with more than passing interest at women in the streets,
+and an old hunger for the companionship of strange women came back to
+him, in some way coarsened and materialised. One evening at the theatre
+a woman, a friend of Sue's and the childless wife of a business friend
+of his own, sat beside him. In the darkness of the playhouse her
+shoulder nestled down against his. In the excitement of a crisis on the
+stage her hand slipped into his and her fingers clutched and held his
+fingers.
+
+Animal desire seized and shook him, a feeling without sweetness, brutal,
+making his eyes burn. When between the acts the theatre was again
+flooded with light he looked up guiltily to meet another pair of eyes
+equally filled with guilty hunger. A challenge had been given and
+received.
+
+In their car, homeward bound, Sam put the thoughts of the woman away
+from him and taking Sue in his arms prayed silently for some help
+against he knew not what.
+
+"I think I will go to Caxton in the morning and have a talk with Mary
+Underwood," he said.
+
+After his return from Caxton Sam set about finding some new interest to
+occupy Sue's mind. He had spent an afternoon talking to Valmore, Freedom
+Smith, and Telfer and thought there was a kind of flatness in their
+jokes and in their ageing comments on each other. Then he had gone from
+them for his talk with Mary. Half through the night they had talked,
+Sam getting forgiveness for not writing and getting also a long friendly
+lecture on his duty toward Sue. He thought she had in some way missed
+the point. She had seemed to suppose that the loss of the children
+had fallen singly upon Sue. She had not counted upon him, and he had
+depended upon her doing just that. He had come as a boy to his mother
+wanting to talk of himself and she had wept at the thought of the
+childless wife and had told him how to set about making her happy.
+
+"Well, I will set about it," he thought on the train coming home; "I
+will find for her this new interest and make her less dependent upon me.
+Then I also will take hold anew and work out for myself a programme for
+a way of life."
+
+One afternoon when he came home from the office he found Sue filled
+indeed with a new idea. With glowing cheeks she sat beside him through
+the evening and talked of the beauties of a life devoted to social
+service.
+
+"I have been thinking things out," she said, her eyes shining. "We must
+not allow ourselves to become sordid. We must keep to the vision. We
+must together give the best in our lives and our fortunes to mankind.
+We must make ourselves units in the great modern movements for social
+uplift."
+
+Sam looked at the fire and a chill feeling of doubt ran through him. He
+could not see himself as a unit in anything. His mind did not run out
+toward the thought of being one of the army of philanthropists or rich
+social uplifters he had met talking and explaining in the reading rooms
+of clubs. No answering flame burned in his heart as it had burned
+that evening by the bridle path in Jackson Park when she had expounded
+another idea. But the thought of a need of new interest for her coming
+to him, he turned to her smiling.
+
+"It sounds all right but I know nothing of such things," he said.
+
+After that evening Sue began to get a hold upon herself. The old fire
+came back into her eyes and she went about the house with a smile
+upon her face and talked through the evenings to her silent, attentive
+husband of the life of usefulness, the full life. One day she told him
+of her election to the presidency of a society for the rescue of fallen
+women, and he began seeing her name in the newspapers in connection with
+various charity and civic movements. At the house a new sort of men
+and women began appearing at the dinner table; a strangely earnest,
+feverish, half fanatical people, Sam thought, with an inclination toward
+corsetless dresses and uncut hair, who talked far into the night and
+worked themselves into a sort of religious zeal over what they called
+their movement. Sam found them likely to run to startling statements,
+noticed that they sat on the edges of their chairs when they talked,
+and was puzzled by their tendency toward making the most revolutionary
+statements without pausing to back them up. When he questioned a
+statement made by one of these people, he came down upon him with a rush
+that quite carried him away and then, turning to the others, looked
+at them wisely like a cat that has swallowed a mouse. "Ask us another
+question if you dare," their faces seemed to be saying, while their
+tongues declared that they were but students of the great problem of
+right living.
+
+With these new people Sam never made any progress toward real
+understanding and friendship. For a time he tried honestly to get some
+of their own fervent devotions to their ideas and to be impressed by
+what they said of their love of man, even going with them to some of
+their meetings, at one of which he sat among the fallen women gathered
+in, and listened to a speech by Sue.
+
+The speech did not make much of a hit, the fallen women moving
+restlessly about. A large woman, with an immense nose, did better.
+She talked with a swift, contagious zeal that was very stirring, and,
+listening to her, Sam was reminded of the evening when he sat before
+another zealous talker in the church at Caxton and Jim Williams, the
+barber, tried to stampede him into the fold with the lambs. While the
+woman talked a plump little member of the _demi monde_ who sat beside
+Sam wept copiously, but at the end of the speech he could remember
+nothing of what had been said and he wondered if the weeping woman would
+remember.
+
+To express his determination to continue being Sue's companion and
+partner, Sam during one winter taught a class of young men at a
+settlement house in the factory district of the west side. The class in
+his hands was unsuccessful. He found the young men heavy and stupid with
+fatigue after the day of labour in the shops and more inclined to fall
+asleep in their chairs, or wander away, one at a time, to loaf and
+smoke on a nearby corner, than to stay in the room listening to the man
+reading or talking before them.
+
+When one of the young women workers came into the room, they sat up and
+seemed for the moment interested. Once Sam heard a group of them
+talking of these women workers on a landing in a darkened stairway. The
+experience startled Sam and he dropped the class, admitting to Sue
+his failure and his lack of interest and bowing his head before her
+accusation of a lack of the love of men.
+
+Later by the fire in his own room he tried to draw for himself a moral
+from the experience.
+
+"Why should I love these men?" he asked himself. "They are what I might
+have been. Few of the men I have known have loved me and some of the
+best and cleanest of them have worked vigorously for my defeat. Life is
+a battle in which few men win and many are defeated and in which hate
+and fear play their part with love and generosity. These heavy-featured
+young men are a part of the world as men have made it. Why this protest
+against their fate when we are all of us making more and more of them
+with every turn of the clock?"
+
+During the next year, after the fiasco of the settlement house class,
+Sam found himself drifting more and more rapidly away from Sue and her
+new viewpoint of life. The growing gulf between them showed itself in a
+thousand little household acts and impulses, and every time he looked at
+her he thought her more apart from him and less a part of the real
+life that went on within him. In the old days there had been something
+intimate and familiar in her person and in her presence. She had seemed
+like a part of him, like the room in which he slept or the coat he wore
+on his back, and he had looked into her eyes as thoughtlessly and with
+as little fear of what he might find there as he looked at his own
+hands. Now when his eyes met hers they dropped, and one or the other of
+them began talking hurriedly like a person who has a consciousness of
+something he must conceal.
+
+Down town Sam took up anew his old friendship and intimacy with Jack
+Prince, going with him to clubs and drinking places and often spending
+evenings among the clever, money-wasting young men who laughed and made
+deals and talked their way through life at Jack's side. Among these
+young men a business associate of Jack's caught his attention and in a
+few weeks an intimacy had sprung up between Sam and this man.
+
+Maurice Morrison, Sam's new friend, had been discovered by Jack Prince
+working as a sub-editor on a country daily down the state. There was,
+Sam thought, something of the Caxton dandy, Mike McCarthy, in the man,
+combined with prolonged and fervent, although somewhat periodic attacks
+of industry. In his youth he had written poetry and at one time had
+studied for the ministry, and in Chicago, under Jack Prince, he had
+developed into a money maker and led the life of a talented, rather
+unscrupulous man of the world. He kept a mistress, often overdrank, and
+Sam thought him the most brilliant and convincing talker he had ever
+heard. As Jack Prince's assistant he had charge of the Rainey Company's
+large advertising expenditure, and the two men being thrown often
+together a mutual regard grew up between them. Sam believed him to be
+without moral sense; he knew him to be able and honest and he found in
+the association with him a fund of odd little sweetnesses of character
+and action that lent an inexpressible charm to the person of his friend.
+
+It was through Morrison that Sam had his first serious misunderstanding
+with Sue. One evening the brilliant young advertising man dined at the
+McPhersons'. The table, as usual, was filled with Sue's new friends,
+among them a tall, gaunt man who, with the arrival of the coffee,
+began in a high-pitched, earnest voice to talk of the coming social
+revolution. Sam looked across the table and saw a light dancing in
+Morrison's eyes. Like a hound unleashed he sprang among Sue's friends,
+tearing the rich to pieces, calling for the onward advance of the
+masses, quoting odds and ends of Shelley and Carlyle, peering earnestly
+up and down the table, and at the end quite winning the hearts of the
+women by a defence of fallen women that stirred the blood of even his
+friend and host.
+
+Sam was amused and a trifle annoyed. The whole thing was, he knew, no
+more than a piece of downright acting with just the touch of sincerity
+in it that was characteristic of the man but that had no depth or real
+meaning. During the rest of the evening he watched Sue, wondering if she
+too had fathomed Morrison and what she thought of his having taken the
+role of star from the long gaunt man, who had evidently been booked
+for that part and who sat at the table and wandered afterward among the
+guests, annoyed and disconcerted.
+
+Late that night Sue came into his room and found him reading and smoking
+by the fire.
+
+"Cheeky of Morrison, dimming your star," he said, looking at her and
+laughing apologetically.
+
+Sue looked at him doubtfully.
+
+"I came in to thank you for bringing him," she said; "I thought him
+splendid."
+
+Sam looked at her and for a moment was tempted to let the matter pass.
+And then his old inclination to be always open and frank with her
+asserted itself and he closed the book and rising stood looking down at
+her.
+
+"The little beast was guying your crowd," he said, "but I do not want
+him to guy you. Not that he wouldn't try. He has the audacity for
+anything."
+
+A flush arose to her cheeks and her eyes gleamed.
+
+"That is not true, Sam," she said coldly. "You say that because you are
+becoming hard and cold and cynical. Your friend Morrison talked from his
+heart. It was beautiful. Men like you, who have a strong influence over
+him, may lead him away, but in the end a man like that will come to give
+his life to the service of society. You should help him; not assume an
+attitude of unbelief and laugh at him."
+
+Sam stood upon the hearth smoking his pipe and looking at her. He was
+thinking how easy it would have been in the first year after their
+marriage to have explained Morrison. Now he felt that he was but making
+a bad matter worse, but went on determined to stick to his policy of
+being entirely honest with her.
+
+"Look here, Sue," he began quietly, "be a good sport. Morrison was
+joking. I know the man. He is the friend of men like me because he
+wants to be and because it pays him to be. He is a talker, a writer, a
+talented, unscrupulous word-monger. He is making a big salary by
+taking the ideas of men like me and expressing them better than we can
+ourselves. He is a good workman and a generous, open-hearted fellow with
+a lot of nameless charm in him, but a man of convictions he is not. He
+could talk tears into the eyes of your fallen women, but he would be a
+lot more likely to talk good women into their state."
+
+Sam put a hand upon her shoulder.
+
+"Be sensible and do not be offended," he went on: "take the fellow for
+what he is and be glad for him. He hurts little and cheers a lot. He
+could make a convincing argument in favour of civilisation's return to
+cannibalism, but really, you know, he spends most of his time thinking
+and writing of washing machines and ladies' hats and liver pills, and
+most of his eloquence after all only comes down to 'Send for catalogue,
+Department K' in the end."
+
+Sue's voice was colourless with passion when she replied.
+
+"This is unbearable. Why did you bring the fellow here?"
+
+Sam sat down and picked up his book. In his impatience he lied to her
+for the first time since their marriage.
+
+"First, because I like him and second, because I wanted to see if
+I couldn't produce a man who could outsentimentalise your socialist
+friends," he said quietly.
+
+Sue turned and walked out of the room. In a way the action was final and
+marked the end of understanding between them. Putting down his book
+Sam watched her go and some feeling he had kept for her and that had
+differentiated her from all other women died in him as the door closed
+between them. Throwing the book aside he sprang to his feet and stood
+looking at the door.
+
+"The old goodfellowship appeal is dead," he thought. "From now on we
+will have to explain and apologise like two strangers. No more taking
+each other for granted."
+
+Turning out the light he sat again before the fire to think his way
+through the situation that faced him. He had no thought that she would
+return. That last shot of his own had crushed the possibility of that.
+
+The fire was getting low in the grate and he did not renew it. He looked
+past it toward the darkened windows and heard the hum of motor cars
+along the boulevard below. Again he was the boy of Caxton hungrily
+seeking an end in life. The flushed face of the woman in the theatre
+danced before his eyes. He remembered with shame how he had, a few days
+before, stood in a doorway and followed with his eyes the figure of a
+woman who had lifted her eyes to him as they passed in the street. He
+wished that he might go out of the house for a walk with John Telfer and
+have his mind filled with eloquence of the standing corn, or sit at the
+feet of Janet Eberly as she talked of books and of life. He got up and
+turning on the lights began preparing for bed.
+
+"I know what I will do," he said, "I will go to work. I will do some
+real work and make some more money. That's the place for me."
+
+And to work he went, real work, the most sustained and clearly
+thought-out work he had done. For two years he was out of the house at
+dawn for a long bracing walk in the fresh morning air, to be followed
+by eight, ten and even fifteen hours in the office and shops; hours in
+which he drove the Rainey Arms Company's organisation mercilessly
+and, taking openly every vestige of the management out of the hands
+of Colonel Tom, began the plans for the consolidation of the American
+firearms companies that later put his name on the front pages of the
+newspapers and got him the title of a Captain of Finance.
+
+There is a widespread misunderstanding abroad regarding the motives
+of many of the American millionaires who sprang into prominence and
+affluence in the days of change and sudden bewildering growth that
+followed the close of the Spanish War. They were, many of them, not
+of the brute trader type, but were, instead, men who thought and acted
+quickly and with a daring and audacity impossible to the average mind.
+They wanted power and were, many of them, entirely unscrupulous, but
+for the most part they were men with a fire burning within them, men who
+became what they were because the world offered them no better outlet
+for their vast energies.
+
+Sam McPherson had been untiring and without scruples in the first hard,
+quick struggle to get his head above the great unknown body of men there
+in the city. He had turned aside from money getting when he heard what
+he took to be a call to a better way of life. Now with the fires of
+youth still in him and with the training and discipline that had come
+from two years of reading, of comparative leisure and of thought, he was
+prepared to give the Chicago business world a display of that tremendous
+energy that was to write his name in the industrial history of the city
+as one of the first of the western giants of finance.
+
+Going to Sue, Sam told her frankly of his plans.
+
+"I want a free hand in the handling of your stock in the company," he
+said. "I cannot lead this new life of yours. It may help and sustain you
+but it gets no hold on me. I want to be myself now and lead my own life
+in my own way. I want to run the company, really run it. I cannot stand
+idly by and let life go past. I am hurting myself and you standing here
+looking on. Also I am in a kind of danger of another kind that I want to
+avoid by throwing myself into hard, constructive work."
+
+Without question Sue signed the papers he brought her. A flash of her
+old frankness toward him came back.
+
+"I do not blame you, Sam," she said, smiling bravely. "Things have not
+gone right, as we both know, but if we cannot work together at least let
+us not hurt each other."
+
+When Sam returned to give himself again to affairs, the country was just
+at the beginning of the great wave of consolidation which was finally
+to sweep all of the financial power of the country into a dozen pairs
+of competent and entirely efficient hands. With the sure instinct of the
+born trader Sam had seen this movement coming and had studied it. Now he
+began to act. Going to that same swarthy-faced lawyer who had drawn
+the contract for him to secure control of the medical student's twenty
+thousand dollars and who had jokingly invited him to become one of a
+band of train robbers, he told him of his plans to begin working toward
+a consolidation of all the firearms companies of the country.
+
+Webster wasted no time in joking now. He laid out the plans, adjusted
+and readjusted them to suit Sam's shrewd suggestions, and when a fee was
+mentioned shook his head.
+
+"I want in on this," he said. "You will need me. I am made for this game
+and have been waiting for a chance to get at it. Just count me in as one
+of the promoters if you will."
+
+Sam nodded his head. Within a week he had formed a pool of his own
+company's stock controlling, as he thought, a safe majority and had
+begun working to form a similar pool in the stock of his only big
+western rival.
+
+This last job was not an easy one. Lewis, the Jew, had been making
+constant headway in that company just as Sam had made headway in the
+Rainey Company. He was a money maker, a sales manager of rare ability,
+and, as Sam knew, a planner and executor of business coups of the first
+class.
+
+Sam did not want to deal with Lewis. He had respect for the man's
+ability in driving sharp bargains and felt that he would like to have
+the whip in his own hands when it came to the point of dealing with him.
+To this end he began visiting bankers and the men who were head of big
+western trust companies in Chicago and St. Louis. He went about his work
+slowly, feeling his way and trying to get at each man by some effective
+appeal, buying the use of vast sums of money by a promise of common
+stock, the bait of a big active bank account, and, here and there, by
+the hint of a directorship in the big new consolidated company.
+
+For a time the project moved slowly; indeed there were weeks and months
+when it did not appear to move at all. Working in secret and with
+extreme caution Sam encountered many discouragements and went home in
+the evening day after day to sit among Sue's guests with a mind filled
+with his own plans and with an indifferent ear turned to the talk
+of revolution, social unrest, and the new class consciousness of the
+masses, that rattled and crackled up and down his dinner table.
+He thought that it must be trying to Sue. He was so evidently not
+interested in her interests. At the same time he thought that he was
+working toward what he wanted out of life and went to bed at night
+believing that he was finding, and would find, a kind of peace in just
+thinking clearly along one line day after day.
+
+One day Webster, who had wanted to be in on the deal, came to Sam's
+office and gave his project its first great boost toward success. He,
+like Sam, thought he saw clearly the tendencies of the times, and was
+greedy for the block of common stock that Sam had promised should come
+to him with the completion of the enterprise.
+
+"You are not using me," he said, sitting down before Sam's desk. "What
+is blocking the deal?"
+
+Sam began to explain and when he had finished Webster laughed.
+
+"Let's get at Tom Edwards of the Edward Arms Company direct," he said,
+and then, leaning over the desk, "Edwards is a vain little peacock and a
+second rate business man," he declared emphatically. "Get him afraid and
+then flatter his vanity. He has a new wife with blonde hair and big soft
+blue eyes. He wants prominence. He is afraid to venture upon big things
+himself but is hungry for the reputation and gain that comes through big
+deals. Use the method the Jew has used; show him what it means to
+the yellow-haired woman to be the wife of the president of the big
+consolidated Arms Company. THE EDWARDS CONSOLIDATED, eh? Get at Edwards.
+Bluff him and flatter him and he is your man."
+
+Sam wondered. Edwards was a small grey-haired man of sixty with
+something dry and unresponsive about him. Being a silent man, he had
+created an impression of remarkable shrewdness and ability. After a
+lifetime spent in hard labour and in the practice of the most rigid
+economy he had come up to wealth, and had got into the firearms business
+through Lewis, and it was counted one of the brightest stars in that
+brilliant Hebrew's crown that he had been able to lead Edwards with him
+in his daring and audacious handling of the company's affairs.
+
+Sam looked at Webster across the desk and thought of Tom Edwards as the
+figurehead of the firearms trust.
+
+"I was saving the frosting on the cake for my own Tom," he said; "it was
+a thing I wanted to hand the colonel."
+
+"Let us see Edwards this evening," said Webster dryly.
+
+Sam nodded, and late that night made the deal that gave him control of
+the two important western companies and put him in position to move
+on the eastern companies with every prospect of complete success. To
+Edwards he went with an exaggerated report of the support he had
+already got for his project, and having frightened him offered him
+the presidency of the new company and promised that it should be
+incorporated under the name of The Edwards Consolidated Firearms Company
+of America.
+
+The eastern companies fell quickly. With Webster Sam tried on them the
+old dodge of telling each that the other two had agreed to come in, and
+it worked.
+
+With the coming in of Edwards and the options given by the eastern
+companies Sam began to get also the support of the LaSalle Street
+bankers. The firearms trust was one of the few big consolidations
+managed wholly in the west, and after two or three of the bankers had
+agreed to help finance Sam's plan the others began asking to be taken
+into the underwriting syndicate he and Webster had formed. Within thirty
+days after the closing of the deal with Tom Edwards Sam felt that he was
+ready to act.
+
+For several months Colonel Tom had known something of the plans Sam had
+on foot, and had made no protest. He had in fact given Sam to understand
+that his stock would be voted with Sue's, controlled by Sam, and with
+the stock of the other directors who knew of and hoped to share in the
+profits of Sam's deal. The old gunmaker had all of his life believed
+that the other American firearms companies were but shadows destined to
+disappear before the rising sun of the Rainey Company, and thought of
+Sam's project as an act of providence to further this desirable end.
+
+At the moment of his acquiescence in Webster's plan, for landing Tom
+Edwards, Sam had a moment of doubt, and now, with the success of his
+project in sight, he began to wonder how the blustering old man would
+look upon Edwards as the titular head of the big company and upon the
+name of Edwards in the title of the company.
+
+For two years Sam had seen little of the colonel, who had given up all
+pretence to an active part in the management of the business and who,
+finding Sue's new friends disconcerting, seldom appeared at the house,
+living at the clubs, playing billiards all day long, or sitting in the
+club windows boasting to chance listeners of his part in the building of
+the Rainey Arms Company.
+
+With a mind filled with doubt Sam went home and put the matter before
+Sue. She was dressed and ready for an evening at the theatre with a
+party of friends and the talk was brief.
+
+"He will not mind," she said indifferently. "Go ahead and do what you
+want to do."
+
+Sam rode back to the office and called his lieutenants about him. He
+felt that the thing might as well be done and over, and with the options
+in his hands, and the ability he thought he had to control his own
+company, he was ready to come out into the open and get the deal cleaned
+up.
+
+The morning papers that carried the story of the proposed big new
+consolidation of firearms companies carried also an almost life-size
+halftone of Colonel Tom Rainey, a slightly smaller one of Tom Edwards,
+and grouped about these, small pictures of Sam, Lewis, Prince, Webster,
+and several of the eastern men. By the size of the half-tone, Sam,
+Prince, and Morrison had tried to reconcile Colonel Tom to Edwards'
+name in the title of the new company and to Edwards' coming election
+as president. The story also played up the past glories of the Rainey
+Company and its directing genius, Colonel Tom. One phrase, written by
+Morrison, brought a smile to Sam's lips.
+
+"This grand old patriarch of American business, retired now from active
+service, is like a tired giant, who, having raised a brood of young
+giants, goes into his castle to rest and reflect and to count the scars
+won in many a hard-fought battle."
+
+Morrison laughed as he read it aloud.
+
+"It ought to get the colonel," he said, "but the newspaper man who
+prints it should be hung."
+
+"They will print it all right," said Jack Prince.
+
+And they did print it; going from newspaper office to newspaper office
+Prince and Morrison saw to that, using their influence as big buyers
+of advertising space and even insisting upon reading proof on their own
+masterpiece.
+
+But it did not work. Early the next morning Colonel Tom appeared at the
+offices of the arms company with blood in his eye, and swore that the
+consolidation should not be put through. For an hour he stormed up
+and down in Sam's office, his outbursts of wrath varied by periods
+of childlike pleading for the retention of the name and glory of the
+Raineys. When Sam shook his head and went with the old man to the
+meeting that was to pass upon his action and sell the Rainey Company, he
+knew that he had a fight on his hands.
+
+The meeting was a stormy one. Sam made a talk telling what had been
+done and Webster, voting some of Sam's proxies, made a motion that Sam's
+offer for the old company be accepted.
+
+And then Colonel Tom fired his guns. Walking up and down in the room
+before the men, sitting at a long table or in chairs tilted against the
+walls, he began talking with all of his old flamboyant pomposity of the
+past glories of the Rainey Company. Sam watched him quietly thinking of
+the exhibition as something detached and apart from the business of the
+meeting. He remembered a question that had come into his head when he
+was a schoolboy and had got his first peep into a school history. There
+had been a picture of Indians at the war dance and he had wondered why
+they danced before rather than after battle. Now his mind answered the
+question.
+
+"If they had not danced before they might never have got the chance," he
+thought, and smiled to himself.
+
+"I call upon you men here to stick to the old colours," roared the
+colonel, turning and making a direct attack upon Sam. "Do not let this
+ungrateful upstart, this son of a drunken village housepainter, that I
+picked up from among the cabbages of South Water Street, win you away
+from your loyalty to the old leader. Do not let him steal by trickery
+what we have won only by years of effort."
+
+The colonel, leaning on the table, glared about the room. Sam felt
+relieved and glad of the direct attack.
+
+"It justifies what I am going to do," he thought.
+
+When Colonel Tom had finished Sam gave a careless glance at the old
+man's red face and trembling fingers. He had no doubt that the outburst
+of eloquence had fallen upon deaf ears and without comment put Webster's
+motion to the vote.
+
+To his surprise two of the new employ� directors voted their stock with
+Colonel Tom's, and a third man, voting his own stock as well as that of
+a wealthy southside real estate man, did not vote. On a count the stock
+represented stood deadlocked and Sam, looking down the table, raised his
+eyebrows to Webster.
+
+"Move we adjourn for twenty-four hours," snapped Webster, and the motion
+carried.
+
+Sam looked at a paper lying before him on the table. During the count
+of the vote he had been writing over and over on the sheet of paper this
+sentence.
+
+"The best men spend their lives seeking truth."
+
+Colonel Tom walked out of the room like a conqueror, declining to speak
+to Sam as he passed, and Sam looked down the table at Webster and made a
+motion with his head toward the man who had not voted.
+
+Within an hour Sam's fight was won. Pouncing upon the man representing
+the stock of the south-side investor, he and Webster did not go out of
+the room until they had secured absolute control of the Rainey Company
+and the man who had refused to vote had put twenty-five thousand dollars
+into his pocket. The two employe� directors Sam marked for slaughter.
+Then after spending the afternoon and early evening with the
+representatives of the eastern companies and their attorneys he drove
+home to Sue.
+
+It was past nine o'clock when his car stopped before the house and,
+going at once to his room, he found Sue sitting before his fire, her
+arms thrown above her head and her eyes staring at the burning coals.
+
+As Sam stood in the doorway looking at her a wave of resentment swept
+over him.
+
+"The old coward," he thought, "he has brought our fight here to her."
+
+Hanging up his coat he filled his pipe and drawing up a chair sat beside
+her. For five minutes Sue sat staring into the fire. When she spoke
+there was a touch of hardness in her voice.
+
+"When everything is said, Sam, you do owe a lot to father," she
+observed, refusing to look at him.
+
+Sam said nothing and she went on.
+
+"Not that I think we made you, father and I. You are not the kind of man
+that people make or unmake. But, Sam, Sam, think what you are doing. He
+has always been a fool in your hands. He used to come home here when you
+were new with the company and talk of what he was doing. He had a whole
+new set of ideas and phrases; all that about waste and efficiency and
+orderly working toward a definite end. It did not fool me. I knew the
+ideas, and even the phrases he used to express them, were not his and
+I was not long finding out they were yours, that it was simply you
+expressing yourself through him. He is a big helpless child, Sam, and
+he is old. He hasn't much longer to live. Do not be hard, Sam. Be
+merciful."
+
+Her voice did not tremble but tears ran down her rigid face and her
+expressive hands clutched at her dress.
+
+"Can nothing change you? Must you always have your own way?" she added,
+still refusing to look at him.
+
+"It is not true, Sue, that I always want my own way, and people do
+change me; you have changed me," he said.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No, I have not changed you. I found you hungry for something and you
+thought I could feed it. I gave you an idea that you took hold of and
+made your own. I do not know where I got it, from some book or hearing
+some one talk, I suppose. But it belonged to you. You built it and
+fostered it in me and coloured it with your own personality. It is your
+idea to-day. It means more to you than all this firearms trust that the
+papers are full of."
+
+She turned to look at him, and put out her hand and laid it in his.
+
+"I have not been brave," she said. "I am standing in your way. I have
+had a hope that we would get back to each other. I should have freed you
+but I hadn't the courage, I hadn't the courage. I could not give up the
+dream that some day you would really take me back to you."
+
+Getting out of her chair she dropped to her knees and putting her head
+in his lap, shook with sobs. Sam sat stroking her hair. Her agitation
+was so great that her muscular little back shook with it.
+
+Sam looked past her at the fire and tried to think clearly. He was not
+greatly moved by her agitation, but with all his heart he wanted to
+think things out and get at the right and the honest thing to do.
+
+"It is a time of big things," he said slowly and with an air of one
+explaining to a child. "As your socialists say, vast changes are going
+on. I do not believe that your socialists really sense what these
+changes mean, and I am not sure that I do or that any man does, but
+I know they mean something big and I want to be in them and a part of
+them; all big men do; they are struggling like chicks in the shell. Why,
+look here! What I am doing has to be done and if I do not do it another
+man will. The colonel has to go. He will be swept aside. He belongs to
+something old and outworn. Your socialists, I believe, call it the age
+of competition."
+
+"But not by us, not by you, Sam," she plead. "After all, he is my
+father."
+
+A stern look came into Sam's eyes.
+
+"It does not ring right, Sue," he said coldly; "fathers do not mean much
+to me. I choked my own father and threw him into the street when I was
+only a boy. You knew about that. You heard of it when you went to find
+out about me that time in Caxton. Mary Underwood told you. I did it
+because he lied and believed in lies. Do not your friends say that the
+individual who stands in the way should be crushed?"
+
+She sprang to her feet and stood before him.
+
+"Do not quote that crowd," she burst out. "They are not the real thing.
+Do you suppose I do not know that? Do I not know that they come here
+because they hope to get hold of you? Haven't I watched them and seen
+the look on their faces when you have not come or have not listened to
+their talk? They are afraid of you, all of them. That's why they talk so
+bitterly. They are afraid and ashamed that they are afraid."
+
+"Like the workers in the shop?" he asked, musingly.
+
+"Yes, like that, and like me since I failed in my part of our lives and
+had not the courage to get out of the way. You are worth all of us and
+for all our talk we shall never succeed or begin to succeed until we
+make men like you want what we want. They know that and I know it."
+
+"And what do you want?"
+
+"I want you to be big and generous. You can be. Failure cannot hurt you.
+You and men like you can do anything. You can even fail. I cannot. None
+of us can. I cannot put my father to that shame. I want you to accept
+failure."
+
+Sam got up and taking her by the arm led her to the door. At the door he
+turned her about and kissed her on the lips like a lover.
+
+"All right, Sue girl, I will do it," he said, and pushed her through the
+door. "Now let me sit down by myself and think things out."
+
+It was a night in September and a whisper of the coming frost was in the
+air. He threw up the window and took long breaths of the sharp air and
+listened to the rumble of the elevated road in the distance. Looking
+up the boulevard he saw the lights of the cyclists making a glistening
+stream that flowed past the house. A thought of his new motor car and
+of all of the wonder of the mechanical progress of the world ran through
+his mind.
+
+"The men who make machines do not hesitate," he said to himself; "even
+though a thousand fat-hearted men stood in their way they would go on."
+
+A line of Tennyson's came into his mind.
+
+"And the nation's airy navies grappling in the central blue," he quoted,
+thinking of an article he had read predicting the coming of airships.
+
+He thought of the lives of the workers in steel and iron and of the
+things they had done and would do.
+
+"They have," he thought, "freedom. Steel and iron do not run home to
+carry the struggle to women sitting by the fire."
+
+He walked up and down the room.
+
+"Fat old coward. Damned fat old coward," he muttered over and over to
+himself.
+
+It was past midnight when he got into bed and began trying to quiet
+himself for sleep. In his dreams he saw a fat man with a chorus girl
+hanging to his arm kicking his head about a bridge above a swiftly
+flowing stream.
+
+When he got down to the breakfast room the next morning Sue had gone. By
+his plate he found a note saying that she had gone for Colonel Tom
+and would take him to the country for the day. He walked to the office
+thinking of the incapable old man who, in the name of sentiment, had
+beaten him in what he thought the big enterprise of his life.
+
+At his desk he found a message from Webster. "The old turkey cock has
+fled," it said; "we should have saved the twenty-five thousand."
+
+On the phone Webster told Sam of an early visit to the club to see
+Colonel Tom and that the old man had left the city, going to the country
+for the day. It was on Sam's lips to tell of his changed plans but he
+hesitated.
+
+"I will see you at your office in an hour," he said.
+
+Outside again in the open air Sam walked and thought of his promise.
+Down by the lake he went to where the railroad with the lake beyond
+stopped him. Upon the old wooden bridge looking over the track and down
+to the water he stood as he had stood at other crises in his life and
+thought over the struggle of the night before. In the clear morning air,
+with the roar of the city behind him and the still waters of the lake
+in front, the tears, and the talk with Sue seemed but a part of the
+ridiculous and sentimental attitude of her father, and the promise given
+her insignificant and unfairly won. He reviewed the scene carefully, the
+talk and the tears and the promise given as he led her to the door. It
+all seemed far away and unreal like some promise made to a girl in his
+boyhood.
+
+"It was never a part of all this," he said, turning and looking at the
+towering city before him.
+
+For an hour he stood on the wooden bridge. He thought of Windy McPherson
+putting the bugle to his lips in the streets of Caxton and again there
+sounded in his ears the roaring laugh of the crowd; again he lay in the
+bed beside Colonel Tom in that northern city and saw the moon rising
+over the round paunch and heard the empty chattering talk of love.
+
+"Love," he said, still looking toward the city, "is a matter of truth,
+not lies and pretence."
+
+Suddenly it seemed to him that if he went forward truthfully he should
+get even Sue back again some time. His mind lingered over the thoughts
+of the loves that come to a man in the world, of Sue in the wind-swept
+northern woods and of Janet in her wheel-chair in the little room where
+the cable cars ran rumbling under the window. And he thought of other
+things, of Sue reading papers culled out of books before the fallen
+women in the little State Street hall, of Tom Edwards with his new wife
+and his little watery eyes, of Morrison and the long-fingered socialist
+fighting over words at his table. And then pulling on his gloves he
+lighted a cigar and went back through the crowded streets to his office
+to do the thing he had determined on.
+
+At the meeting that afternoon the project went through without a
+dissenting voice. Colonel Tom being absent, the two employ� directors
+voted with Sam with almost panicky haste as Sam looking across at the
+well-dressed, cool-headed Webster, laughed and lighted a fresh cigar.
+And then he voted the stock Sue had intrusted to him for the project,
+feeling that in doing so he was cutting, perhaps for all time, the knot
+that bound them.
+
+With the completion of the deal Sam stood to win five million dollars,
+more money than Colonel Tom or any of the Raineys had ever controlled,
+and had placed himself in the eyes of the business men of Chicago and
+New York where before he had placed himself in the eyes of Caxton and
+South Water Street. Instead of another Windy McPherson failing to blow
+his bugle before the waiting crowd, he was still the man who made good,
+the man who achieved, the kind of man of whom America boasts before the
+world.
+
+He did not see Sue again. When the news of his betrayal reached her she
+went off east taking Colonel Tom with her, and Sam closed the house,
+even sending a man there for his clothes. To her eastern address, got
+from her attorney, he wrote a brief note offering to make over to her or
+to Colonel Tom his entire winnings from the deal and closed it with the
+brutal declaration, "At the end I could not be an ass, even for you."
+
+To this note Sam got a cold, brief reply telling him to dispose of her
+stock in the company and of that belonging to Colonel Tom, and naming an
+eastern trust company to receive the money. With Colonel Tom's help she
+had made a careful estimate of the values of their holdings at the
+time of consolidation and refused flatly to accept a penny beyond that
+amount.
+
+Sam felt that another chapter of his life was closed. Webster, Edwards,
+Prince, and the eastern men met and elected him chairman of the board of
+directors of the new company and the public bought eagerly the river
+of common stock he turned upon the market, Prince and Morrison doing
+masterful work in the moulding of public opinion through the press. The
+first board meeting ended with a dinner at which wine flowed in rivulets
+and Edwards, getting drunk, stood up at his place and boasted of the
+beauty of his young wife. And Sam, at his desk in his new offices in the
+Rookery, settled down grimly to the playing of his role as one of the
+new kings of American business.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The story of Sam's life there in Chicago for the next several years
+ceases to be the story of a man and becomes the story of a type, a
+crowd, a gang. What he and the group of men surrounding him and making
+money with him did in Chicago, other men and other groups of men have
+done in New York, in Paris, in London. Coming into power with the
+great expansive wave of prosperity that attended the first McKinley
+administration, these men went mad of money making. They played
+with great industrial institutions and railroad systems like excited
+children, and a man of Chicago won the notice and something of the
+admiration of the world by his willingness to bet a million dollars on
+the turn of the weather. In the years of criticism and readjustment that
+followed this period of sporadic growth, writers have told with great
+clearness how the thing was done, and some of the participants, captains
+of industry turned penmen, Caesars become ink-slingers, have bruited the
+story to an admiring world.
+
+Given the time, the inclination, the power of the press, and the
+unscrupulousness, the thing that Sam McPherson and his followers did in
+Chicago in not difficult. Advised by Webster and the talented Prince
+and Morrison to handle his publicity work, he rapidly unloaded his huge
+holdings of common stock upon an eager public, keeping for himself the
+bonds which he hypothecated at the banks to increase his working capital
+while continuing to control the company. When the common stock was
+unloaded, he, with a group of fellow spirits, began an attack upon it
+through the stock market and in the press, and bought it again at a
+low figure, holding it ready to unload when the public should have
+forgotten.
+
+The annual advertising expenditure of the firearms trust ran into
+millions and Sam's hold upon the press of the country was almost
+unbelievably strong. Morrison rapidly developed unusual daring and
+audacity in using this instrument and making it serve Sam's ends. He
+suppressed facts, created illusions, and used the newspapers as a whip
+to crack at the heels of congressmen, senators, and legislators, of the
+various states, when such matters as appropriation for firearms came
+before them.
+
+And Sam, who had undertaken the consolidation of the firearms companies,
+having a dream of himself as a great master in that field, a sort of
+American Krupp, rapidly awoke from the dream to take the bigger chances
+for gain in the world of speculation. Within a year he dropped Edwards
+as head of the firearms trust and in his place put Lewis, with Morrison
+as secretary and manager of sales. Guided by Sam these two, like the
+little drygoods merchant of the old Rainey Company, went from capital
+to capital and from city to city making contracts, influencing news,
+placing advertising contracts where they would do the most good, fixing
+men.
+
+And in the meantime Sam, with Webster, a banker named Crofts who had
+profited largely in the firearms merger, and sometimes Morrison or
+Prince, began a series of stock raids, speculations, and manipulations
+that attracted country-wide attention, and became known to the newspaper
+reading world as the McPherson Chicago crowd. They were in oil,
+railroads, coal, western land, mining, timber, and street railways. One
+summer Sam, with Prince, built, ran to a profit, and sold to advantage
+a huge amusement park. Through his head day after day marched columns
+of figures, ideas, schemes, more and more spectacular opportunities
+for gain. Some of the enterprises in which he engaged, while because of
+their size they seemed more dignified, were of reality of a type with
+the game smuggling of his South Water Street days, and in all of his
+operations it was his old instinct for bargains and for the finding of
+buyers together with Webster's ability for carrying through questionable
+deals that made him and his followers almost constantly successful in
+the face of opposition from the more conservative business and financial
+men of the city.
+
+Again Sam led a new life, owning running horses at the tracks,
+memberships in many clubs, a country house in Wisconsin, and shooting
+preserves in Texas. He drank steadily, played poker for big stakes, kept
+in the public prints, and day after day led his crew upon the high seas
+of finance. He did not dare think and in his heart he was sick of it.
+Sick to the soul, so that when thought came to him he got out of his bed
+to seek roistering companions or, getting pen and paper, sat for hours
+figuring out new and more daring schemes for money making. The great
+forward movement in modern industry of which he had dreamed of being a
+part had for him turned out to be a huge meaningless gamble with loaded
+dice against a credulous public. With his followers he went on day after
+day doing deeds without thought. Industries were organised and launched,
+men employed and thrown out of employment, towns wrecked by the
+destruction of an industry and other towns made by the building of other
+industries. At a whim of his a thousand men began building a city on an
+Indiana sand hill, and at a wave of his hand another thousand men of an
+Indiana town sold their homes, with the chicken houses in the back-yards
+and vines trained by the kitchen doors, and rushed to buy sections
+of the hill plotted off for them. He did not stop to discuss with his
+followers the meaning of the things he did. He told them of the profits
+to be made and then, having done the thing, he went with them to drink
+in bar rooms and to spend the evening or afternoon singing songs,
+visiting his stable of runners or, more often, sitting silently about
+the card table playing for high stakes. Making millions through the
+manipulation of the public during the day, he sometimes sat half the
+night struggling with his companions for the possession of thousands.
+
+Lewis, the Jew, the only one of Sam's companions who had not followed
+him in his spectacular money making, stayed in the office of the
+firearms company and ran it like the scientific able man of business he
+was. While Sam remained chairman of the board of the company and had an
+office, a desk, and the name of leadership there, he let Lewis run the
+place, and spent his own time upon the stock exchange or in some corner
+with Webster and Crofts planning some new money making raid.
+
+"You have the better of it, Lewis," he said one day in a reflective
+mood; "you thought I had cut the ground from under you when I got Tom
+Edwards, but I only set you more firmly in a larger place."
+
+He made a movement with his hand toward the large general offices with
+the rows of busy clerks and the substantial look of work being done.
+
+"I might have had the work you are doing. I planned and schemed with
+that end in view," he added, lighting a cigar and going out at the door.
+
+"And the money hunger got you," laughed Lewis, looking after him, "the
+hunger that gets Jews and Gentiles and all who feed it."
+
+One might have come upon the McPherson Chicago crowd about the old
+Chicago stock exchange on any day during those years, Crofts, tall,
+abrupt, and dogmatic; Morrison, slender, dandified, and gracious;
+Webster, well-dressed, suave, gentlemanly, and Sam, silent, restless,
+and often morose and ugly. Sometimes it seemed to Sam that they were
+all unreal, himself and the men with him. He watched his companions
+cunningly. They were constantly posing before the passing crowd of
+brokers and small speculators. Webster, coming up to him on the floor of
+the exchange, would tell him of a snowstorm raging outside with the air
+of a man parting with a long-cherished secret. His companions went from
+one to the other vowing eternal friendships, and then, keeping spies
+upon each other, they hurried to Sam with tales of secret betrayals.
+Into any deal proposed by him they went eagerly, although sometimes
+fearfully, and almost always they won. And with Sam they made millions
+through the manipulation of the firearms company, and the Chicago and
+Northern Lake Railroad which he controlled.
+
+In later years Sam looked back upon it all as a kind of nightmare. It
+seemed to him that never during that period had he lived or thought
+sanely. The great financial leaders that he saw were not, he thought,
+great men. Some of them, like Webster, were masters of craft, or, like
+Morrison, of words, but for the most part they were but shrewd, greedy
+vultures feeding upon the public or upon each other.
+
+In the meantime Sam was rapidly degenerating. His paunch became
+distended, and his hands trembled in the morning. Being a man of
+strong appetites, and having a determination to avoid women, he almost
+constantly overdrank and overate, and in the leisure hours that came to
+him he hurried eagerly from place to place, avoiding thought, avoiding
+sane quiet talk, avoiding himself.
+
+All of his companions did not suffer equally. Webster seemed made for
+the life, thriving and expanding under it, putting his winnings steadily
+aside, going on Sunday to a suburban church, avoiding the publicity
+connecting his name with race horses and big sporting events that Crofts
+sought and to which Sam submitted. One day Sam and Crofts caught him in
+an effort to sell them out to a group of New York bankers in a mining
+deal and turned the trick on him instead, whereupon he went off to New
+York to become a respectable big business man and the friend of senators
+and philanthropists.
+
+Crofts was a man with chronic domestic troubles, one of those men who
+begin each day by cursing their wives before their associates and yet
+continue living with them year after year. There was a kind of rough
+squareness in the man, and after the completion of a successful deal
+he would be as happy as a boy, pounding men on the back, shaking with
+laughter, throwing money about, making crude jokes. After Sam left
+Chicago he finally divorced his wife and married an actress from the
+vaudeville stage and after losing two-thirds of his fortune in an effort
+to capture control of a southern railroad, went to England and, coached
+by the actress wife, developed into an English country gentleman.
+
+And Sam was a man sick. Day after day he went on drinking more and more
+heavily, playing for bigger and bigger stakes, allowing himself less
+and less thought of himself. One day he received a long letter from John
+Telfer telling of the sudden death of Mary Underwood and berating him
+for his neglect of her.
+
+"She was ill for a year and without an income," wrote Telfer. Sam
+noticed that the man's hand had begun to tremble. "She lied to me and
+told me you had sent her money, but now that she is dead I find that
+though she wrote you she got no answer. Her old aunt told me."
+
+Sam put the letter into his pocket and going into one of his clubs began
+drinking with a crowd of men he found idling there. He had paid little
+attention to his correspondence for months. No doubt the letter from
+Mary had been received by his secretary and thrown aside with the
+letters of thousands of other women, begging letters, amorous letters,
+letters directed at him because of his wealth and the prominence given
+his exploits by the newspapers.
+
+After wiring an explanation and mailing a check the size of which filled
+John Telfer with admiration, Sam with a half dozen fellow roisterers
+spent the late afternoon and evening going from saloon to saloon through
+the south side. When he got to his apartments late that night, his head
+was reeling and his mind filled with distorted memories of drinking men
+and women and of himself standing on a table in some obscure drinking
+place and calling upon the shouting, laughing hangers-on of his crowd of
+rich money spenders to think and to work and to seek Truth.
+
+He went to sleep in his chair, his mind filled with the dancing faces of
+dead women, Mary Underwood and Janet and Sue, tear-stained faces calling
+to him. When he awoke and shaved he went out into the street and to
+another down-town club.
+
+"I wonder if Sue is dead, too," he muttered, remembering his dream.
+
+At the club he was called to the telephone by Lewis, who asked him to
+come at once to his office at the Edwards Consolidated. When he
+got there he found a wire from Sue. In a moment of loneliness and
+despondency over the loss of his old business standing and reputation,
+Colonel Tom had shot himself in a New York hotel.
+
+Sam sat at his desk, fingering the yellow paper lying before him and
+fighting to get his head clear.
+
+"The old coward. The damned old coward," he muttered; "any one could
+have done that."
+
+When Lewis came into Sam's office he found his chief sitting at his desk
+fingering the telegram and muttering to himself. When Sam handed him the
+wire he came around and stood beside Sam, his hand upon his shoulder.
+
+"Well, do not blame yourself for that," he said, with quick
+understanding.
+
+"I don't," Sam muttered; "I do not blame myself for anything. I am a
+result, not a cause. I am trying to think. I am not through yet. I am
+going to begin again when I get things thought out."
+
+Lewis went out of the room leaving him to his thoughts. For an hour
+he sat there reviewing his life. When he came to the day that he had
+humiliated Colonel Tom, there came back to his mind the sentence he had
+written on the sheet of paper while the vote was being counted. "The
+best men spend their lives seeking truth."
+
+Suddenly he came to a decision and, calling Lewis, began laying out a
+plan of action. His head cleared and the ring came back into his
+voice. To Lewis he gave an option on his entire holdings of Edwards
+Consolidated stocks and bonds and to him also he entrusted the clearing
+up of deal after deal in which he was interested. Then, calling a
+broker, he began throwing a mass of stock on the market. When Lewis told
+him that Crofts was 'phoning wildly about town to find him, and was with
+the help of another banker supporting the market and taking Sam's stocks
+as fast as offered, he laughed and giving Lewis instructions regarding
+the disposal of his monies walked out of the office, again a free man
+and again seeking the answer to his problem.
+
+He made no attempt to answer Sue's wire. He was restless to get at
+something he had in his mind. He went to his apartments and packed a bag
+and from there disappeared saying goodbye to no one. In his mind was no
+definite idea of where he was going or what he was going to do. He knew
+only that he would follow the message his hand had written. He would try
+to spend his life seeking truth.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+One day when the youth Sam McPherson was new in the city he went on a
+Sunday afternoon to a down-town theatre to hear a sermon. The sermon was
+delivered by a small dark-skinned Boston man, and seemed to the young
+McPherson scholarly and well thought out.
+
+"The greatest man is he whose deeds affect the greatest number of
+lives," the speaker had said, and the thought had stuck in Sam's mind.
+Now walking along the street carrying his travelling bag, he remembered
+the sermon and the thought and shook his head in doubt.
+
+"What I have done here in this city must have affected thousands of
+lives," he mused, and felt a quickening of his blood at just letting go
+of his thoughts as he had not dared do since that day when, by breaking
+his word to Sue, he had started on his career as a business giant.
+
+He began to think of the quest on which he had started and had keen
+satisfaction in the thought of what he should do.
+
+"I will begin all over and come up to Truth through work," he told
+himself. "I will leave the money hunger behind me, and if it returns I
+will come back here to Chicago and see my fortune piled up and the men
+rushing about the banks and the stock exchange and the court they pay to
+such fools and brutes as I have been, and that will cure me."
+
+Into the Illinois Central Station he went, a strange spectacle. A
+smile came to his lips as he sat on a bench along the wall between an
+immigrant from Russia and a small plump farmer's wife who held a banana
+in her hand and gave bites of it to a rosy-cheeked babe lying in her
+arms. He, an American multimillionaire, a man in the midst of his
+money-making, one who had realised the American dream, to have sickened
+at the feast and to have wandered out of a fashionable club with a bag
+in his hand and a roll of bills in his pocket and to have come on this
+strange quest--to seek Truth, to seek God. A few years of the fast
+greedy living in the city, that had seemed so splendid to the Iowa boy
+and to the men and women who had lived in his town, and then a woman had
+died lonely and in want in that Iowa town, and half across the continent
+a fat blustering old man had shot himself in a New York hotel, and here
+he sat.
+
+Leaving his bag in the care of the farmer's wife, he walked across the
+room to the ticket window and standing there watched the people with
+definite destinations in mind come up, lay down money, and taking their
+tickets go briskly away. He had no fear of being known. Although his
+name and his picture had been upon the front pages of Chicago newspapers
+for years, he felt so great a change within himself from just the
+resolution he had taken that he had no doubt of passing unnoticed.
+
+A thought struck him. Looking up and down the long room filled with
+its strangely assorted clusters of men and women a sense of the great
+toiling masses of people, the labourers, the small merchants, the
+skilled mechanics, came over him.
+
+"These are the Americans," he began telling himself, "these people with
+children beside them and with hard daily work to be done, and many
+of them with stunted or imperfectly developed bodies, not Crofts, not
+Morrison and I, but these others who toil without hope of luxury and
+wealth, who make up the armies in times of war and raise up boys and
+girls to do the work of the world in their turn."
+
+He fell into the line moving toward the ticket window behind a
+sturdy-looking old man who carried a box of carpenter tools in one hand
+and a bag in the other, and bought a ticket to the same Illinois town to
+which the old man was bound.
+
+In the train he sat beside the old man and the two fell into quiet
+talk--the old man talking of his family. He had a son, married and
+living in the Illinois town to which he was going, of whom he began
+boasting. The son, he said, had gone to that town and had prospered
+there, owning a hotel which his wife managed while he worked as a
+builder.
+
+"Ed," he said, "keeps fifty or sixty men going all summer. He has sent
+for me to come and take charge of a gang. He knows well enough I will
+get the work out of them."
+
+From Ed the old man drifted into talk of himself and his life, telling
+bare facts with directness and simplicity and making no effort to
+disguise a slight turn of vanity in his success.
+
+"I have raised seven sons and made them all good workmen and they are
+all doing well," he said.
+
+He told of each in detail. One, who had taken to books, was a mechanical
+engineer in a manufacturing town in New England. The mother of his
+children had died the year before and of his three daughters two had
+married mechanics. The third, Sam gathered, had not done well and from
+something the old man said he thought she had perhaps gone the wrong way
+there in Chicago.
+
+To the old man Sam talked of God and of a man's effort to get truth out
+of life.
+
+"I have thought of it a lot," he said.
+
+The old man was interested. He looked at Sam and then out at the car
+window and began talking of his own beliefs, the substance of which Sam
+could not get.
+
+"God is a spirit and lives in the growing corn," said the old man,
+pointing out the window at the passing fields.
+
+He began talking of churches and of ministers, against whom he was
+filled with bitterness.
+
+"They are dodgers. They do not get at things. They are damned dodgers,
+pretending to be good," he declared.
+
+Sam talked of himself, saying that he was alone in the world and had
+money. He said that he wanted work in the open air, not for the money it
+would bring him, but because his paunch was large and his hand trembled
+in the morning.
+
+"I've been drinking," he said, "and I want to work hard day after day so
+that my muscles may become firm and sleep come to me at night."
+
+The old man thought that his son could find Sam a place.
+
+"He's a driver--Ed is," he said, laughing, "and he won't pay you much.
+Ed don't let go of money. He's a tight one."
+
+Night had come when they reached the town where Ed lived, and the three
+men walked over a bridge, beneath which roared a waterfall, toward the
+long poorly-lighted main street of the town and Ed's hotel. Ed, a young,
+broad-shouldered man, with a dry cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth,
+led the way. He had engaged Sam standing in the darkness on the station
+platform, accepting his story without comment.
+
+"I'll let you carry timbers and drive nails," he said, "that will harden
+you up."
+
+On the way over the bridge he talked of the town.
+
+"It's a live place," he said, "we are getting people in here."
+
+"Look at that!" he exclaimed, chewing at the cigar and pointing to the
+waterfall that foamed and roared almost under the bridge. "There's a lot
+of power there and where there's power there will be a city."
+
+At Ed's hotel some twenty men sat about a long low office. They were,
+for the most part, middle-aged working men and sat in silence reading
+and smoking pipes. At a table pushed against the wall a bald-headed
+young man with a scar on his cheek played solitaire with a greasy pack
+of cards, and in front of him and sitting in a chair tilted against the
+wall a sullen-faced boy idly watched the game. When the three men came
+into the office the boy dropped his chair to the floor and stared at Ed
+who stared back at him. It was as though a contest of some sort went on
+between them. A tall neatly-dressed woman, with a brisk manner and pale,
+inexpressive, hard blue eyes, stood back of a little combined desk and
+cigar case at the end of the room, and as the three walked toward her
+she looked from Ed to the sullen-faced boy and then again at Ed. Sam
+concluded she was a woman bent on having her own way. She had that air.
+
+"This is my wife," said Ed, introducing Sam with a wave of his hand and
+passing around the end of the desk to stand by her side.
+
+Ed's wife twirled the hotel register about facing Sam, nodded her head,
+and then, leaning over the desk, bestowed a quick kiss upon the leathery
+cheek of the old carpenter.
+
+Sam and the old man found a place in chairs along the wall and sat down
+among the silent men. The old man pointed to the boy in the chair beside
+the card players.
+
+"Their son," he whispered cautiously.
+
+The boy looked at his mother, who in turn looked steadily at him, and
+got up from his chair. Back of the desk Ed talked in low tones to his
+wife. The boy, stopping before Sam and the old man and still looking
+toward the woman, put out his hand which the old man took. Then, without
+speaking, he went past the desk and through a doorway, and began noisily
+climbing a flight of stairs, followed by his mother. As they climbed
+they berated each other, their voices rising to a high pitch and echoing
+through the upper part of the house.
+
+Ed, coming across to them, talked to Sam about the assignment of a room,
+and the men began looking at the stranger; noting his fine clothes,
+their eyes filled with curiosity.
+
+"Selling something?" asked a large red-haired young man, rolling a quid
+of tobacco in his mouth.
+
+"No," replied Sam shortly, "going to work for Ed."
+
+The silent men in chairs along the wall dropped their newspapers and
+stared, and the bald-headed young man at the table sat with open mouth,
+a card held suspended in the air. Sam had become, for the moment, a
+centre of interest and the men stirred in their chairs and began to
+whisper and point to him.
+
+A large, watery-eyed man, with florid cheeks, clad in a long overcoat
+with spots down the front, came in at the door and passed through the
+room bowing and smiling to the men. Taking Ed by the arm he disappeared
+into a little barroom, where Sam could hear him talking in low tones.
+
+After a little while the florid-faced man came and put his head through
+the barroom door into the office.
+
+"Come on, boys," he said, smiling and nodding right and left, "the
+drinks are on me."
+
+The men got up and filed into the bar, the old man and Sam remaining
+seated in their chairs. They began talking in undertones.
+
+"I'll start 'em thinking--these men," said the old man.
+
+From his pocket he took a pamphlet and gave it to Sam. It was a crudely
+written attack upon rich men and corporations.
+
+"Some brains in the fellow who wrote that," said the old carpenter,
+rubbing his hands together and smiling.
+
+Sam did not think so. He sat reading it and listening to the loud,
+boisterous voices of the men in the barroom. The florid-faced man was
+explaining the details of a proposed town bond issue. Sam gathered that
+the water power in the river was to be developed.
+
+"We want to make this a live town," said the voice of Ed, earnestly.
+
+The old man, leaning over and putting his hand beside his mouth, began
+whispering to Sam.
+
+"I'll bet there is a capitalist deal back of that power scheme," he
+said.
+
+He nodded his head up and down and smiled knowingly.
+
+"If there is Ed will be in on it," he added. "You can't lose Ed. He's a
+slick one."
+
+He took the pamphlet from Sam's hand and put it in his pocket.
+
+"I'm a socialist," he explained, "but don't say anything. Ed's against
+'em."
+
+The men filed back into the room, each with a freshly-lighted cigar in
+his mouth, and the florid-faced man followed them and went out at the
+office door.
+
+"Well, so long, boys," he shouted heartily.
+
+Ed went silently up the stairs to join the mother and boy, whose voices
+could still be heard raised in outbursts of wrath from above as the men
+took their former chairs along the wall.
+
+"Well, Bill's sure all right," said the red-haired young man, evidently
+expressing the opinion of the men in regard to the florid-faced man.
+
+A small bent old man with sunken cheeks got up and walking across the
+room leaned against the cigar case.
+
+"Did you ever hear this one?" he asked, looking about.
+
+Obviously no answer could be given and the bent old man launched into
+a vile pointless anecdote of a woman, a miner, and a mule, the crowd
+giving close attention and laughing uproariously when he had finished.
+The socialist rubbed his hands together and joined in the applause.
+
+"That was a good one, eh?" he commented, turning to Sam.
+
+Sam, picking up his bag, climbed the stairway as the red-haired young
+man launched into another tale, slightly less vile. In his room to which
+Ed, meeting him at the top of the stairs, led him, still chewing at the
+unlighted cigar, he turned out the light and sat on the edge of the bed.
+He was as homesick as a boy.
+
+"Truth," he muttered, looking through the window to the dimly-lighted
+street. "Do these men seek truth?"
+
+The next day he went to work, wearing a suit of clothes bought from
+Ed. He worked with Ed's father, carrying timbers and driving nails as
+directed by him. In the gang with him were four men, boarders at Ed's
+hotel, and four other men who lived in the town with their families. At
+the noon hour he asked the old carpenter how the men from the hotel, who
+did not live in the town, could vote on the question of the power bonds.
+The old man grinned and rubbed his hands together.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "I suppose Ed tends to that. He's a slick one,
+Ed is."
+
+At work, the men who had been so silent in the office of the hotel were
+alert and wonderfully busy, hurrying here and there at a word from the
+old man and sawing and nailing furiously. They seemed bent upon outdoing
+each other and when one fell behind they laughed and shouted at him,
+asking him if he had decided to quit for the day. But though they seemed
+determined to outdo him the old man kept ahead of them all, his hammer
+beating a rattling tattoo upon the boards all day. At the noon hour he
+had given each of the men one of the pamphlets from his pocket and on
+the way back to his hotel in the evening he told Sam that the others had
+tried to show him up.
+
+"They wanted to see if I had juice in me," he explained, strutting
+beside Sam with an amusing little swagger of his shoulders.
+
+Sam was sick with fatigue. His hands were blistered, his legs felt weak,
+and a terrible thirst burned in his throat. All day he had gone grimly
+ahead, thankful for every physical discomfort, every throb of his
+strained, tired muscles. In his weariness and in his efforts to keep
+pace with the others he had forgotten Colonel Tom and Mary Underwood.
+
+All during that month and into the next Sam stayed with the old man's
+gang. He ceased thinking, and only worked desperately. An odd feeling
+of loyalty and devotion to the old man came over him and he felt that he
+too must prove that he had the juice in him. At the hotel he went to bed
+immediately after the silent dinner, slept, awoke aching, and went to
+work again.
+
+One Sunday one of the men of his gang came to Sam's room and invited him
+to go with a party of the workers into the country. They went in boats,
+carrying with them kegs of beer, to a deep ravine clothed on both sides
+by heavy woods. In the boat with Sam sat the red-haired young man, who
+was called Jake and who talked loudly of the time they would have in the
+woods, and boasted that he was the instigator of the trip.
+
+"I thought of it," he said over and over again.
+
+Sam wondered why he had been invited. It was a soft October day and
+in the ravine he sat looking at the trees splashed with colour and
+breathing deeply of the air, his whole body relaxed, grateful for the
+day of rest. Jake came and sat beside him.
+
+"What are you?" he asked bluntly. "We know you are no working man."
+
+Sam told him a half-truth.
+
+"You are right enough about that; I have money enough not to have to
+work. I used to be a business man. I sold guns. But I have a disease and
+the doctors have told me that if I do not work out of doors part of me
+will die."
+
+The man from his own gang who had invited him on the trip came up to
+them, bringing Sam a foaming glass of beer. He shook his head.
+
+"The doctor says it will not do," he explained to the two men.
+
+The red-haired man called Jake began talking.
+
+"We are going to have a fight with Ed," he said. "That's what we came up
+here to talk about. We want to know where you stand. We are going to see
+if we can't make him pay as well for the work here as men are paid for
+the same work in Chicago."
+
+Sam lay back upon the grass.
+
+"All right," he said. "Go ahead. If I can help I will. I'm not so fond
+of Ed."
+
+The men began talking among themselves. Jake, standing among them, read
+aloud a list of names among which was the name Sam had written on the
+register at Ed's hotel.
+
+"It's a list of the names of men we think will stick together and vote
+together on the bond issue," he explained, turning to Sam. "Ed's in that
+and we want to use our votes to scare him into giving us what we want.
+Will you stay with us? You look like a fighter."
+
+Sam nodded and getting up joined the men about the beer kegs. They began
+talking of Ed and of the money he had made in the town.
+
+"He's done a lot of town work here and there's been graft in all of
+it," explained Jake emphatically. "It's time he was being made to do the
+right thing."
+
+While they talked Sam sat watching the men's faces. They did not seem
+vile to him now as they had seemed that first evening in the hotel
+office. He began thinking of them silently and alertly at work all day
+long, surrounded by such influences as Ed and Bill, and the thought
+sweetened his opinion of them.
+
+"Look here," he said, "tell me of this matter. I was a business man
+before I came here and I may be able to help you fellows get what you
+want."
+
+Getting up, Jake took Sam's arm and they walked down the ravine, Jake
+explaining the situation in the town.
+
+"The game," he said, "is to make the taxpayers pay for a millrace to be
+built for the development of the water power in the river and then, by a
+trick, to turn it over to a private company. Bill and Ed are both in the
+deal and they are working for a Chicago man named Crofts. He's been up
+here at the hotel with Bill talking to Ed. I've figured out what they
+are up to." Sam sat down upon a log and laughed heartily.
+
+"Crofts, eh?" he exclaimed. "Say, we will fight this thing. If Crofts
+has been up here you can depend upon it there is some size to the deal.
+We will just smash the whole crooked gang for the good of the town."
+
+"How would you do that?" asked Jake.
+
+Sam sat down on a log and looked at the river flowing past the mouth of
+the ravine.
+
+"Just fight," he said. "Let me show you something."
+
+He took a pencil and slip of paper from his pocket, and, with the
+voices of the men about the beer kegs in his ears and the red-haired man
+peering over his shoulder, began writing his first political pamphlet.
+He wrote and erased and changed words and phrases. The pamphlet was a
+statement of facts as to the value of water power, and was addressed to
+the taxpayers of the community. He warmed to the subject, saying that a
+fortune lay sleeping in the river, and that the town, by the exercise of
+a little discretion now, could build with that fortune a beautiful city
+belonging to the people.
+
+"This fortune in the river rightly managed will pay the expenses of
+government and give you control of a great source of revenue forever,"
+he wrote. "Build your millrace, but look out for a trick of the
+politicians. They are trying to steal it. Reject the offer of the
+Chicago banker named Crofts. Demand an investigation. A capitalist has
+been found who will take the water power bonds at four per cent and back
+the people in this fight for a free American city." Across the head
+of the pamphlet Sam wrote the caption, "A River Paved With Gold," and
+handed it to Jake, who read it and whistled softly.
+
+"Good!" he said. "I will take this and have it printed. It will make
+Bill and Ed sit up."
+
+Sam took a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to the man.
+
+"To pay for the printing," he said. "And when we have them licked I am
+the man who will take the four per cent bonds."
+
+Jake scratched his head. "How much do you suppose the deal is worth to
+Crofts?"
+
+"A million, or he would not bother," Sam answered.
+
+Jake folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
+
+"This would make Bill and Ed squirm, eh?" he laughed.
+
+Going home down the river the men, filled with beer, sang and shouted
+as the boats, guided by Sam and Jake, floated along. The night fell
+warm and still and Sam thought he had never seen the sky so filled
+with stars. His brain was busy with the idea of doing something for the
+people.
+
+"Perhaps here in this town I shall make a start toward what I am after,"
+he thought, his heart filled with happiness and the songs of the tipsy
+workmen ringing in his ears.
+
+All through the next few weeks there was an air of something astir among
+the men of Sam's gang and about Ed's hotel. During the evening Jake
+went among the men talking in low tones, and once he took a three days'
+vacation, telling Ed that he did not feel well and spending the time
+among the men employed in the plough works up the river. From time to
+time he came to Sam for money.
+
+"For the campaign," he said, winking and hurrying away.
+
+Suddenly a speaker appeared and began talking nightly from a box before
+a drug store on Main Street, and after dinner the office of Ed's hotel
+was deserted. The man on the box had a blackboard hung on a pole, on
+which he drew figures estimating the value of the power in the river,
+and as he talked he grew more and more excited, waving his arms and
+inveighing against certain leasing clauses in the bond proposal. He
+declared himself a follower of Karl Marx and delighted the old carpenter
+who danced up and down in the road and rubbed his hands.
+
+"It will come to something--this will--you'll see," he declared to Sam.
+
+One day Ed appeared, riding in a buggy, at the job where Sam worked,
+and called the old man into the road. He sat pounding one hand upon the
+other and talking in a low voice. Sam thought the old man had perhaps
+been indiscreet in the distribution of the socialistic pamphlets. He
+seemed nervous, dancing up and down beside the buggy and shaking his
+head. Then hurrying back to where the men worked he pointed over his
+shoulder with his thumb.
+
+"Ed wants you," he said, and Sam noticed that his voice trembled and his
+hand shook.
+
+In the buggy Ed and Sam rode in silence. Again Ed chewed at an unlighted
+cigar.
+
+"I want to talk with you," he had said as Sam climbed into the buggy.
+
+At the hotel the two men got out of the buggy and went into the office.
+Inside the door Ed, who came behind, sprang forward and pinioned Sam's
+arms with his own. He was as powerful as a bear. His wife, the tall
+woman with the inexpressive eyes, came running into the room, her face
+drawn with hatred. In her hand she carried a broom and with the
+handle of this she struck Sam several swinging blows across the face,
+accompanying each blow with a half scream of rage and a volley of vile
+names. The sullen-faced boy, alive now and with eyes burning with zeal,
+came running down the stairs and pushed the woman aside. He struck Sam
+time after time in the face with his fist, laughing each time as Sam
+winced under the blows.
+
+Sam struggled furiously to escape Ed's powerful grasp. It was the first
+time he had ever been beaten and the first time he had faced hopeless
+defeat. The wrath within him was so intense that the jolting impact
+of the blows seemed a secondary matter to the need of escaping Ed's
+vice-like grasp.
+
+Suddenly Ed turned and, pushing Sam before him, threw him through the
+office door and into the street. In falling his head struck against a
+hitching post and he lay stunned. When he partially recovered from the
+fall Sam got up and walked along the street. His face was swollen and
+bruised and his nose bled. The street was deserted and the assault upon
+him had been unnoticed.
+
+He went to a hotel on Main Street--a more pretentious place than Ed's,
+near the bridge leading to the station--and as he passed in he saw,
+through an open door, Jake, the red-haired man, leaning against the bar
+and talking to Bill, the man with the florid face. Sam, paying for a
+room, went upstairs and to bed.
+
+In the bed, with cold bandages on his bruised face, he tried to get
+the situation in hand. Hatred for Ed ran through his veins. His hands
+clenched, his brain whirled, and the brutal, passionate faces of the
+woman and the boy danced before his eyes.
+
+"I'll fix them, the brutal bullies," he muttered aloud.
+
+And then the thought of his quest came back to his mind and quieted him.
+Through the window came the roar of the waterfall, broken by noises of
+the street. As he fell asleep they mingled with his dreams, sounding
+soft and quiet like the low talk of a family about the fire of an
+evening.
+
+He was awakened by a noise of pounding on his door. At his call the door
+opened and the face of the old carpenter appeared. Sam laughed and sat
+up in bed. Already the cold bandages had soothed the throbbing of his
+bruised face.
+
+"Go away," begged the old man, rubbing his hands together nervously.
+"Get out of town."
+
+He put his hand to his mouth and talked in a hoarse whisper, looking
+back over his shoulder through the open door. Sam, getting out of bed,
+began filling his pipe.
+
+"You can't beat Ed, you fellows," added the old man, backing out at the
+door. "He's a slick one, Ed is. You better get out of town."
+
+Sam called a boy and gave him a note to Ed asking for his clothes and
+for the bag in his room, and to the boy he gave a large bill, asking him
+to pay anything due. When the boy came back bringing the clothes and the
+bag he returned the bill unbroken.
+
+"They're scared about something up there," he said, looking at Sam's
+bruised face.
+
+Sam dressed carefully and went down into the street. He remembered that
+he had never seen a printed copy of the political pamphlet written in
+the ravine and realised that Jake had used it to make money for himself.
+
+"Now I shall try something else," he thought.
+
+It was early evening and crowds of men coming down the railroad track
+from the plough works turned to right and left as they reached Main
+Street. Sam walked among them, climbing a little hilly side street to
+a number he had got from a clerk at the drug store before which the
+socialist had talked. He stopped at a little frame house and a moment
+after knocking was in the presence of the man who had talked night after
+night from the box in the street. Sam had decided to see what could be
+done through him. The socialist was a short, fat man, with curly grey
+hair, shiny round cheeks, and black broken teeth. He sat on the edge of
+his bed and looked as if he had slept in his clothes. A corncob pipe lay
+smoking among the covers of the bed, and during most of the talk he sat
+with one shoe held in his hand as though about to put it on. About the
+room in orderly piles lay stack after stack of paper-covered books. Sam
+sat down in a chair by the window and told his mission.
+
+"It is a big thing, this power steal that is going on here," he
+explained. "I know the man back of it and he would not bother with a
+small affair. I know they are going to make the city build the millrace
+and then steal it. It will be a big thing for your party about here if
+you take hold and stop them. Let me tell you how it can be done."
+
+He explained his plan, and told of Crofts and of his wealth and dogged,
+bullying determination. The socialist seemed beside himself. He pulled
+on the shoe and began running hurriedly about the room.
+
+"The time for the election," Sam went on, "is almost here. I have looked
+into this thing. We must beat this bond issue and then put through a
+square one. There is a train out of Chicago at seven o'clock, a fast
+train. You get fifty speakers out here. I will pay for a special train
+if necessary and I will hire a band and help stir things up. I can give
+you facts enough to shake this town to the bottom. You come with me and
+'phone to Chicago. I will pay everything. I am McPherson, Sam McPherson
+of Chicago."
+
+The socialist ran to a closet and began pulling on his coat. The name
+affected him so that his hand trembled and he could scarcely get his arm
+into the coat sleeve. He began to apologise for the appearance of the
+room and kept looking at Sam with the air of one not able to believe
+what he had heard. As the two men walked out of the house he ran ahead
+holding doors open for Sam's passage.
+
+"And you will help us, Mr. McPherson?" he exclaimed. "You, a man of
+millions, will help us in this fight?"
+
+Sam had a feeling that the man was going to kiss his hand or do
+something equally ridiculous. He had the air of a club door man gone off
+his head.
+
+At the hotel Sam stood in the lobby while the fat man waited in a
+telephone booth.
+
+"I will have to 'phone Chicago, I will simply have to 'phone Chicago. We
+socialists don't do anything like this offhand, Mr. McPherson," he had
+explained as they walked along the street.
+
+When the socialist came out of the booth he stood before Sam shaking his
+head. His whole attitude had changed, and he looked like a man caught
+doing a foolish or absurd thing.
+
+"Nothing doing, nothing doing, Mr. McPherson," he said, starting for the
+hotel door.
+
+At the door he stopped and shook his finger at Sam.
+
+"It won't work," he said, emphatically. "Chicago is too wise."
+
+Sam turned and went back to his room. His name had killed his only
+chance to beat Crofts, Jake, Bill and Ed. In his room he sat looking out
+of the window into the street.
+
+"Where shall I take hold now?" he asked himself.
+
+Turning out the lights he sat listening to the roar of the waterfall and
+thinking of the events of the last week.
+
+"I have had a time," he thought. "I have tried something and even though
+it did not work it has been the best fun I have had for years."
+
+The hours slipped away and night came on. He could hear men shouting and
+laughing in the street, and going downstairs he stood in a hallway at
+the edge of the crowd that gathered about the socialist. The orator
+shouted and waved his hand. He seemed as proud as a young recruit who
+has just passed through his first baptism of fire.
+
+"He tried to make a fool of me--McPherson of Chicago--the
+millionaire--one of the capitalist kings--he tried to bribe me and my
+party."
+
+In the crowd the old carpenter was dancing in the road and rubbing his
+hands together. With the feeling of a man who had finished a piece of
+work or turned the last leaf of a book, Sam went back to his hotel.
+
+"In the morning I shall be on my way," he thought.
+
+A knock came at the door and the red-haired man came in. He closed the
+door softly and winked at Sam.
+
+"Ed made a mistake," he said, and laughed. "The old man told him you
+were a socialist and he thought you were trying to spoil the graft.
+He is scared about that beating you got and mighty sorry. He's all
+right--Ed is--and he and Bill and I have got the votes. What made you
+stay under cover so long? Why didn't you tell us you were McPherson?"
+
+Sam saw the hopelessness of any attempt to explain. Jake had evidently
+sold out the men. Sam wondered how.
+
+"How do you know you can deliver the votes?'" he asked, trying to lead
+Jake on.
+
+Jake rolled the quid in his mouth and winked again.
+
+"It was easy enough to fix the men when Ed, Bill and I got together," he
+said. "You know about the other. There's a clause in the act authorising
+the bond issue, a sleeper, Bill calls it. You know more about that than
+I do. Anyway the power will be turned over to the man we say."
+
+"But how do I know you can deliver the votes?"
+
+Jake threw out his hand impatiently.
+
+"What do they know?" he asked sharply. "What they want is more wages.
+There's a million in the power deal and they can't any more realise a
+million than they can tell what they want to do in Heaven. I promised
+Ed's fellows the city scale. Ed can't kick. He'll make a hundred
+thousand as it stands. Then I promised the plough works gang a ten per
+cent raise. We'll get it for them if we can, but if we can't, they won't
+know it till the deal is put through."
+
+Sam walked over and held open the door.
+
+"Good night," he said.
+
+Jake looked annoyed.
+
+"Ain't you even going to make a bid against Crofts?" he asked. "We ain't
+tied to him if you do better by us. I'm in this thing because you put me
+in. That piece you wrote up the river scared 'em stiff. I want to do
+the right thing by you. Don't be sore about Ed. He wouldn't a done it if
+he'd known."
+
+Sam shook his head and stood with his hand still on the door.
+
+"Good night," he said again. "I am not in it. I have dropped it. No use
+trying to explain."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+For weeks and months Sam led a wandering vagabond life, and surely a
+stranger or more restless vagabond never went upon the road. In his
+pocket he had at almost any time from one to five thousand dollars, his
+bag went on from place to place ahead of him, and now and then he caught
+up with it, unpacked it, and wore a suit of his former Chicago clothes
+upon the streets of some town. For the most part, however, he wore the
+rough clothes bought from Ed, and, when these were gone, others like
+them, with a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a pair of
+heavy boots lacing half way up the legs. Among the people, he passed for
+a rather well-set-up workman with money in his pocket going his own way.
+
+During all those months of wandering, and even when he had returned to
+something nearer his former way of life, his mind was unsettled and his
+outlook on life disturbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that he, among
+all men, was a unique, an innovation. Day after day his mind ground away
+upon his problem and he was determined to seek and to keep on seeking
+until he found for himself a way of peace. In the towns and in the
+country through which he passed he saw the clerks in the stores,
+the merchants with worried faces hurrying into banks, the farmers,
+brutalised by toil, dragging their weary bodies homeward at the coming
+of night, and told himself that all life was abortive, that on all sides
+of him it wore itself out in little futile efforts or ran away in side
+currents, that nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward giving
+point to the tremendous sacrifice involved in just living and working in
+the world. He thought of Christ going about seeing the world and talking
+to men, and thought that he too would go and talk to them, not as a
+teacher, but as one seeking eagerly to be taught. At times he was filled
+with longing and inexpressible hopes and, like the boy of Caxton, would
+get out of bed, not now to stand in Miller's pasture watching the rain
+on the surface of the water, but to walk endless miles through the
+darkness getting the blessed relief of fatigue into his body and often
+paying for and occupying two beds in one night.
+
+Sam wanted to go back to Sue; he wanted peace and something like
+happiness, but most of all he wanted work, real work, work that would
+demand of him day after day the best and finest in him so that he would
+be held to the need of renewing constantly the better impulses of his
+mind. He was at the top of his life, and the few weeks of hard physical
+exertion as a driver of nails and a bearer of timbers had begun to
+restore his body to shapeliness and strength, so that he was filled anew
+with all of his native restlessness and energy; but he was determined
+that he would not again pour himself out in work that would react upon
+him as had his money making, his dream of beautiful children, and this
+last half-formed dream of a kind of financial fatherhood to the Illinois
+town.
+
+The incident with Ed and the red-haired man had been his first serious
+effort at anything like social service achieved through controlling or
+attempting to influence the public mind, for his was the type of mind
+that runs to the concrete, the actual. As he sat in the ravine talking
+to Jake, and, later, coming home in the boat under the multitude of
+stars, he had looked up from among the drunken workmen and his mind had
+seen a city built for a people, a city independent, beautiful, strong,
+and free, but a glimpse of a red head through a barroom door and a
+socialist trembling before a name had dispelled the vision. After his
+return from hearing the socialist, who in his turn was hedged about by
+complicated influences, and in those November days when he walked south
+through Illinois, seeing the late glory of the trees and breathing the
+fine air, he laughed at himself for having had the vision. It was not
+that the red-haired man had sold him out, it was not the beating given
+him by Ed's sullen-faced son or the blows across the face at the hands
+of his vigorous wife--it was just that at bottom he did not believe the
+people wanted reform; they wanted a ten per cent raise in wages. The
+public mind was a thing too big, too complicated and inert for a vision
+or an ideal to get at and move deeply.
+
+And then, walking on the road and struggling to find truth even within
+himself, Sam had to come to something else. At bottom he was no leader,
+no reformer. He had not wanted the free city for a free people, but as a
+work to be done by his own hand. He was McPherson, the money maker, the
+man who loved himself. The fact, not the sight of Jake hobnobbing with
+Bill or the timidity of the socialist, had blocked his way to work as a
+political reformer and builder.
+
+Tramping south between the rows of shocked corn he laughed at himself.
+"The experience with Ed and Jake has done something for me," he thought.
+"They bullied me. I have been a kind of bully myself and what has
+happened has been good medicine for me."
+
+Sam walked the roads of Illinois, Ohio, New York, and other states,
+through hill country and flat country, in the snow drifts of winter and
+through the storms of spring, talking to people, asking their way of
+life and the end toward which they worked. At night he dreamed of Sue,
+of his boyhood struggles in Caxton, of Janet Eberly sitting in her chair
+and talking of writers of books, or, visualising the stock exchange or
+some garish drinking place, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster,
+Morrison, and Prince intent and eager as he laid before them some scheme
+of money making. Sometimes at night he awoke, seized with horror, seeing
+Colonel Tom with the revolver pressed against his head; and sitting in
+his bed, and all through the next day he talked aloud to himself.
+
+"The damned old coward," he shouted into the darkness of his room or
+into the wide peaceful prospect of the countryside.
+
+The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible.
+It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing
+to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent,
+so completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose.
+
+"And yet," thought Sam, "he has found strength to whip me, the man of
+ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight
+I put upon the little play world in which he had been king."
+
+In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed
+beard sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead,
+and into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance
+of a thought he had got from a book of Janet's or from some talk he had
+heard, perhaps at his own dinner table.
+
+"It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying
+dead."
+
+At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving
+past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that
+issued from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam,
+hurrying and seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to
+the old commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his
+forces to withstand an attack.
+
+"I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth," he said.
+
+Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping
+night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and
+daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction
+from the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed
+feet on the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon
+his body and subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind,
+chilled by the winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun.
+In the spring he swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the
+cattle grazing in the fields and the white clouds floating across the
+sky, and constantly his legs became harder and his body more flat and
+sinewy. Once he slept for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a
+woods and in the morning was awakened by a farmer's dog licking his
+face.
+
+Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other
+roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no
+incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or
+on the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he
+talked and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in
+life, sought no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the
+romance went out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and
+stupid, they were, almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they
+wanted passionately to get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding
+life with its problems and responsibilities. They always talked of
+the big cities, of "Chi" and "Cinci" and "Frisco," and were bent upon
+getting to one of these places. They condemned the rich and begged and
+stole from the poor, talked swaggeringly of their personal courage and
+ran whimpering and begging before country constables. One of them, a
+tall, leering youth in a grey cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the
+edge of a village in Indiana, tried to rob him. Full of his new strength
+and with the thought of Ed's wife and the sullen-faced son in his mind,
+Sam sprang upon him and had revenge for the beating received in the
+office of Ed's hotel by beating this fellow in his turn. When the tall
+youth had partially recovered from the beating and had staggered to his
+feet, he ran off into the darkness, stopping when well out of reach to
+hurl a stone that splashed in the mud of the road at Sam's feet.
+
+Everywhere Sam sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He
+had a kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of
+some simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman,
+with whom he talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana,
+interested him so that he went into a train with her and travelled all
+night in the day coach, listening to her talk of her three sons, one
+of whom had weak lungs and had, with two younger brothers, taken up
+government land in the west. The woman had been with them for some
+months, helping them to get a start.
+
+"I was raised on a farm and knew things they could not know," she told
+Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of
+fellow passengers.
+
+She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had
+driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a
+house, and had grown brown and strong at the work.
+
+"And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has
+gained eleven pounds," she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her
+heavy, muscular forearms.
+
+She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle
+factory in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods
+store, with her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her
+hearer's interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the
+west and the loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they
+sometimes made her heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved
+success, although he did not see how her experience could serve as a
+guide to him.
+
+"You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth," he said, taking
+her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.
+
+At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through
+southern Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse,
+asked, "Where are you going?" adding genially, "I may be able to give
+you a lift."
+
+Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man's manner or in his
+dress suggesting the man of God, he assumed a bantering air.
+
+"I am on my way to the New Jerusalem," he said seriously. "I am one who
+seeks God."
+
+The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when
+he saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam's mouth, he turned the
+wheels of his buggy.
+
+"Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem,"
+he said.
+
+On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road,
+told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward
+which he might work.
+
+"It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard
+necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will
+bring me bread and butter, but because I need to be doing something that
+will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to
+serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I
+got at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me,
+and I want to find that way."
+
+The young minister, who was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary at
+Springfield, Ohio, and had come out of college with a very serious
+outlook on life, took Sam to his house and together they sat talking
+half the night. He had a wife, a country girl with a babe lying at
+her breast, who got supper for them, and who, after supper, sat in the
+shadows in a corner of the living-room listening to their talk.
+
+The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe and the minister poked at
+a coal fire that burned in a stove. They talked of God and of what the
+thought of God meant to men; but the young minister did not try to give
+Sam an answer to his problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly
+dissatisfied and unhappy in his way of life.
+
+"There is no spirit of God here," he said, poking viciously at the coals
+in the stove. "The people here do not want me to talk to them of God.
+They have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has
+put them here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind
+of glorified Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished
+this life of work and of putting money in the savings bank."
+
+For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the
+country with him and talking of God. In the evening they sat in the
+house, continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man
+preach in his church.
+
+The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked
+vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and
+unnatural.
+
+"The man," thought Sam, "has no feeling for public address and is not
+treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation,
+the ideas he has expounded to me in his house." He decided there was
+something to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week
+after week and who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an
+effort.
+
+One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came
+to him as he stood on the little porch before the house.
+
+"I wish you would go away," she said, standing with her babe in her
+arms and looking at the porch floor. "You stir him up and make him
+dissatisfied."
+
+Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness.
+There had been tears in the wife's eyes.
+
+In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and
+eating with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses
+where they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked
+in a new place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and
+several of his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the
+men of the threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot
+of them day after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk,
+crept into the loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began
+another day of heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a
+swim in some creek and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees
+of an orchard sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of
+talk, talk that never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they
+would try to settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at
+some farm during the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man
+in the crew never talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long
+Sunday afternoons and whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.
+
+The threshing outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe,
+who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the
+men all day, drove about the country half the night making deals
+with farmers for other days of threshing. Sam thought that he looked
+constantly on the point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one
+of the men, who had been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that
+at the end of the season their employer did not have enough money left
+from his season of work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines
+and that he continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them.
+
+"One has to keep going," said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him
+on the matter.
+
+When told to keep Sam's wage until the end of the season he looked
+relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried
+and said that he had no money.
+
+"I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a
+little time," he said.
+
+Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him
+from the shadows at the back of the barn.
+
+"Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one
+else?" he asked.
+
+Joe looked indignant.
+
+"A man wants independence," he said.
+
+When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a
+stream, and tearing up Joe's note watched the torn pieces of it float
+away upon the brown water.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The
+days on which something happened or on which something outside himself
+interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours
+of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in
+a kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get
+at people who came into his way and to discover something of their way
+of life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed,
+staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the
+sidewalks of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an
+idea came into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once
+the practicability of living by following the idea, and although
+the practice brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the
+difficulties of the problem he was striving to work out, it brought him
+many strange experiences.
+
+At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town
+in eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a
+railroad track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the
+sidewalk. It was a stormy night in September at the end of his first
+year of wandering and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after
+buying drinks for the labourer and cigars for himself, several men came
+in and stood by the bar drinking together. As they drank they became
+more and more friendly, slapping each other on the back, singing songs
+and boasting. One of them got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The
+proprietor, a round-faced man with one dead eye, who had himself been
+drinking freely, put a bottle upon the bar and coming up to Sam, began
+complaining that he had no bartender and had to work long hours.
+
+"Drink what you want, boys, and then I'll tell you what you owe," he
+said to the men standing along the bar.
+
+Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room,
+and looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had
+for the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen,
+Sam said to himself, "I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At
+least I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with
+this tramping on the road and thinking."
+
+The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an
+obscure place had made its proprietor what is called "well fixed." It
+had a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the
+main street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks
+was but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men
+from the freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand
+about drinking beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at
+the side door was prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door,
+took drinks and hurried out again, looking up the alley and running
+quickly when they found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and
+when Sam had worked for a few days in the place he once made the mistake
+of reaching for the bottle when he heard the door open.
+
+"Let them ask for it," said the proprietor gruffly. "Do you want to
+insult a man?"
+
+On Saturday the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and
+at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks.
+When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these
+men and put the bottle before them, saying, "Drink all you want of the
+stuff."
+
+When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment
+by the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat
+pockets and looking at the floor.
+
+"Bar flies," the proprietor explained laconically.
+
+The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it
+into stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into
+bottles as they became empty. He kept on display in glass cases bottles
+of well known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for
+one of these brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from
+beneath the bar, a bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of
+his own mixture. As Al sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know
+nothing the bartender's art and stood all day handing out Al's poisonous
+stuff and the foaming glasses of beer the workingmen drank in the
+evening.
+
+Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the
+proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam
+most. Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over
+their shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at
+Sam apologetically.
+
+"Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold," they would say,
+as though repeating a formula.
+
+At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre
+notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life's
+unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day's duty, and his
+curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in
+at the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked
+them why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the
+telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam's question an
+impertinence.
+
+"You fool, don't you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?"
+Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in
+the centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and
+women going through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to
+overcome a feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening
+before. He had come into town over a poorly made clay road running
+through barren hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores
+of a river, swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges
+of the town.
+
+Before him in the distance he had looked into the windows of a huge
+factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene that
+lay before him. Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers
+ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the glare of the furnace
+fire lighting now one, now another of them, sharply. At his feet the
+tumbling waters that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated
+him. Looking closely at the racing waters his head, light from physical
+weariness, reeled, and in fear of falling he had been compelled to grip
+firmly the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a
+house across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens
+sat on a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly
+fitting accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard
+itself two bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they
+sprang into the fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming
+exhausted, they fell to picking and scratching among the rubbish in the
+yard, and when they had a little recovered renewed the struggle. For an
+hour Sam had looked at the scene, letting his eyes wander from the river
+to the grey sky and to the factory belching forth its black smoke. He
+had thought that the two feebly struggling fowls, immersed in their
+pointless struggle in the midst of such mighty force, epitomised much of
+man's struggle in the world, and, turning, had gone along the sidewalks
+and to the village hotel, feeling old and tired. Now on the bench in
+the little park, with the early morning sun shining down through the
+glistening rain drops clinging to the red leaves of the trees, he began
+to lose the sense of depression that had clung to him through the night.
+
+A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying
+workers, and stopped to sit beside him.
+
+"On the road, brother?" he asked.
+
+Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.
+
+"Fools and slaves," he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women
+passing on the sidewalk. "See them going like beasts to their bondage?
+What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of
+dogs."
+
+He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced.
+
+"We are all fools and slaves," said Sam, stoutly.
+
+Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about.
+
+"There, you talk sense," he cried. "Welcome to our town, stranger. We
+have no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity
+among them. Come and have breakfast with me."
+
+In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a
+graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he
+was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of
+which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud
+of the fact.
+
+"I refuse to work! I scorn it!" he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in
+the air.
+
+Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the
+socialist party in his native town, and boasted of the leadership he
+had already achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried
+because of his connection with the movement.
+
+"She wants me to be respectable," he said sadly, and added, "What's the
+use trying to explain to a woman? I can't get her to see the difference
+between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I've given up
+trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by
+getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police."
+
+He talked of a strike going on among some girl employ�s of a Jewish
+shirtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began
+asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to
+the scene of the strike.
+
+The shirtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and
+on the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up
+and down. A flashily dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his
+hands in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft
+and looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came
+a stream of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the
+empty air. When Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs,
+shouting oaths over his shoulder.
+
+Sam joined the three girls, and began talking to them, walking up and
+down with them before the grocery store.
+
+"What are you doing to win?" he asked when they had told him of their
+grievances.
+
+"We do what we can!" said a Jewish girl with broad hips, great motherly
+breasts, and fine, soft, brown eyes, who appeared to be a leader and
+spokesman among the strikers. "We walk up and down here and try to get
+a word with the strikebreakers the boss has brought in from other towns,
+when they go in and come out."
+
+Frank, the University man, spoke up. "We are putting up stickers
+everywhere," he said. "I myself have put up hundreds of them."
+
+He took from his coat pocket a printed slip, gummed on one side, and
+told Sam that he had been putting them on walls and telegraph poles
+about town. The thing was vilely written. "Down with the dirty scabs"
+was the heading in bold, black letters across the top.
+
+Sam was shocked at the vileness of the caption and at the crude
+brutality of the text printed on the slip.
+
+"Do you call women workers names like that?" he asked.
+
+"They have taken our work from us," the Jewish girl answered simply and
+began again, telling the story of her sister strikers and of what the
+low wage had meant to them and to their families. "To me it does not so
+much matter; I have a brother who works in a clothing store and he can
+support me, but many of the women in our union have only their wage here
+with which to feed their families."
+
+Sam's mind began working on the problem.
+
+"Here," he declared, "is something definite to do, a battle in which I
+will pit myself against this employer for the sake of these women."
+
+He put away from him his experience in the Illinois town, telling
+himself that the young woman walking beside him would have a sense of
+honour unknown to the red-haired young workman who had sold him out to
+Bill and Ed.
+
+"I failed with my money," he thought, "now I will try to help these
+girls with my energy."
+
+Turning to the Jewish girl he made a quick decision.
+
+"I will help you get your places back," he said.
+
+Leaving the girls he went across the street to a barber shop where he
+could watch the entrance to the factory. He wanted to think out a method
+of procedure and wanted also to look at the girl strikebreakers as
+they came to work. After a time several girls came along the street and
+turned in at the stairway. The flashily dressed Hebrew with the cigar
+still in his mouth was again by the stairway entrance. The three pickets
+running forward accosted the file of girls going up the stairs, one
+of whom, a young American girl with yellow hair, turned and shouted
+something over her shoulder. The man called Frank shouted back and the
+Hebrew took the cigar out of his mouth and laughed heartily. Sam filled
+and lighted his pipe, a dozen plans for helping the striking girls
+running through his mind.
+
+During the morning he went into the grocery store on the corner, a
+saloon in the neighbourhood, and returned to the barber shop talking to
+men of the strike. He ate his lunch alone, still thinking of the three
+girls patiently walking up and down before the stairway. Their ceaseless
+walking seemed to him a useless waste of energy.
+
+"They should be doing something more definite," he thought.
+
+After lunch he joined the soft-eyed Jewish girl and together they walked
+along the street talking of the strike.
+
+"You cannot win this strike by just calling nasty names," he said. "I
+do not like that 'dirty scab' sticker Frank had in his pocket. It cannot
+help you and only antagonises the girls who have taken your places. Here
+in this part of town the people want to see you win. I have talked to
+the men who come into the saloon and the barber shop across the street
+and you already have their sympathy. You want to get the sympathy of the
+girls who have taken your places. Calling them dirty scabs only makes
+martyrs of them. Did the yellow-haired girl call you a name this
+morning?"
+
+The Jewish girl looked at Sam and laughed bitterly.
+
+"Rather; she called me a loud-mouthed street walker."
+
+They continued their walk along the street, across the railroad track
+and a bridge, and into a quiet residence street. Carriages stood at
+the curb before the houses, and pointing to these and to the well-kept
+houses Sam said, "Men have bought these things for their women."
+
+A shadow fell across the girl's face.
+
+"I suppose all of us want what these women have," she answered. "We do
+not really want to fight and to stand on our own feet, not when we know
+the world. What a woman really wants is a man," she added shortly.
+
+Sam began talking and told her of a plan that had come into his mind.
+He had remembered how Jack Prince and Morrison used to talk about the
+appeal of the direct personal letter and how effectively it was used by
+mail order houses.
+
+"We will have a mail order strike here," he said and went on to lay
+before her the details of his plan. He proposed that she, Frank, and
+some others of the striking girls, should go about town getting the
+names and the mail addresses of the girl strikebreakers.
+
+"Get also the names of the keepers of the boarding houses at which
+these girls live and the names of the men and women who live in the
+same houses," he suggested. "Then you get the striking girls and women
+together and have them tell me their stories. We will write letters day
+after day to the girl strikebreakers, to the women who keep the boarding
+houses, and to the people who live in the houses and sit at table with
+them. We won't call names. We will tell the story of what being beaten
+in this fight means to the women in your union, tell it simply and
+truthfully as you told it to me this morning."
+
+"It will cost such a lot," said the Jewish girl, shaking her head.
+
+Sam took a roll of bills from his pocket and showed it to her.
+
+"I will pay," he said.
+
+"Why?" she asked, looking at him sharply.
+
+"Because I am a man wanting work just as you want work," he replied, and
+then went on hurriedly, "It is a long story. I am a rich man wandering
+about the world seeking Truth. I will not want that known. Take me for
+granted. You won't be sorry."
+
+Within an hour he had engaged a large room, paying a month's rent in
+advance, and into the room chairs and table and typewriters had
+been brought. He put an advertisement in the evening paper for girl
+stenographers, and a printer, hurried by a promise of extra pay, ran out
+for him several thousand letter heads across the top of which in bold,
+black type ran the words, "The Girl Strikers."
+
+That night Sam held, in the room he had engaged, a meeting of the girl
+strikers, explaining to them his plan and offering to pay all expenses
+of the fight he proposed to make for them. They clapped their hands and
+shouted approvingly, and Sam began laying out his campaign.
+
+One of the girls he told off to stand in front of the factory morning
+and evening.
+
+"I will have other help for you there," he said. "Before you go home
+to-night there will be a printer here with a bundle of pamphlets I am
+having printed for you."
+
+Advised by the soft-eyed Jewish girl, he told off others to get
+additional names for the mailing list he wanted, getting many important
+ones from girls in the room. Six of the girls he asked to come in the
+morning to help him with addressing and mailing letters. The Jewish girl
+he told to take charge of the girls at work in the room--on the morrow
+to become also an office--and to superintend getting the names.
+
+Frank rose at the back of the room.
+
+"Who are you anyway?" he asked.
+
+"A man with money and the ability to win this strike," Sam told him.
+
+"What are you doing it for?" demanded Frank.
+
+The Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
+
+"Because he believes in these women and wants to help," she explained.
+
+"Rot," said Frank, going out at the door.
+
+It was snowing when the meeting ended, and Sam and the Jewish girl
+finished their talk in the hallway leading to her room.
+
+"I don't know what Harrigan, the union leader from Pittsburgh, will
+say to this," she told him. "He appointed Frank to lead and direct the
+strike here. He doesn't like interference and he may not like your plan.
+But we working women need men, men like you who can plan and do things.
+There are too many men living on us. We need men who will work for all
+of us as the men work for the women in the carriages and automobiles."
+She laughed and put out a hand to him. "See what you have got yourself
+into? I want you to be a husband to our entire union."
+
+The next morning four girl stenographers went to work in Sam's strike
+headquarters, and he wrote his first strike letter, a letter telling
+the story of a striking girl named Hadaway, whose young brother was sick
+with tuberculosis. Sam did not put any flourishes in the letter; he
+felt that he did not need to. He thought that with twenty or thirty such
+letters, each telling briefly and truthfully the story of one of the
+striking girls, he should be able to show one American town how its
+other half lived. He gave the letter to the four girl stenographers with
+the mailing list he already had and started them writing it to each of
+the names.
+
+At eight o'clock a man came in to install a telephone and girl strikers
+began bringing in new names for the mailing list. At nine o'clock three
+more stenographers appeared and were put to work, and girls who had been
+in began sending more names over the 'phone. The Jewish girl walked up
+and down, giving orders, making suggestions. From time to time she ran
+to Sam's desk and suggested other sources of names for the mailing list.
+Sam thought that if the other working girls were timid and embarrassed
+before him this one was not. She was like a general on the field of
+battle. Her soft brown eyes glowed, her mind worked rapidly, and her
+voice had a ring in it. At her suggestion Sam gave the girls at the
+typewriters lists bearing the names of town officials, bankers and
+prominent business men, and the wives of all these, also presidents of
+various women's clubs, society women, and charitable organizations. She
+called reporters from the town's two daily papers and had them interview
+Sam, and at her suggestion he gave them copies of the Hadaway girl
+letter to print.
+
+"Print it," he said, "and if you cannot use it as news, make it an
+advertisement and bring the bill to me."
+
+At eleven o'clock Frank came into the room bringing a tall Irishman,
+with sunken cheeks, black, unclean teeth, and an overcoat too small for
+him. Leaving him standing by the door, Frank walked across the room to
+Sam.
+
+"Come to lunch with us," he said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder
+toward the tall Irishman. "I picked him up," he said. "Best brain that's
+been in town for years. He's a wonder. Used to be a Catholic priest.
+He doesn't believe in God or love or anything. Come on out and hear him
+talk. He's great."
+
+Sam shook his head.
+
+"I am too busy. There is work to be done here. We are going to win this
+strike."
+
+Frank looked at him doubtfully and then about the room at the busy
+girls.
+
+"I don't know what Harrigan will think of all this," he said. "He
+doesn't like interferences. I never do anything without writing him.
+I wrote and told him what you were doing here. I had to, you know. I'm
+responsible to headquarters."
+
+In the afternoon the Hebrew owner of the shirtwaist factory came in to
+strike headquarters and, walking through the room took off his hat and
+sat down by Sam's desk.
+
+"What do you want here?" he asked. "The newspaper boys told me of what
+you had planned to do. What's your game?"
+
+"I want to whip you," Sam answered quietly, "to whip you good. You might
+as well get into line. You are going to lose this strike."
+
+"I'm only one," said the Hebrew. "There is an association of us
+manufacturers of shirtwaists. We are all in this. We all have a strike
+on our hands. What will you gain if you do beat me here? I'm only a
+little fellow after all."
+
+Sam laughed and picking up his pen began writing.
+
+"You are unlucky," he said. "I just happened to take hold here. When I
+have you beaten I will go on and beat the others. There is more money
+back of me than back of you all, and I am going to beat every one of
+you."
+
+The next morning a crowd stood before the stairway leading to the
+factory when the strikebreaking girls came to work. The letters and
+the newspaper interview had been effective and more than half the
+strikebreakers did not appear. The others hurried along the street and
+turned in at the stairway without looking at the crowd. The girl,
+told off by Sam, stood on the sidewalk passing out pamphlets to the
+strikebreakers. The pamphlets were headed, "The Story of Ten Girls," and
+told briefly and pointedly the stories of ten striking girls and what
+the loss of the strike meant to them and to their families.
+
+After a while there drove up two carriages and a large automobile, and
+out of the automobile climbed a well-dressed woman who took a bundle of
+the pamphlets from the girl picket and began passing them about among
+the people. Two policemen who stood in front of the crowd took off their
+helmets and accompanied her. The crowd cheered. Frank came hurrying
+across the street to where Sam stood in front of the barber shop and
+slapped him on the back.
+
+"You're a wonder," he said.
+
+Sam hurried back to the room and prepared the second letter for the
+mailing list. Two more stenographers had come to work. He had to send
+out for more machines. A reporter for the town's evening paper ran up
+the stairway.
+
+"Who are you?" he asked. "The town wants to know."
+
+From his pocket he took a telegram from a Pittsburgh daily.
+
+"What about mail-order strike plan? Give name and story new strike
+leader there."
+
+At ten o'clock Frank returned.
+
+"There's a wire from Harrigan," he said. "He's coming here. He wants a
+mass meeting of the girls for to-night. I've got to get them together.
+We'll meet here in this room."
+
+In the room the work went on. The list of names for the mailing had
+doubled. The picket at the shirtwaist factory reported that three more
+of the strikebreakers had left the plant. The Jewish girl was excited.
+She went hurrying about the room, her eyes glowing.
+
+"It's great," she said. "The plan is working. The whole town is aroused
+and for us. We'll win in another twenty-four hours."
+
+And then at seven o'clock that night Harrigan came into the room where
+Sam sat with the assembled girls, bolting the door behind him. He was a
+short, strongly built man with blue eyes and red hair. He walked about
+the room in silence, followed by Frank. Suddenly he stopped and, picking
+up one of the typewriting machines rented by Sam for the letter writing,
+raised it above his head and sent it smashing to the floor.
+
+"A hell of a strike leader," he roared. "Look at this. Scab machines!
+
+"Scab stenographers!" he said through his teeth. "Scab printing! Scab
+everything!"
+
+Picking up a bundle of the letterheads, he tore them across, and walking
+to the front of the room, shook his fist before Sam's face.
+
+"Scab leader!" he shouted, turning and facing the girls.
+
+The soft-eyed Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
+
+"He's winning for us," she said.
+
+Harrigan walked toward her threateningly.
+
+"Better lose than win a scab victory," he bellowed.
+
+"Who are you anyway? What grafter sent you here?" he demanded, turning
+to Sam.
+
+He launched into a speech. "I have been watching this fellow, I know
+him. He has a scheme to break down the union and is being paid by the
+capitalists."
+
+Sam waited to hear no more. Getting up he pulled on his canvas jacket
+and started for the door. He saw that already he had involved himself
+in a dozen violations of the unionist code and the idea of trying to
+convince Harrigan of his disinterestedness did not occur to him.
+
+"Do not mind me," he said, "I am going."
+
+He walked between the rows of frightened, white-faced girls and unbolted
+the door, the Jewish girl following. At the head of the stairway leading
+to the street he stopped and pointed back into the room.
+
+"Go back," he said, handing her a roll of bills. "Carry on the work
+if you can. Get other machines and new printing. I will help you in
+secret."
+
+Turning he ran down the stairs, hurried through the curious crowd
+standing at the foot, and walked rapidly along in front of the lighted
+stores. A cold rain, half snow, was falling. Beside him walked a young
+man with a brown pointed beard, one of the newspaper reporters who had
+interviewed him the day before.
+
+"Did Harrigan trim you?" asked the young man, and then added, laughing,
+"He told us he intended to throw you down stairs."
+
+Sam walked on in silence, filled with wrath. He turned into a side
+street and stopped when his companion put a hand upon his arm.
+
+"This is our dump," said the young man, pointing to a long low frame
+building facing the side street. "Come in and let us have your story. It
+should be a good one."
+
+Inside the newspaper office another young man sat with his head lying
+on a flat-top desk. He was clad in a strikingly flashy plaid coat, had a
+little wizened, good-natured face and seemed to have been drinking. The
+young man with the beard explained Sam's identity, taking the sleeping
+man by the shoulder and shaking him vigorously.
+
+"Wake up, Skipper! There's a good story here!" he shouted. "The union
+has thrown out the mail-order strike leader!"
+
+The Skipper got to his feet and began shaking his head.
+
+"Of course, of course, Old Top, they would throw you out. You've got
+some brains. No man with brains can lead a strike. It's against the laws
+of Nature. Something was bound to hit you. Did Roughneck come out from
+Pittsburgh?" he asked, turning to the young man of the brown beard.
+
+Then reaching above his head and taking a cap that matched his plaid
+coat from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. "Come on, Old Top. I've
+got to get a drink."
+
+The two men went through a side door and down a dark alley, going in
+at the back door of a saloon. Mud lay deep in the alley and The Skipper
+sloshed through it, splattering Sam's clothes and face. In the saloon at
+a table facing Sam, with a bottle of French wine between them, he began
+explaining.
+
+"I've a note coming due at the bank in the morning and no money to pay
+it," he said. "When I have a note coming due I always have no money and
+I always get drunk. Then next morning I pay the note. I don't know how
+I do it, but I always come out all right. It's a system--Now about this
+strike." He plunged into a discussion of the strike while men came in
+and out, laughing and drinking. At ten o'clock the proprietor locked
+the front door, drew the curtain, and coming to the back of the room sat
+down at the table with Sam and The Skipper, bringing another bottle of
+the French wine from which the two men continued drinking.
+
+"That man from Pittsburgh busted up your place, eh?" he said, turning
+to Sam. "A man came in here to-night and told me. He sent for the
+typewriter people and made them take away the machines."
+
+When they were ready to leave, Sam took money from his pocket and
+offered to pay for the bottle of French wine ordered by The Skipper, who
+arose and stood unsteadily on his feet.
+
+"Do you mean to insult me?" he demanded indignantly, throwing a
+twenty-dollar bill on the table. The proprietor gave him back only
+fourteen dollars.
+
+"I might as well wipe off the slate while you're flush," he observed,
+winking at Sam.
+
+The Skipper sat down again, taking a pencil and pad of paper from his
+pocket, and throwing them on the table.
+
+"I want an editorial on the strike for the Old Rag," he said to Sam. "Do
+one for me. Do something strong. Get a punch into it. I want to talk to
+my friend here."
+
+Putting the pad of paper on the table Sam began writing his newspaper
+editorial. His head seemed wonderfully clear, his command of words
+unusually good. He called the attention of the public to the situation,
+the struggles of the striking girls and the intelligent fight they had
+been making to win a just cause, following this with paragraphs pointing
+out how the effectiveness of the work done had been annulled by the
+position taken by the labour and socialist leaders.
+
+"These fellows at bottom care nothing for results," he wrote. "They are
+not thinking of the unemployed women with families to support, they are
+thinking only of themselves and their puny leadership which they fear
+is threatened. Now we shall have the usual exhibition of all the old
+things, struggle, and hatred and defeat."
+
+When he had finished The Skipper and Sam went back through the alley
+to the newspaper office. The Skipper sloshed again through the mud
+and carried in his hand a bottle of red gin. At his desk he took the
+editorial from Sam's hands and read it.
+
+"Perfect! Perfect to the thousandth part of an inch, Old Top," he said,
+pounding Sam on the shoulder. "Just what the Old Rag wanted to say about
+the strike." Then climbing upon the desk and putting the plaid coat
+under his head he went peacefully to sleep, and Sam, sitting beside the
+desk in a shaky office chair, slept also. At daybreak a black man with a
+broom in his hand woke them, and going into a long low room filled with
+presses The Skipper put his head under a water tap and came back waving
+a soiled towel and with water dripping from his hair.
+
+"Now for the day and the labours thereof," he said, grinning at Sam and
+taking a long drink out of the gin bottle.
+
+After breakfast he and Sam took up their stand in front of the barber
+shop opposite the stairway leading to the shirtwaist factory. Sam's girl
+with the pamphlets was gone as was also the soft-eyed Jewish girl, and
+in their places Frank and the Pittsburgh leader named Harrigan walked up
+and down. Again carriages and automobiles stood by the curb, and again
+a well-dressed woman got out of a machine and went toward three striking
+girls approaching along the sidewalk. The woman was met by Harrigan,
+shaking his fist and shouting, and getting back into the machine she
+drove off. From the stairway the flashily-dressed Hebrew looked at the
+crowd and laughed.
+
+"Where is the new strike leader--the mail-order strike leader?" he
+called to Frank.
+
+With the words, a working man with a dinner pail on his arm ran out of
+the crowd and knocked the Jew back into the stairway.
+
+"Punch him! Punch the dirty scab leader!" yelled Frank, dancing up and
+down on the sidewalk.
+
+Two policemen running forward began leading the workingman up the
+street, his dinner pail still clutched in one hand.
+
+"I know something," The Skipper shouted, pounding Sam on the shoulder.
+"I know who will sign that note with me. The woman Harrigan drove back
+into her machine is the richest woman in town. I will show her your
+editorial. She will think I wrote it and it will get her. You'll see."
+He ran off up the street, shouting back over his shoulder, "Come over to
+the dump, I want to see you again."
+
+Sam returned to the newspaper office and sat down waiting for The
+Skipper who, after a time, came in, took off his coat and began writing
+furiously. From time to time he took long drinks out of the bottle of
+red gin, and after silently offering it to Sam, continued reeling off
+sheet after sheet of loosely-written matter.
+
+"I got her to sign the note," he called over his shoulder to Sam. "She
+was furious at Harrigan and when I told her we were going to attack him
+and defend you she fell for it quick. I won out by following my system.
+I always get drunk and it always wins."
+
+At ten o'clock the newspaper office was in a ferment. The little man
+with the brown pointed beard, and another, kept running to The Skipper
+asking advice, laying typewritten sheets before him, talking as he
+wrote.
+
+"Give me a lead. I want one more front page lead," The Skipper kept
+bawling at them, working like mad.
+
+At ten thirty the door opened and Harrigan, accompanied by Frank, came
+in. Seeing Sam they stopped, looking at him uncertainly, and at the man
+at work at the desk.
+
+"Well, speak up. This is no ladies' reception room. What do you fellows
+want?" snapped The Skipper, glaring at them.
+
+Frank, coming forward, laid a typewritten sheet on the desk, which the
+newspaper man read hurriedly.
+
+"Will you use it?" asked Frank.
+
+The Skipper laughed.
+
+"Wouldn't change a word of it," he shouted. "Sure I'll use it. It's what
+I wanted to make my point. You fellows watch me."
+
+Frank and Harrigan went out and The Skipper, rushing to the door, began
+yelling into the room beyond.
+
+"Hey, you Shorty and Tom, I've got that last lead."
+
+Coming back to his desk he began writing again, grinning as he worked.
+To Sam he handed the typewritten sheet prepared by Frank.
+
+"Dastardly attempt to win the cause of the working girls by dirty scab
+leaders and butter-fingered capitalist class," it began, and after
+this followed a wild jumble of words, words without meaning, sentences
+without point in which Sam was called a mealy-mouthed mail-order musser
+and The Skipper was mentioned incidentally as a pusillanimous ink
+slinger.
+
+"I'll run the stuff and comment on it," declared The Skipper, handing
+Sam what he had written. It was an editorial inviting the public to
+read the article prepared for publication by the strike leaders and
+sympathising with the striking girls that their cause had to be lost
+because of the incompetence and lack of intelligence of their leaders.
+
+"Hurrah for Roughhouse, the brave man who leads working girls to defeat
+in order that he may retain leadership and drive intelligent effort out
+of the cause of labour," wrote The Skipper.
+
+Sam looked at the sheets and out of the window where a snow storm
+raged. It seemed to him that a crime was being done and he was sick and
+disgusted at his own inability to stop it. The Skipper lighted a short
+black pipe and took his cap from a nail on the wall.
+
+"I'm the smoothest little newspaper thing in town and some financier as
+well," he declared. "Let's go have a drink."
+
+After the drink Sam walked through the town toward the country. At the
+edge of town where the houses became scattered and the road started to
+drop away into a deep valley some one helloed behind him. Turning, he
+saw the soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.
+
+"Where are you going?" he asked, stopping to lean against a board fence,
+the snow falling upon his face.
+
+"I'm going with you," said the girl. "You're the best and the strongest
+man I've ever seen and I'm not going to let you get away. If you've got
+a wife it don't matter. She isn't what she should be or you wouldn't be
+walking about the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you're crazy,
+but I know better. I am going with you and I'm going to help you find
+what you want."
+
+Sam wondered. She took a roll of bills from a pocket in her dress and
+gave it to him.
+
+"I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars," she said.
+
+They stood looking at each other. She put out a hand and laid it on his
+arm. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with eager light looked into his.
+Her round breasts rose and fell.
+
+"Anywhere you say. I'll be your servant if you ask it of me."
+
+A wave of hot desire ran through Sam followed by a quick reaction. He
+thought of his months of weary seeking and his universal failure.
+
+"You are going back to town if I have to drive you there with stones,"
+he told her, and turning ran down the valley leaving her standing by the
+board fence, her head buried in her arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in
+Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying
+or loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed
+to be a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women
+who met at the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away
+together. Sam found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings.
+In the year since he had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had
+grown more and more reflective. Little things--a smile on the lips of
+an ill-clad old man mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the
+flutter of a child's hand from the doorway of a farmhouse--had furnished
+him food for hours of thought. Now he watched with interest the little
+incidents; the nods, the hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances
+around of the men and women who met for a moment at the corner. On the
+sidewalk near his doorway several middle-aged men, evidently from a
+large hotel around the corner, were eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry,
+furtive eyes the women in the crowd.
+
+A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. "Waiting for
+some one?" she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with
+the harried, uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the
+middle-aged men upon the sidewalk.
+
+"What are you doing here with your husband at work?" he ventured.
+
+She looked startled and then laughed.
+
+"Why don't you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?"
+she demanded, adding, "I don't know who you are, but whoever you are I
+want to tell you that I've quit my husband."
+
+"Why?" asked Sam.
+
+She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.
+
+"I guess you're bluffing," she said. "I don't believe you know Alf at
+all. And I'm glad you don't. I've quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just
+the same, if he saw me out here hustling."
+
+Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a
+lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and
+beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered,
+"Hello, Sport!"
+
+Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in
+the eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of
+the lives of great numbers of people in the cities--of the men and
+women on the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe
+marriage had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together
+in the theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of
+all modern city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching
+hunger stood in the way of men's getting hold of life and living it
+earnestly and purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all
+men and women wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in
+Caxton he was more than once startled by the flashes of brutality and
+coarseness in the speech and actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now
+as he walked in the streets of the city he thought that he had got past
+being startled. "It is a quality of our lives," he decided. "American
+men and women have not learned to be clean and noble and natural, like
+their forests and their wide, clean plains."
+
+He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other
+cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his
+lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.
+
+"We are no finer nor cleaner than these," he said, "and we sprang from
+the big clean new land through which I have been walking all these
+months. Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly
+expressed hunger in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will
+it never shrive itself and understand itself, and turn fiercely and
+energetically toward the building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?"
+
+"It won't unless you help," came the answer from some hidden part of
+him.
+
+Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and
+he wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of
+vice, and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in
+futile attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward
+human betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or
+stopping the playing of baseball on Sunday.
+
+As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously
+in league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as
+something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague
+charm.
+
+"For me," he reflected, "there have been no Fran�ois Villons or Sapphos
+in the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only
+heart-breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces
+and torn, greasy finery."
+
+He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how
+he, as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly's
+suggestion and had been helped by him--helped and frightened and made
+to see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of
+a second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed
+across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of "Nana's Brother,"
+saying with a smirk, "That's some sporty stuff." And he wondered what he
+should have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the
+bookseller's comment was intended to arouse.
+
+In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in
+which he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to
+sleep sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman's saloon
+in Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting
+that it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.
+
+"Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth," he thought, coming to
+a street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a
+dingy poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. "It gets
+into all modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears
+lewd stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men
+from the cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the
+stove in village stores."
+
+Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things
+were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and
+daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of
+Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could
+but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the
+glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in
+that city and in every city he had known.
+
+Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far
+gone in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam's mind leaped back to
+those first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man
+he had left behind him in Caxton.
+
+"You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than
+that painter's son of Caxton," he reminded himself, "and yet he embraced
+vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading
+talk and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part
+with able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was
+too rare a thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the
+lips-that-touch-liquor-shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was
+reserved for the lips that did not invite."
+
+He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business
+men of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of
+himself, quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and
+to shout the innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in
+Chicago barrooms. Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one
+to keep himself to himself. But on these carouses he let himself go,
+and got a reputation for daring audacity by slapping men on the back and
+singing songs with them. A glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for
+a time he had really believed there was such a thing as high flying vice
+that glistens in the sun.
+
+Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city's
+streets, he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.
+
+He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted
+questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained
+unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they
+walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at
+the windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams,
+and cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the
+place; men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their
+faces; sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were
+locked out.
+
+He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from
+farms and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men
+believers in the golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and
+women of the town laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked
+in that way. He also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible
+mistress that lurked at the bottom of men's tales of the submerged
+world. He wanted his golden girl. He was like the na�ve German lad in
+the South Water Street warehouses who had once said to him--he was a
+frugal soul--"I would like to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and
+modest and who will be my mistress and not charge anything."
+
+Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He
+had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and
+now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not
+be made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks
+of vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no
+housecleaning days in the tenderloin?
+
+During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this
+matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the
+scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary
+decent social life could not go on without it. Often during the past
+year Sam had thought of the man's talk and his brain had reeled before
+the thought. In towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little
+girls come laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered
+which of them would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in
+his hour of depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his
+dinner table might be made to walk with him and to share with him his
+thoughts.
+
+Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam
+continued his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and
+soothed his mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought
+with gratitude that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of
+faces rolling up to him under the lights filled him with peace. "There
+is so much of life," he thought, "it must come to some end."
+
+Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the
+faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose,
+the faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on
+which the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers
+ached to get a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas
+in enduring pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able
+to say, "Here are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves
+and for your children."
+
+In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little
+cigar counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly
+at a woman clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her
+machine to wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.
+
+Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that
+had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one
+woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little
+Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness--her quick,
+deft fingers and her muscular little arms. "Another such as she," he
+muttered, "has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman;
+a hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the
+warm furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy--a shot, and
+red blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws
+in the air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her
+white limbs, her cheeks, her hair."
+
+For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like
+himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit
+of the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could
+achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the
+power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces
+in the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers
+the story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.
+
+In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer's talk, and in Chicago and
+New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of
+the artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the
+long street he thought that he did understand.
+
+Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an
+affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her
+face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message
+of the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong,
+bullet-like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold.
+He remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love
+passage with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How
+eagerly both man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place.
+How her strong hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor
+by the office building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so
+free from the marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of
+a cattle raiser had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the
+beauty of that face.
+
+On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman,
+standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called
+softly, and turning he went to her.
+
+"I am not a customer," he said, looking at her thin face and bony
+hands, "but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am
+getting hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to
+me so that I won't get to thinking."
+
+"You're a queer bird," said the woman, taking his arm. "What have you
+done that you don't want to think?"
+
+Sam said nothing.
+
+"There's a place over there," she said, pointing to the lighted front of
+a cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.
+
+Sam kept on walking.
+
+"If you do not mind," he said, "I will pick the place. I want to buy
+a good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good
+cook in the kitchen."
+
+They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he
+waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited
+he went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When
+she returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam
+thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work
+on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still
+waiting.
+
+"I thought maybe it was a stall," she said.
+
+They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with
+clean washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private
+dining-rooms. Sam had been there several times during the month, and the
+food had been well cooked.
+
+They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself,
+and she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not
+studying her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his
+loneliness, and because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out
+from the darkness by the church door, had made an appeal.
+
+She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not
+defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy's.
+Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had
+the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother's hands. Now that she
+sat before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his
+mother.
+
+After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman
+of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.
+
+"Are you going to take me anywhere after this--after we leave here?" she
+said.
+
+"I am going to take you to the door of your room, that's all."
+
+"I'm glad," she said; "it's a long time since I've had an evening like
+this. It makes me feel clean."
+
+For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home
+town in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came
+into his mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she
+in turn told of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about
+hearing which made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be
+repeated to her and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire,
+letting her talk. Her father had been a captain of a small steamboat
+plying up and down Long Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd
+woman and a good housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village
+and had a garden back of their house. The captain had not married until
+he was forty-five and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother
+dying a year later.
+
+The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy
+and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in
+the garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with
+thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had
+married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the
+house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her
+life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills
+and the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature,
+undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of
+her husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by
+various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a
+time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that
+her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the
+town.
+
+"There wasn't any use wasting words when I found he didn't care for me
+or for the baby and wouldn't support us, so I left him," she said in a
+level, businesslike way.
+
+When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and
+had taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her
+savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to
+work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with
+her hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with
+a small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine
+man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a
+gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing
+to be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was
+seven dollars a week.
+
+"And so," she said, "I began going on the street. I knew no one and
+there was nothing else to do. I couldn't do that in the town where the
+boy lived, so I came away. I've gone from city to city, working mostly
+for patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in
+the streets. I'm not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many
+of them care about me. I don't like to have them touch me with their
+hands. I can't drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to
+be left alone. Perhaps I shouldn't have married. Not that I minded my
+husband. We got along very well until I had to stop giving him money.
+When I found where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to
+have at least a thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened
+to me. When I found there wasn't anything to do but just go on the
+streets, I went. I tried doing other work, but hadn't the strength, and
+when it came to the test I cared more about the boy than I did about
+myself--any woman would. I thought he was of more importance than what I
+wanted.
+
+"It hasn't been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with
+me I walk along the street praying that I won't shudder and draw away
+when he touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away
+and I won't get any money.
+
+"And then they talk and lie about themselves. I've had them try to work
+off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make
+love to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That's the
+hard part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies
+over and over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to
+these others lying to me."
+
+She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and
+sat looking into the fire.
+
+"My mother," she began again, "didn't always wear a clean dress. She
+couldn't. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor
+or out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was
+dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be
+that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I'm losing it all.
+All evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear
+isn't clean. Most of the time I don't care. Being clean doesn't go with
+what I am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men
+will stop when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done
+well I don't go on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean
+up my room and bathe myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the
+basement at night. I don't seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am
+on the streets."
+
+The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German
+waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He
+stopped by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From
+another room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing
+voices. The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam
+felt that he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to
+him he should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly.
+She had a quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.
+
+As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.
+
+"I wouldn't mind about you," she said, looking at him frankly.
+
+Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. "It's been a good evening," he
+said, "we'll go through with it as it stands."
+
+"Thanks for that," she said, "and there is something else I want to tell
+you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don't want to
+go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on
+gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders."
+
+As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic
+breathing as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped
+and waved her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish.
+Sam had a feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting
+citizens in the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the
+long deserted street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton.
+Like Mike, he lifted up his voice in the night.
+
+"Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth
+hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,
+and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and
+hurt and destroy?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out
+of his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia,
+looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly
+lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his
+bill at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely
+abandoned the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about
+the country and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in
+villages, and had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his
+income.
+
+He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the
+wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood.
+The spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain
+spring mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in
+his experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran
+through the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when
+the call of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind,
+filling him with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in
+his brain, yet at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was,
+after all, a man of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water
+Street and LaSalle Street had all left their marks on him, and so,
+throwing his canvas jacket into a corner of the room in the West
+Virginia hotel, he returned to the haunts of his kind.
+
+In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and
+into the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named
+Jackson.
+
+Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he
+had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again
+the quiet elegance of the surroundings.
+
+"Hello, Moneymaker," said Jackson, heartily. "Heard you had gone to a
+nunnery."
+
+Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson's eyes open
+with astonishment.
+
+"You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man's spending month after
+month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then
+suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this," he
+observed.
+
+Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.
+
+"How little you know me," he said. "I would live my life in the open but
+that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New
+York run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will
+you go back to Morrison and Prince and money making?"
+
+Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before
+him. How satisfied and happy he looked.
+
+"I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely," he said.
+
+"They are a rotten crew," Jackson assured him, "and I am taking a night
+train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over."
+
+On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old
+man who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.
+
+"I am going to sail from Seattle," he said, "and go everywhere and hunt
+everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind
+of thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there
+until I die."
+
+"I will go with you," said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at
+Detroit and continued westward with his new acquaintance.
+
+For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous,
+big-hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early
+investment in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to
+his lusty, primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion
+hunts, elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of
+Africa Sam took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the
+beach smoking black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over
+and that Sam was a fool to go.
+
+After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life
+of a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He
+went on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern
+lakes, canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat
+about clubs and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and
+women of that world.
+
+Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on
+the Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw
+her. For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure
+as she walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had
+come to mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come
+face to face with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train
+to the city feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed
+after the years.
+
+In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily
+and almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from
+his hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting
+with Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant,
+got into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode
+about town laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to
+passers-by in the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place
+at the edge of town, where the party spent hours around a long table,
+drinking, and singing songs.
+
+One of the girls sat on Sam's lap and put an arm about his neck.
+
+"Give me some money, rich man," she said.
+
+Sam looked at her closely.
+
+"Who are you?" he asked.
+
+She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that
+she had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.
+
+"I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes," she said frankly,
+"but if Tim saw me here he would kill me."
+
+Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a
+taxicab drove back to his hotel.
+
+After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in
+a kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which
+he did not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited,
+planned a return to business which he did not execute, and month after
+month continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon
+and begin drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry
+and talkative, calling men by their first names, slapping chance
+acquaintances on the back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young
+men intent upon gain. In the early summer he got in with a party of
+young men from New York and with them spent months in sheer idle waste
+of time. Together they drove high-powered automobiles on long trips,
+drank, quarrelled, and went on board a yacht to carouse, alone or with
+women. At times Sam would leave his companions and spend days riding
+through the country on fast trains, sitting for hours in silence looking
+out of the window at the passing country and wondering at his endurance
+of the life he led. For some months he carried with him a young man whom
+he called a secretary and paid a large salary for his ability to tell
+stories and sing clever songs, only to discharge him suddenly for
+telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of another tale told by the
+stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed's hotel in the Illinois
+town.
+
+From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings,
+Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless
+way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right
+way of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He
+lost his native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for
+hours by little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and
+talking nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew
+habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and
+more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about
+hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to
+sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor's head.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train
+intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had
+heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he
+thought he would do something for them.
+
+"I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them
+my money," he thought. "Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by
+setting them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear."
+
+At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see
+an attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days
+stayed about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had
+picked up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and
+gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men
+and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of
+enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that
+shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.
+
+In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he
+came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the
+river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.
+
+"I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the
+river," he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. "Take
+us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it
+costs."
+
+It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he
+went among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to
+continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him
+on the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.
+
+"Sing louder," he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his
+companions.
+
+A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to
+perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the
+deck before the shouting crowd.
+
+"Now dance!" he growled, "or I will throw you into the river."
+
+The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked
+at him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along
+the deck or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take
+effect, a queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction
+came to him and he raised his hand for silence.
+
+"I want to see a woman who is a mother," he shouted. "I want to see a
+woman who has borne children."
+
+A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the
+group gathered about the dancer.
+
+"I have borne children--three of them," she said, laughing up into his
+face. "I can bear more of them."
+
+Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair
+on the deck. The crowd laughed.
+
+"Belle is after his roll," whispered a short, fat man to his companion,
+a tall woman with blue eyes.
+
+As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing
+songs, went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman
+beside Sam pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.
+
+"My children are there. They are getting supper now," she said.
+
+She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting
+along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang
+a song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam's companion kept
+time with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain
+stood looking up the river.
+
+"Turn back," he said, "I am tired of this crew."
+
+On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside
+Sam.
+
+"We will go to my house," she said quietly, "just you and me. I will
+show you the kids."
+
+Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the
+distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had
+grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small
+groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell
+Sam her story.
+
+She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.
+
+"I drove him crazy," she said, laughing quietly. "He wanted me to stay
+at home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me
+down town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn't come he
+would go away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn't a
+man. He would do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and
+left the kids on my hands."
+
+In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in
+an open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place,
+eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but
+grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.
+
+"We will go to my house. I want to have you alone," said the woman.
+
+They drove through street after street of workingmen's houses, where
+children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their
+bare legs flashing in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after
+them, holding to the back of the carriage.
+
+The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up
+and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of
+the running boys.
+
+"Run, you little devils," she cried.
+
+They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under
+the lights.
+
+"Give me a silver dollar," she said, turning to Sam, and when he had
+given it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp.
+The two boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her.
+
+Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps,
+striking Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black
+crawling thing, alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she
+crept forward and dropped it down the neck of the driver.
+
+In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam's
+head was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran
+back over the years he had passed since breaking his word to Sue, and a
+scorn of all effort burned in him.
+
+"It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth," he thought. "He comes to
+a fine end in life."
+
+On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the
+air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night
+there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the
+carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood
+climbed through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half
+hope awoke in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing,
+intoxicated woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot
+through him. He began thinking of what she had said before the laughing
+crowd on the steamer.
+
+"I have borne three children and can bear more."
+
+His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain,
+and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him.
+He thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of
+life unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command
+and direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company.
+
+"Else why am I here?" he muttered, looking away from the vacant,
+laughing face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver
+on the seat in front. "Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why
+went I about seeking Truth?"
+
+His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles
+and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her
+black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling
+beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her
+hand.
+
+"Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have
+been," he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he
+thought, was being tossed about by life.
+
+Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped.
+Through the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before
+a bar drinking foaming glasses of beer, the hanging lamps above their
+heads throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell
+came out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and
+shouted. "O Will, come out here."
+
+A man clad in a long white apron and with his shirt sleeves rolled to
+his elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had
+started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place.
+
+"Will you run it?" he asked.
+
+"Sure," she said. "The kids can take care of themselves."
+
+At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got
+out of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk
+skirting a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a
+tangled mass of bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and
+in the distance the grey body of the river showed faint and far away.
+The undergrowth was so thick that, looking down, one saw only the
+tops of the growth, with here and there a grey outcrop of rocks that
+glistened in the moonlight.
+
+Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the
+houses facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily
+on Sam's arm, her feet groping for the steps. They passed through a door
+and into a long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the
+room went up to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the
+end one looked into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor
+and about a table, under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three
+children. Sam looked at them closely. His head reeled and he clutched at
+the knob of the door. A boy of perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his
+face and on the backs of his hands and with reddish-brown hair and brown
+eyes, was reading aloud. Beside him a younger boy with black hair and
+black eyes, and with his knees doubled up on the chair in front of him
+so that his chin rested on them, sat listening. A tiny girl, pale and
+with yellow hair and dark circles under her eyes, slept in another
+chair, her head hanging uncomfortably to one side. She was, one would
+have said, seven, the black-haired boy ten.
+
+The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman;
+the sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired
+boy straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder.
+
+"Hello, Mother," he said heartily.
+
+The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the
+dining-room and pulled aside the curtains.
+
+"Come here, Joe," she said.
+
+The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside,
+supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he passed
+she struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him
+reeling into the dining-room.
+
+"Now you, Tom," she called to the black-haired boy. "I told you kids to
+wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten
+and nothing done and you two reading books again."
+
+The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam
+walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she
+winced and twisted in his grasp.
+
+"You come with me," he said.
+
+He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned
+heavily on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face.
+
+At the top of the stairway he stopped.
+
+"We go in here," she said, pointing to a door.
+
+He took her into the room. "You get to sleep," he said, and going out
+closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.
+
+Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off
+the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by
+the table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.
+
+Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back
+at him self-consciously.
+
+"Which of you two puts Mary to bed?" he asked, and then, without waiting
+for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. "Let Tom do it," he
+said. "I will help you here."
+
+Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going
+busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him
+dry wiping towels. Sam's coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.
+
+The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within
+Sam's breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though
+the lash of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old
+memories began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood,
+his mother at work among other people's soiled clothes, his father Windy
+coming home drunk, and the chill in his mother's heart and in his own.
+There was something men and women owed to childhood, not because it
+was childhood but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any
+question of fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.
+
+In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house
+there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam's spirit. The boy Joe
+went quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves.
+Somewhere on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The
+backs of the hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and
+competent the hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled,
+unshaken by life. Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He
+had always wanted quickness and firmness within his own body, the health
+of the body that is a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an
+American and down deep within himself was the moral fervor that is
+American and that had become so strangely perverted in himself and
+others. As so often happened with him, when he was deeply stirred, an
+army of vagrant thoughts ran through his head. The thoughts had taken
+the place of the perpetual scheming and planning of his days as a man of
+affairs, but as yet all his thinking had brought him to nothing and had
+only left him more shaken and uncertain then ever.
+
+The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to
+escape the shy silent presence of the boy. "Has life quite gone from me?
+Am I but a dead thing walking about?" he asked himself. The presence of
+the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown
+tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad.
+Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?
+
+The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two
+boys said good night to the strange man in their mother's house. Joe,
+the bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook
+it solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.
+
+"I'll be around here to-morrow I think," Sam said huskily.
+
+The boys were gone, into the silence of the house, and Sam walked up and
+down in the little room. He was restless as though about to start on a
+new journey and half unconsciously began running his hands over his body
+wishing it strong and hard as when he tramped the road. As on the day
+when he had walked out of the Chicago Club bound on his hunt for
+Truth, he let his mind go so that it played freely over his past life,
+reviewing and analysing.
+
+For hours he sat on the porch or walked up and down in the room where
+the lamp still burned brightly. Again the smoke from his pipe tasted
+good on his tongue and all the night air had a sweetness that brought
+back to him the walk beside the bridle path in Jackson Park when Sue had
+given him herself, and with herself a new impulse in life.
+
+It was two o'clock when he lay down upon a couch in the living-room and
+blew out the light. He did not undress, but threw his shoes on the floor
+and lay looking at a wide path of moonlight that came through the open
+door. In the darkness it seemed that his mind worked more rapidly and
+that the events and motives of his restless years went streaming past
+like living things upon the floor.
+
+Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy
+with sleep, ran through the upper part of the house.
+
+"Mother! O Mother!" called the sleepy voice, and Sam thought he could
+hear the little body moving restlessly in bed.
+
+Silence followed. He sat upon the edge of the couch, waiting. It seemed
+to him that he was coming to something; that his brain that had for
+hours been working more and more rapidly was about to produce the thing
+for which he waited. He felt as he had felt that night as he waited in
+the corridor of the hospital.
+
+In the morning the three children came down the stairs and finished
+dressing in the long room, the little girl coming last, carrying her
+shoes and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A
+cool morning wind blew up from the river and through the open screened
+doors as he and Joe cooked breakfast, and later as the four of them
+sat at the table Sam tried to talk but did not make much progress. His
+tongue was heavy and the children seemed looking at him with strange
+questioning eyes. "Why are you here?" their eyes asked.
+
+For a week Sam stayed in the city, coming daily to the house. With the
+children he talked a little, and in the evening, when the mother had
+gone away, the little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the
+porch outside and while the boys sat reading under the lamp inside she
+went to sleep in his arms. Her body was warm and the breath came softly
+and sweetly from between her lips. Sam looked down the bluffside and saw
+the country and the river far below, sweet in the moonlight. Tears came
+into his eyes. Was a new sweet purpose growing within him or were the
+tears but evidence of self pity? He wondered.
+
+One night the black-haired woman again came home far gone in drink, and
+again Sam led her up the stairs to see her fall muttering and babbling
+upon the bed. Her companion, a little flashily dressed man with a beard,
+had run off at the sight of Sam standing in the living-room under the
+lamp. The two boys, to whom he had been reading, said nothing, looking
+self-consciously at the book upon the table and occasionally out of the
+corner of their eyes at their new friend. In a few minutes they too
+went up the stairs, and as on that first night, they put out their hands
+awkwardly.
+
+Through the night Sam again sat in the darkness outside or lay awake on
+the couch. "I will make a new try, adopt a new purpose in life now," he
+said to himself.
+
+When the children had gone to school the next morning, Sam took a car
+and went into the city, going first to a bank to have a large draft
+cashed. Then he spent many busy hours going from store to store and
+buying clothes, caps, soft underwear, suit cases, dresses, night
+clothes, and books. Last of all he bought a large dressed doll. All
+these things he had sent to his room at the hotel, leaving a man there
+to pack the trunks and suit cases, and get them to the station. A large,
+motherly-looking woman, an employ� of the hotel, who passed through the
+hall, offered to help with the packing.
+
+After another visit or two Sam got back upon the car and went again to
+the house. In his pockets he had several thousands of dollars in large
+bills. He had remembered the power of cash in deals he had made in the
+past.
+
+"I will see what it will do here," he thought.
+
+In the house Sam found the black-haired woman lying on a couch in the
+living-room. As he came in at the door she arose unsteadily and looked
+at him.
+
+"There's a bottle in the cupboard in the kitchen," she said. "Get me a
+drink. Why do you hang about here?"
+
+Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with
+her by putting the bottle to his lips and throwing back his head.
+
+"What was your husband like?" he asked.
+
+"Who? Jack?" she said. "Oh, he was all right. He was stuck on me. He
+stood for anything until I brought men home here. Then he got crazy and
+went away." She looked at Sam and laughed.
+
+"I didn't care much for him," she added. "He couldn't make money enough
+for a live woman."
+
+Sam began talking of the saloon she intended buying.
+
+"The children will be a bother, eh?" he said.
+
+"I have an offer for the house," she said. "I wish I didn't have the
+kids. They are a nuisance."
+
+"I have been figuring that out," Sam told her. "I know a woman in the
+East who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I
+should like to do something to help you. I might take them to her."
+
+"In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away," she laughed, and took
+another drink from the bottle.
+
+Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown
+attorney.
+
+"Get a neighbour in here to witness this," he said. "The woman will want
+things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and
+puts it on her."
+
+She looked at him suspiciously. "What's the graft? Who gets stuck for
+the fares down east?"
+
+Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a
+tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.
+
+"Sign here," he said, putting the paper before her. "Here is your
+neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent."
+
+The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at
+Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle
+lay down again on the couch.
+
+"If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed,"
+she declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but
+at the moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take
+an advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in
+life, for purpose to come into his own life.
+
+Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at
+the brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an
+automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came
+out.
+
+He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children
+accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found
+the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit
+cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an
+envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked
+up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride
+of them.
+
+At two o'clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of
+the boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York
+flyer--bound for Sue.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money,
+that he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does
+not mean much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy
+Americans than is commonly believed. Something has happened to him
+that has happened to the others also, to how many of the others? Men
+of courage, with strong bodies and quick brains, men who have come of
+a strong race, have taken up what they had thought to be the banner of
+life and carried it forward. Growing weary they have stopped in a road
+that climbs a long hill and have leaned the banner against a tree. Tight
+brains have loosened a little. Strong convictions have become weak. Old
+gods are dying.
+
+  "It is only when you are torn from your mooring and
+    drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come
+    near to you."
+
+The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with
+determination.
+
+What is inscribed on it?
+
+It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have
+believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves
+Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been
+unknown among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life
+and courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads
+had to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What
+in Europe has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the
+generations we must build now, in a lifetime.
+
+In our father's day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio,
+Kentucky, and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in
+our fathers and mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land.
+When the land was conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in
+our American souls the wolves still howl.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three
+children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws
+of failure.
+
+But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still
+there. It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New
+England roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it
+looked down at him from the stars.
+
+Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept.
+Perhaps his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it
+began then.
+
+The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was
+a house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam's
+breast there was a feeling of something alive, growing.
+
+Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in
+Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by
+raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night,
+coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children--a
+little inclined toward tears and homesickness--she was flustered and
+nervous.
+
+Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate
+to the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe
+and Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come
+out at the front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little
+frightened. Her hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam
+thought her figure almost boyish in its slenderness.
+
+With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask
+many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question
+she did ask.
+
+"Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?" she
+asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the
+children.
+
+Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a
+help.
+
+"They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep," he
+said, as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with
+him three strange children were an everyday affair.
+
+Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the
+house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought
+together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other
+and little Mary put her arms about Sam's neck and hid her face on his
+shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue's
+arms. "She will be your mother now," he said defiantly, not looking at
+Sue.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and
+very nobly by Sue.
+
+There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted
+on that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come
+into her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly
+romantic act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening,
+both Sam and the children had been installed in the house.
+
+A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions
+regarding food for the children. "They will want bread and milk, and
+beds must be found for them," she said, and then, although her mind was
+still filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam's children
+by some other woman, she took her plunge. "This is Mr. McPherson, my
+husband, and these are our three children," she announced to the puzzled
+and smiling servant.
+
+They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden.
+In the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A
+little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more.
+"Don't bring lamps, a candle will do," Sue said, and she went to stand
+near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point
+of breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive
+sense of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children
+feel at home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys.
+"There is a barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you
+everything," she said, smiling at them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue's house and a
+road that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and
+the Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In
+the feeble light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick
+branches overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into
+the darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before
+the house.
+
+He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling
+for possession of his person.
+
+There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring
+always to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way,
+trampled people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped
+forward, the man of achievement.
+
+And then there was another personality, a quite different being
+altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a
+timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or
+walked before men.
+
+What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive
+thing within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him
+out of his place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many
+times it had tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him.
+
+It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against
+it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into
+darkness.
+
+He kept whispering to himself. Perhaps now the test of his life had
+come. There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. A basis
+for love and understanding might be found with her. Later the impulse
+could be carried on and into the lives of the children he had found and
+brought to her.
+
+A vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life,
+kneeling before the intricate wonder of life, came to him, but he was
+again afraid. When he saw Sue's figure, dressed in white, a dim, pale,
+flashing thing, coming down steps toward him, he wanted to run away, to
+hide himself in the darkness.
+
+And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because
+she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human
+perplexities.
+
+He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive
+within him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her.
+"Nothing but boldness will answer now," he kept saying to himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to
+tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he
+came to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path
+and stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.
+
+Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically.
+"I have taken them and you, of course," she said, after he had stepped
+to her and had put his arm about her waist. "My life alone hasn't turned
+out to be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them
+and you, in the house there. The two years you have been gone have
+seemed like an age. What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought
+they must be your own children by some other woman, some woman you had
+found to take my place. It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two
+must be nearly fourteen."
+
+They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue's command,
+found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped
+and excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.
+
+In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue's figure
+going through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room.
+Presently she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A
+place was being prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which
+he was to live what was left of his life.
+
+With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure
+of the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped
+down over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more
+intense.
+
+Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house
+darkly seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman,
+Sue, ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives
+together. Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three
+children who must begin life as he had once done, who must listen to
+his voice, the voice of Sue and all the other voices they would hear
+speaking words in the world. They would grow up and thrust out into a
+world of people as he had done.
+
+To what end?
+
+There was an end. Sam believed that stoutly. "To shift the load to the
+shoulders of children is cowardice," he whispered to himself.
+
+An almost overpowering desire to turn and run away from the house, from
+Sue who had so generously received him and from the three new lives into
+which he had thrust himself and in which in the future he would have to
+be concerned, took hold of him. His body shook with the strength of it,
+but he stood still under the trees. "I cannot run away from life. I must
+face it. I must begin to try to understand these other lives, to love,"
+he told himself. The buried inner thing in him thrust itself up.
+
+How still the night had become. In the tree beneath which he stood a
+bird moved on some slender branch and there was a faint rustling of
+leaves. The darkness before and behind was a wall through which he
+must in some way manage to thrust himself into the light. With his hand
+before him, as though trying to push aside some dark blinding mass, he
+moved out of the grove and thus moving stumbled up the steps and into
+the house.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Windy McPherson's Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+
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diff --git a/7443-8.zip b/7443-8.zip
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      Windy Mcpherson's Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    .side      { float: right; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
+               border-left: dashed thin; margin-left: 0.8em; text-align: left;
+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windy McPherson's Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Windy McPherson's Son
+
+Author: Sherwood Anderson
+
+
+Release Date: February, 2005  [EBook #7443]
+This file was first posted on April 30, 2003
+Last Updated: October 31, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON ***
+
+
+
+
+Text file produced by Anne Soulard, Eric Eldred, John R. Bilderback,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      WINDY MCPHERSON&rsquo;S SON
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By Sherwood Anderson
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h4>
+      To The Living Men And Women Of My Own Middle Western Home Town<br /> This
+      Book Is Dedicated
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>WINDY MCPHERSON&rsquo;S SON</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>BOOK I</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> <b>BOOK II</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER VII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER VIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER IX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> <b>BOOK III</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> <b>BOOK IV</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      WINDY MCPHERSON&rsquo;S SON
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson,
+      a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black eyes, and an
+      amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he walked, came
+      upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping town of Caxton in
+      Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked cautiously, lifting his
+      bare feet and putting them down with extreme deliberateness on the hot,
+      dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried a bundle of newspapers. A
+      long black cigar was in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In front of the station he stopped; and Jerry Donlin, the baggage-man,
+      seeing the cigar in his hand, laughed, and slowly drew the side of his
+      face up into a laboured wink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the game to-night, Sam?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stepped to the baggage-room door, handed him the cigar, and began
+      giving directions, pointing into the baggage-room, intent and
+      business-like in the face of the Irishman&rsquo;s laughter. Then, turning, he
+      walked across the station platform to the main street of the town, his
+      eyes bent on the ends of his fingers on which he was making computations
+      with his thumb. Jerry looked after him, grinning so that his red gums made
+      a splash of colour on his bearded face. A gleam of paternal pride lit his
+      eyes and he shook his head and muttered admiringly. Then, lighting the
+      cigar, he went down the platform to where a wrapped bundle of newspapers
+      lay against the building, under the window of the telegraph office, and
+      taking it in his arm disappeared, still grinning, into the baggage-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson walked down Main Street, past the shoe store, the bakery,
+      and the candy store kept by Penny Hughes, toward a group lounging at the
+      front of Geiger&rsquo;s drug store. Before the door of the shoe store he paused
+      a moment, and taking a small note-book from his pocket ran his finger down
+      the pages, then shaking his head continued on his way, again absorbed in
+      doing sums on his fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, from among the men by the drug store, a roaring song broke the
+      evening quiet of the street, and a voice, huge and guttural, brought a
+      smile to the boy&rsquo;s lips:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;He washed the windows and he swept the floor,
+  And he polished up the handle of the big front door.
+  He polished that handle so carefullee,
+  That now he&rsquo;s the ruler of the queen&rsquo;s navee.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The singer, a short man with grotesquely wide shoulders, wore a long
+      flowing moustache, and a black coat, covered with dust, that reached to
+      his knees. He held a smoking briar pipe in his hand, and with it beat time
+      for a row of men sitting on a long stone under the store window and
+      pounding on the sidewalk with their heels to make a chorus for the song.
+      Sam&rsquo;s smile broadened into a grin as he looked at the singer, Freedom
+      Smith, a buyer of butter and eggs, and past him at John Telfer, the
+      orator, the dandy, the only man in town, except Mike McCarthy, who kept
+      his trousers creased. Among all the men of Caxton, Sam most admired John
+      Telfer and in his admiration had struck upon the town&rsquo;s high light. Telfer
+      loved good clothes and wore them with an air, and never allowed Caxton to
+      see him shabbily or indifferently dressed, laughingly declaring that it
+      was his mission in life to give tone to the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Telfer had a small income left him by his father, once a banker in
+      the town, and in his youth he had gone to New York to study art, and later
+      to Paris; but lacking ability or industry to get on had come back to
+      Caxton where he had married Eleanor Millis, a prosperous milliner. They
+      were the most successful married pair in Caxton, and after years of life
+      together they were still in love; were never indifferent to each other,
+      and never quarrelled; Telfer treated his wife with as much consideration
+      and respect as though she were a sweetheart, or a guest in his house, and
+      she, unlike most of the wives in Caxton, never ventured to question his
+      goings and comings, but left him free to live his own life in his own way
+      while she attended to the millinery business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the age of forty-five John Telfer was a tall, slender, fine looking
+      man, with black hair and a little black pointed beard, and with something
+      lazy and care-free in his every movement and impulse. Dressed in white
+      flannels, with white shoes, a jaunty cap upon his head, eyeglasses hanging
+      from a gold chain, and a cane lightly swinging from his hand, he made a
+      figure that might have passed unnoticed on the promenade before some
+      fashionable summer hotel, but that seemed a breach of the laws of nature
+      when seen on the streets of a corn-shipping town in Iowa. And Telfer was
+      aware of the extraordinary figure he cut; it was a part of his programme
+      of life. Now as Sam approached he laid a hand on Freedom Smith&rsquo;s shoulder
+      to check the song, and, with his eyes twinkling with good-humour, began
+      thrusting with his cane at the boy&rsquo;s feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will never be ruler of the queen&rsquo;s navee,&rdquo; he declared, laughing and
+      following the dancing boy about in a wide circle. &ldquo;He is a little mole
+      that works underground intent upon worms. The trick he has of tilting up
+      his nose is only his way of smelling out stray pennies. I have it from
+      Banker Walker that he brings a basket of them into the bank every day. One
+      of these days he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Circling about on the stone sidewalk and dancing to escape the flying
+      cane, Sam dodged under the arm of Valmore, a huge old blacksmith with
+      shaggy clumps of hair on the back of his hands, and sought refuge between
+      him and Freedom Smith. The blacksmith&rsquo;s hand stole out and lay upon the
+      boy&rsquo;s shoulder. Telfer, his legs spread apart and the cane hooked upon his
+      arm, began rolling a cigarette; Geiger, a yellow skinned man with fat
+      cheeks and with hands clasped over his round paunch, smoked a black cigar,
+      and as he sent each puff into the air, grunted forth his satisfaction with
+      life. He was wishing that Telfer, Freedom Smith, and Valmore, instead of
+      moving on to their nightly nest at the back of Wildman&rsquo;s grocery, would
+      come into his place for the evening. He thought he would like to have the
+      three of them there night after night discussing the doings of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quiet once more settled down upon the sleepy street. Over Sam&rsquo;s shoulder,
+      Valmore and Freedom Smith talked of the coming corn crop and the growth
+      and prosperity of the country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Times are getting better about here, but the wild things are almost
+      gone,&rdquo; said Freedom, who in the winter bought hides and pelts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The men sitting on the stone beneath the window watched with idle interest
+      Telfer&rsquo;s labours with paper and tobacco. &ldquo;Young Henry Kerns has got
+      married,&rdquo; observed one of them, striving to make talk. &ldquo;He has married a
+      girl from over Parkertown way. She gives lessons in painting&mdash;china
+      painting&mdash;kind of an artist, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An ejaculation of disgust broke from Telfer: his fingers trembled and the
+      tobacco that was to have been the foundation of his evening smoke rained
+      on the sidewalk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An artist!&rdquo; he exclaimed, his voice tense with excitement. &ldquo;Who said
+      artist? Who called her that?&rdquo; He glared fiercely about. &ldquo;Let us have an
+      end to this blatant misuse of fine old words. To say of one that he is an
+      artist is to touch the peak of praise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Throwing his cigarette paper after the scattered tobacco he thrust one
+      hand into his trouser pocket. With the other he held the cane, emphasising
+      his points by ringing taps upon the pavement. Geiger, taking the cigar
+      between his fingers, listened with open mouth to the outburst that
+      followed. Valmore and Freedom Smith dropped their conversation and with
+      broad smiles upon their faces gave attention, and Sam McPherson, his eyes
+      round with wonder and admiration, felt again the thrill that always ran
+      through him under the drum beats of Telfer&rsquo;s eloquence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An artist is one who hungers and thirsts after perfection, not one who
+      dabs flowers upon plates to choke the gullets of diners,&rdquo; declared Telfer,
+      setting himself for one of the long speeches with which he loved to
+      astonish the men of Caxton, and glaring down at those seated upon the
+      stone. &ldquo;It is the artist who, among all men, has the divine audacity. Does
+      he not hurl himself into a battle in which is engaged against him all of
+      the accumulative genius of the world?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pausing, he looked about for an opponent upon whom he might pour the flood
+      of his eloquence, but on all sides smiles greeted him. Undaunted, he
+      rushed again to the charge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A business man&mdash;what is he?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;He succeeds by outwitting
+      the little minds with which he comes in contact. A scientist is of more
+      account&mdash;he pits his brains against the dull unresponsiveness of
+      inanimate matter and a hundredweight of black iron he makes do the work of
+      a hundred housewives. But an artist tests his brains against the greatest
+      brains of all times; he stands upon the peak of life and hurls himself
+      against the world. A girl from Parkertown who paints flowers upon dishes
+      to be called an artist&mdash;ugh! Let me spew forth the thought! Let me
+      cleanse my mouth! A man should have a prayer upon his lips who utters the
+      word artist!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, we can&rsquo;t all be artists and the woman can paint flowers upon dishes
+      for all I care,&rdquo; spoke up Valmore, laughing good naturedly. &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t all
+      paint pictures and write books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We do not want to be artists&mdash;we do not dare to be,&rdquo; shouted Telfer,
+      whirling and shaking his cane at Valmore. &ldquo;You have a misunderstanding of
+      the word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He straightened his shoulders and threw out his chest and the boy standing
+      beside the blacksmith threw up his chin, unconsciously imitating the
+      swagger of the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not paint pictures; I do not write books; yet am I an artist,&rdquo;
+       declared Telfer, proudly. &ldquo;I am an artist practising the most difficult of
+      all arts&mdash;the art of living. Here in this western village I stand and
+      fling my challenge to the world. &lsquo;On the lip of not the greatest of you,&rsquo; 
+      I cry, &lsquo;has life been more sweet.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned from Valmore to the men upon the stone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make a study of my life,&rdquo; he commanded. &ldquo;It will be a revelation to you.
+      With a smile I greet the morning; I swagger in the noontime; and in the
+      evening, like Socrates of old, I gather a little group of you benighted
+      villagers about me and toss wisdom into your teeth, striving to teach you
+      judgment in the use of great words.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk an almighty lot about yourself, John,&rdquo; grumbled Freedom Smith,
+      taking his pipe from his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The subject is complex, it is varied, it is full of charm,&rdquo; Telfer
+      answered, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking a fresh supply of tobacco and paper from his pocket, he rolled and
+      lighted a cigarette. His fingers no longer trembled. Flourishing his cane
+      he threw back his head and blew smoke into the air. He thought that in
+      spite of the roar of laughter that had greeted Freedom Smith&rsquo;s comment, he
+      had vindicated the honour of art and the thought made him happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the newsboy, who had been leaning against the storefront lost in
+      admiration, it seemed that he had caught in Telfer&rsquo;s talk an echo of the
+      kind of talk that must go on among men in the big outside world. Had not
+      this Telfer travelled far? Had he not lived in New York and Paris? Without
+      understanding the sense of what had been said, Sam felt that it must be
+      something big and conclusive. When from the distance there came the shriek
+      of a locomotive, he stood unmoved, trying to comprehend the meaning of
+      Telfer&rsquo;s outburst over the lounger&rsquo;s simple statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s the seven forty-five,&rdquo; cried Telfer, sharply. &ldquo;Is the war between
+      you and Fatty at an end? Are we going to lose our evening&rsquo;s diversion? Has
+      Fatty bluffed you out or are you growing rich and lazy like Papa Geiger
+      here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Springing from his place beside the blacksmith and grasping the bundle of
+      newspapers, Sam ran down the street, Telfer, Valmore, Freedom Smith and
+      the loungers following more slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the evening train from Des Moines stopped at Caxton, a blue-coated
+      train news merchant leaped hurriedly to the platform and began looking
+      anxiously about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hurry, Fatty,&rdquo; rang out Freedom Smith&rsquo;s huge voice, &ldquo;Sam&rsquo;s already half
+      through one car.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man called &ldquo;Fatty&rdquo; ran up and down the station platform. &ldquo;Where
+      is that bundle of Omaha papers, you Irish loafer?&rdquo; he shouted, shaking his
+      fist at Jerry Donlin who stood upon a truck at the front of the train,
+      up-ending trunks into the baggage car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jerry paused with a trunk dangling in mid-air. &ldquo;In the baggage-room, of
+      course. Hurry, man. Do you want the kid to work the whole train?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An air of something impending hung over the idlers upon the platform, the
+      train crew, and even the travelling men who began climbing off the train.
+      The engineer thrust his head out of the cab; the conductor, a dignified
+      looking man with a grey moustache, threw back his head and shook with
+      mirth; a young man with a suit-case in his hand and a long pipe in his
+      mouth ran to the door of the baggage-room, calling, &ldquo;Hurry! Hurry, Fatty!
+      The kid is working the entire train. You won&rsquo;t be able to sell a paper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The fat young man ran from the baggage-room to the platform and shouted
+      again to Jerry Donlin, who was now slowly pushing the empty truck along
+      the platform. From the train came a clear voice calling, &ldquo;Latest Omaha
+      papers! Have your change ready! Fatty, the train newsboy, has fallen down
+      a well! Have your change ready, gentlemen!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jerry Donlin, followed by Fatty, again disappeared from sight. The
+      conductor, waving his hand, jumped upon the steps of the train. The
+      engineer pulled in his head and the train began to move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fat young man emerged from the baggage-room, swearing revenge upon the
+      head of Jerry Donlin. &ldquo;There was no need to put it under a mail sack!&rdquo; he
+      shouted, shaking his fist. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be even with you for this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Followed by the shouts of the travelling men and the laughter of the
+      idlers upon the platform he climbed upon the moving train and began
+      running from car to car. Off the last car dropped Sam McPherson, a smile
+      upon his lips, the bundle of newspapers gone, his pocket jingling with
+      coins. The evening&rsquo;s entertainment for the town of Caxton was at an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Telfer, standing by the side of Valmore, waved his cane in the air
+      and began talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beat him again, by Gad!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Bully for Sam! Who says the
+      spirit of the old buccaneers is dead? That boy didn&rsquo;t understand what I
+      said about art, but he is an artist just the same!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Windy McPherson, the father of the Caxton newsboy, Sam McPherson, had been
+      war touched. The civilian clothes that he wore caused an itching of the
+      skin. He could not forget that he had once been a sergeant in a regiment
+      of infantry and had commanded a company through a battle fought in ditches
+      along a Virginia country road. He chafed under the fact of his present
+      obscure position in life. Had he been able to replace his regimentals with
+      the robes of a judge, the felt hat of a statesman, or even with the night
+      stick of a village marshal life might have retained something of its
+      sweetness, but to have ended by becoming an obscure housepainter in a
+      village that lived by raising corn and by feeding that corn to red steers&mdash;ugh!&mdash;the
+      thought made him shudder. He looked with envy at the blue coat and the
+      brass buttons of the railroad agent; he tried vainly to get into the
+      Caxton Cornet Band; he got drunk to forget his humiliation and in the end
+      he fell to loud boasting and to the nursing of a belief within himself
+      that in truth not Lincoln nor Grant but he himself had thrown the winning
+      die in the great struggle. In his cups he said as much and the Caxton corn
+      grower, punching his neighbour in the ribs, shook with delight over the
+      statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam was a twelve year old, barefooted boy upon the streets a kind of
+      backwash of the wave of glory that had swept over Windy McPherson in the
+      days of &lsquo;61 lapped upon the shores of the Iowa village. That strange
+      manifestation called the A. P. A. movement brought the old soldier to a
+      position of prominence in the community. He founded a local branch of the
+      organisation; he marched at the head of a procession through the streets;
+      he stood on a corner and pointing a trembling forefinger to where the flag
+      on the schoolhouse waved beside the cross of Rome, shouted hoarsely, &ldquo;See,
+      the cross rears itself above the flag! We shall end by being murdered in
+      our beds!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But although some of the hard-headed, money-making men of Caxton joined
+      the movement started by the boasting old soldier and although for the
+      moment they vied with him in stealthy creepings through the streets to
+      secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands the movement
+      subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its leader more
+      desolate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the little house at the end of the street by the shores of Squirrel
+      Creek, Sam and his sister Kate regarded their father&rsquo;s warlike pretensions
+      with scorn. &ldquo;The butter is low, father&rsquo;s army leg will ache to-night,&rdquo;
+       they whispered to each other across the kitchen table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Following her mother&rsquo;s example, Kate, a tall slender girl of sixteen and
+      already a bread winner with a clerkship in Winney&rsquo;s drygoods store,
+      remained silent under Windy&rsquo;s boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate them,
+      did not always succeed. There was now and then a rebellious muttering that
+      should have warned Windy. It had once burst into an open quarrel in which
+      the victor of a hundred battles withdrew defeated from the field. Windy,
+      half-drunk, had taken an old account book from a shelf in the kitchen, a
+      relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when he had first come to
+      Caxton, and had begun reading to the little family a list of names of men
+      who, he claimed, had been the cause of his ruin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is Tom Newman, now,&rdquo; he exclaimed excitedly. &ldquo;Owns a hundred acres
+      of good corn-growing land and won&rsquo;t pay for the harness on the backs of
+      his horses or for the ploughs in his barn. The receipt he has from me is
+      forged. I could put him in prison if I chose. To beat an old soldier!&mdash;to
+      beat one of the boys of &lsquo;61!&mdash;it is shameful!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard of what you owed and what men owed you; you had none the
+      worst of it,&rdquo; Sam protested coldly, while Kate held her breath and Jane
+      McPherson, at work over the ironing board in the corner, half turned and
+      looked silently at the man and the boy, the slightly increased pallor of
+      her long face the only sign that she had heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy had not pressed the quarrel. Standing for a moment in the middle of
+      the kitchen, holding the book in his hand, he looked from the pale silent
+      mother by the ironing board to the son now standing and staring at him,
+      and, throwing the book upon the table with a bang, fled the house. &ldquo;You
+      don&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; he had cried, &ldquo;you don&rsquo;t understand the heart of a
+      soldier.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a way the man was right. The two children did not understand the
+      blustering, pretending, inefficient old man. Having moved shoulder to
+      shoulder with grim, silent men to the consummation of great deeds Windy
+      could not get the flavour of those days out of his outlook upon life.
+      Walking half drunk in the darkness along the sidewalks of Caxton on the
+      evening of the quarrel the man became inspired. He threw back his
+      shoulders and walked with martial tread; he drew an imaginary sword from
+      its scabbard and waved it aloft; stopping, he aimed carefully at a body of
+      imaginary men who advanced yelling toward him across a wheatfield; he felt
+      that life in making him a housepainter in a farming village in Iowa and in
+      giving him an unappreciative son had been cruelly unfair; he wept at the
+      injustice of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The American Civil War was a thing so passionate, so inflaming, so vast,
+      so absorbing, it so touched to the quick the men and women of those
+      pregnant days that but a faint echo of it has been able to penetrate down
+      to our days and to our minds; no real sense of it has as yet crept into
+      the pages of a printed book; it yet wants its Thomas Carlyle; and in the
+      end we are put to the need of listening to old fellows boasting on our
+      village streets to get upon our cheeks the living breath of it. For four
+      years the men of American cities, villages and farms walked across the
+      smoking embers of a burning land, advancing and receding as the flame of
+      that universal, passionate, death-spitting thing swept down upon them or
+      receded toward the smoking sky-line. Is it so strange that they could not
+      come home and begin again peacefully painting houses or mending broken
+      shoes? A something in them cried out. It sent them to bluster and boast
+      upon the street corners. When people passing continued to think only of
+      their brick laying and of their shovelling of corn into cars, when the
+      sons of these war gods walking home at evening and hearing the vain
+      boastings of the fathers began to doubt even the facts of the great
+      struggle, a something snapped in their brains and they fell to chattering
+      and shouting their vain boastings to all as they looked hungrily about for
+      believing eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When our own Thomas Carlyle comes to write of our Civil War he will make
+      much of our Windy McPhersons. He will see something big and pathetic in
+      their hungry search for auditors and in their endless war talk. He will go
+      filled with eager curiosity into little G. A. R. halls in the villages and
+      think of the men who coming there night after night, year after year, told
+      and re-told endlessly, monotonously, their story of battle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us hope that in his fervour for the old fellows he will not fail to
+      treat tenderly the families of those veteran talkers; the families that
+      with their breakfasts and their dinners, by the fire at evening, through
+      fast day and feast day, at weddings and at funerals got again and again
+      endlessly, everlastingly this flow of war words. Let him reflect that
+      peaceful men in corn-growing counties do not by choice sleep among the
+      dogs of war nor wash their linen in the blood of their country&rsquo;s foe. Let
+      him, in his sympathy with the talkers, remember with kindness the heroism
+      of the listeners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a summer day Sam McPherson sat on a box before Wildman&rsquo;s grocery lost
+      in thought. In his hand he held the little yellow account book and in this
+      he buried himself, striving to wipe from his consciousness a scene being
+      enacted before his eyes upon the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The realisation of the fact that his father was a confirmed liar and
+      braggart had for years cast a shadow over his days and the shadow had been
+      made blacker by the fact that in a land where the least fortunate can
+      laugh in the face of want he had more than once stood face to face with
+      poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation was money in
+      the bank and with all the ardour of his boy&rsquo;s heart he strove to realise
+      that answer. He wanted to be a money-maker and the totals at the foot of
+      the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones that marked
+      the progress he had already made. They told him that the daily struggles
+      with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton&rsquo;s streets on bleak winter
+      evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when crowds filled the
+      stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he worked among them
+      tirelessly and persistently were not without fruit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, above the murmur of men&rsquo;s voices on the street, his father&rsquo;s
+      voice rose loud and insistent. A block further down the street, leaning
+      against the door of Hunter&rsquo;s jewelry store, Windy talked at the top of his
+      lungs, pumping his arms up and down with the air of a man making a stump
+      speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is making a fool of himself,&rdquo; thought Sam, and returned to his
+      bankbook, striving in the contemplation of the totals at the foot of the
+      pages to shake off the dull anger that had begun to burn in his brain.
+      Glancing up again, he saw that Joe Wildman, son of the grocer and a boy of
+      his own age, had joined the group of men laughing and jeering at Windy.
+      The shadow on Sam&rsquo;s face grew heavier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had been at Joe Wildman&rsquo;s house; he knew the air of plenty and of
+      comfort that hung over it; the table piled high with meat and potatoes;
+      the group of children laughing and eating to the edge of gluttony; the
+      quiet, gentle father who amid the clamour and the noise did not raise his
+      voice, and the well-dressed, bustling, rosy-cheeked mother. As a contrast
+      to this scene he began to call up in his mind a picture of life in his own
+      home, getting a kind of perverted pleasure out of his dissatisfaction with
+      it. He saw the boasting, incompetent father telling his endless tales of
+      the Civil War and complaining of his wounds; the tall, stoop-shouldered,
+      silent mother with the deep lines in her long face, everlastingly at work
+      over her washtub among the soiled clothes; the silent, hurriedly-eaten
+      meals snatched from the kitchen table; and the long winter days when ice
+      formed upon his mother&rsquo;s skirts and Windy idled about town while the
+      little family subsisted upon bowls of cornmeal mush everlastingly
+      repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half gone in
+      drink, and knew that he was boasting of his part in the Civil War. &ldquo;He is
+      either doing that or telling of his aristocratic family or lying about his
+      birthplace,&rdquo; he thought resentfully, and unable any longer to endure the
+      sight of what seemed to him his own degradation, he got up and went into
+      the grocery where a group of Caxton citizens stood talking to Wildman of a
+      meeting to be held that morning at the town hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Caxton was to have a Fourth of July celebration. The idea, born in the
+      heads of the few, had been taken up by the many. Rumours of it had run
+      through the streets late in May. It had been talked of in Geiger&rsquo;s drug
+      store, at the back of Wildman&rsquo;s grocery, and in the street before the New
+      Leland House. John Telfer, the town&rsquo;s one man of leisure, had for weeks
+      been going from place to place discussing the details with prominent men.
+      Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall over Geiger&rsquo;s drug store and
+      to a man the citizens of Caxton had turned out for the meeting. The
+      housepainter had come down off his ladder, the clerks were locking the
+      doors of the stores, men went along the streets in groups bound for the
+      hall. As they went they shouted to each other. &ldquo;The old town has woke up,&rdquo;
+       they called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a corner by Hunter&rsquo;s jewelry store Windy McPherson leaned against a
+      building and harangued the passing crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let the old flag wave,&rdquo; he shouted excitedly, &ldquo;let the men of Caxton show
+      the true blue and rally to the old standards.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right, Windy, expostulate with them,&rdquo; shouted a wit, and a roar of
+      laughter drowned Windy&rsquo;s reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson also went to the meeting in the hall. He came out of the
+      grocery store with Wildman and went along the street looking at the
+      sidewalk and trying not to see the drunken man talking in front of the
+      jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up and
+      down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the town&rsquo;s
+      life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned. He
+      squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window ledge
+      where he could watch the men come in and find seats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Caxton&rsquo;s one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a
+      living and a kind of standing in the town&rsquo;s life. To be a newsboy or a
+      bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in
+      the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great men
+      and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day
+      likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town owe to
+      future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the men of Caxton
+      and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the window ledge of the
+      hall while the other boys of the town waited on the sidewalk below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Telfer was chairman of the mass meeting. He was always chairman of
+      public meetings in Caxton. The industrious silent men of position in the
+      town envied his easy, bantering style of public address, while pretending
+      to treat it with scorn. &ldquo;He talks too much,&rdquo; they said, making a virtue of
+      their own inability with apt and clever words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer did not wait to be appointed chairman of the meeting, but went
+      forward, climbed the little raised platform at the end of the hall, and
+      usurped the chairmanship. He walked up and down on the platform bantering
+      with the crowd, answering gibes, calling to well-known men, getting and
+      giving keen satisfaction with his talent. When the hall was filled with
+      men he called the meeting to order, appointed committees and launched into
+      a harangue. He told of plans made to advertise the big day in other towns
+      and to get low railroad rates arranged for excursion parties. The
+      programme, he said, included a musical carnival with brass bands from
+      other towns, a sham battle by the military company at the fairgrounds,
+      horse races, speeches from the steps of the town hall, and fireworks in
+      the evening. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll show them a live town here,&rdquo; he declared, walking up
+      and down the platform and swinging his cane, while the crowd applauded and
+      shouted its approval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When a call came for voluntary subscriptions to pay for the fun, the
+      audience quieted down. One or two men got up and started to go out,
+      grumbling that it was a waste of money. The fate of the celebration was on
+      the knees of the gods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer arose to the occasion. He called out the names of the departing,
+      and made jests at their expense so that they dropped back into their
+      chairs unable to face the roaring laughter of the crowd, and shouted to a
+      man at the back of the hall to close and bolt the door. Men began getting
+      up in various parts of the hall and calling out sums, Telfer repeating the
+      name and the amount in a loud voice to young Tom Jedrow, clerk in the
+      bank, who wrote them down in a book. When the amount subscribed did not
+      meet with his approval, he protested and the crowd backing him up forced
+      the increase he demanded. When a man did not rise, he shouted at him and
+      the man answered back an amount.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly in the hall a diversion arose. Windy McPherson emerged from the
+      crowd at the back of the hall and walked down the centre aisle to the
+      platform. He walked unsteadily straightening his shoulders and thrusting
+      out his chin. When he got to the front of the hall he took a roll of bills
+      from his pocket and threw it on the platform at the chairman&rsquo;s feet. &ldquo;From
+      one of the boys of &lsquo;61,&rdquo; he announced in a loud voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd shouted and clapped its hands with delight as Telfer picked up
+      the bills and ran his finger over them. &ldquo;Seventeen dollars from our hero,
+      the mighty McPherson,&rdquo; he shouted while the bank clerk wrote the name and
+      the amount in the book and the crowd continued to make merry over the
+      title given the drunken soldier by the chairman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy on the window ledge slipped to the floor and stood with burning
+      cheeks behind the mass of men. He knew that at home his mother was doing a
+      family washing for Lesley, the shoe merchant, who had given five dollars
+      to the Fourth-of-July fund, and the resentment he had felt on seeing his
+      father talking to the crowd before the jewelry store blazed up anew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the taking of subscriptions, men in various parts of the hall began
+      making suggestions for added features for the great day. To some of the
+      speakers the crowd listened respectfully, at others they hooted. An old
+      man with a grey beard told a long rambling story of a Fourth-of-July
+      celebration of his boyhood. When voices interrupted he protested and shook
+      his fist in the air, pale with indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, sit down, old daddy,&rdquo; shouted Freedom Smith and a murmur of applause
+      greeted this sensible suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another man got up and began to talk. He had an idea. &ldquo;We will have,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;a bugler mounted on a white horse who will ride through the town at
+      dawn blowing the reveille. At midnight he will stand on the steps of the
+      town hall and blow taps to end the day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd applauded. The idea had caught their fancy and had instantly
+      taken a place in their minds as one of the real events of the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Windy McPherson emerged from the crowd at the back of the hall.
+      Raising his hand for silence he told the crowd that he was a bugler, that
+      he had been a regimental bugler for two years during the Civil War. He
+      said that he would gladly volunteer for the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd shouted and John Telfer waved his hand. &ldquo;The white horse for
+      you, McPherson,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson wriggled along the wall and out at the now unbolted door. He
+      was filled with astonishment at his father&rsquo;s folly, and was still more
+      astonished at the folly of these other men in accepting his statement and
+      handing over the important place for the big day. He knew that his father
+      must have had some part in the war as he was a member of the G. A. R., but
+      he had no faith at all in the stories he had heard him relate of his
+      experiences in the war. Sometimes he caught himself wondering if there
+      ever had been such a war and thought that it must be a lie like everything
+      else in the life of Windy McPherson. For years he had wondered why some
+      sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did not rise, and in a
+      matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing as the Civil War had
+      ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in the minds of pompous old
+      men demanding unearned glory of their fellows. Now hurrying along the
+      street with burning cheeks, he decided that after all there must have been
+      such a war. He had had the same feeling about birthplaces and there could
+      be no doubt that people were born. He had heard his father claim as his
+      birthplace Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana and Scotland. The
+      thing had left a kind of defect in his mind. To the end of his life when
+      he heard a man tell the place of his birth he looked up suspiciously, and
+      a shadow of doubt crossed his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the mass meeting Sam went home to his mother and presented the case
+      bluntly. &ldquo;The thing will have to be stopped,&rdquo; he declared, standing with
+      blazing eyes before her washtub. &ldquo;It is too public. He can&rsquo;t blow a bugle;
+      I know he can&rsquo;t. The whole town will have another laugh at our expense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jane McPherson listened in silence to the boy&rsquo;s outburst, then, turning,
+      went back to rubbing clothes, avoiding his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With his hands thrust into his trousers pocket Sam stared sullenly at the
+      ground. A sense of justice told him not to press the matter, but as he
+      walked away from the washtub and out at the kitchen door, he hoped there
+      would be plain talk of the matter at supper time. &ldquo;The old fool!&rdquo; he
+      protested, addressing the empty street. &ldquo;He is going to make a show of
+      himself again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Windy McPherson came home that evening, something in the eyes of the
+      silent wife, and the sullen face of the boy, startled him. He passed over
+      lightly his wife&rsquo;s silence but looked closely at his son. He felt that he
+      faced a crisis. In the emergency he was magnificent. With a flourish, he
+      told of the mass meeting, and declared that the citizens of Caxton had
+      arisen as one man to demand that he take the responsible place as official
+      bugler. Then, turning, he glared across the table at his son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, openly defiant, announced that he did not believe his father capable
+      of blowing a bugle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy roared with amazement. He rose from the table declaring in a loud
+      voice that the boy had wronged him; he swore that he had been for two
+      years bugler on the staff of a colonel, and launched into a long story of
+      a surprise by the enemy while his regiment lay asleep in their tents, and
+      of his standing in the face of a storm of bullets and blowing his comrades
+      to action. Putting one hand on his forehead he rocked back and forth as
+      though about to fall, declaring that he was striving to keep back the
+      tears wrenched from him by the injustice of his son&rsquo;s insinuation and,
+      shouting so that his voice carried far down the street, he declared with
+      an oath that the town of Caxton should ring and echo with his bugling as
+      the sleeping camp had echoed with it that night in the Virginia wood. Then
+      dropping again into his chair, and resting his head upon his hand, he
+      assumed a look of patient resignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy McPherson was victorious. In the little house a great stir and
+      bustle of preparation arose. Putting on his white overalls and forgetting
+      for the time his honourable wounds the father went day after day to his
+      work as a housepainter. He dreamed of a new blue uniform for the great day
+      and in the end achieved the realisation of his dreams, not however without
+      material assistance from what was known in the house as &ldquo;Mother&rsquo;s Wash
+      Money.&rdquo; And the boy, convinced by the story of the midnight attack in the
+      woods of Virginia, began against his judgment to build once more an old
+      dream of his father&rsquo;s reformation. Boylike, the scepticism was thrown to
+      the winds and he entered with zeal into the plans for the great day. As he
+      went through the quiet residence streets delivering the late evening
+      papers, he threw back his head and revelled in the thought of a tall
+      blue-clad figure on a great white horse passing like a knight before the
+      gaping people. In a fervent moment he even drew money from his carefully
+      built-up bank account and sent it to a firm in Chicago to pay for a
+      shining new bugle that would complete the picture he had in his mind. And
+      when the evening papers were distributed he hurried home to sit on the
+      porch before the house discussing with his sister Kate the honours that
+      had alighted upon their family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the coming of dawn on the great day the three McPhersons hurried hand
+      in hand toward Main Street. In the street, on all sides of them, they saw
+      people coming out of houses rubbing their eyes and buttoning their coats
+      as they went along the sidewalk. All of Caxton seemed abroad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Main Street the people were packed on the sidewalk, and massed on the
+      curb and in the doorways of the stores. Heads appeared at windows, flags
+      waved from roofs or hung from ropes stretched across the street, and a
+      great murmur of voices broke the silence of the dawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;s heart beat so that he was hard put to it to keep back the tears from
+      his eyes. He thought with a gasp of the days of anxiety that had passed
+      when the new bugle had not come from the Chicago company, and in
+      retrospect he suffered again the horror of the days of waiting. It had
+      been all important. He could not blame his father for raving and shouting
+      about the house, he himself had felt like raving, and had put another
+      dollar of his savings into telegrams before the treasure was finally in
+      his hands. Now, the thought that it might not have come sickened him, and
+      a little prayer of thankfulness rose from his lips. To be sure one might
+      have been secured from a nearby town, but not a new shining one to go with
+      his father&rsquo;s new blue uniform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A cheer broke from the crowd massed along the street. Into the street rode
+      a tall figure seated upon a white horse. The horse was from Culvert&rsquo;s
+      livery and the boys there had woven ribbons into its mane and tail. Windy
+      McPherson, sitting very straight in the saddle and looking wonderfully
+      striking in the new blue uniform and the broad-brimmed campaign hat, had
+      the air of a conqueror come to receive the homage of the town. He wore a
+      gold band across his chest and against his hip rested the shining bugle.
+      With stern eyes he looked down upon the people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lump in the throat of the boy hurt more and more. A great wave of
+      pride ran over him, submerging him. In a moment he forgot all the past
+      humiliations the father had brought upon his family, and understood why
+      his mother remained silent when he, in his blindness, had wanted to
+      protest against her seeming indifference. Glancing furtively up he saw a
+      tear lying upon her cheek and felt that he too would like to sob aloud his
+      pride and happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly and with stately stride the horse walked up the street between the
+      rows of silent waiting people. In front of the town hall the tall military
+      figure, rising in the saddle, took one haughty look at the multitude, and
+      then, putting the bugle to his lips, blew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the bugle came only a thin piercing shriek followed by a squawk.
+      Again Windy put the bugle to his lips and again the same dismal squawk was
+      his only reward. On his face was a look of helpless boyish astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in a moment the people knew. It was only another of Windy McPherson&rsquo;s
+      pretensions. He couldn&rsquo;t blow a bugle at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great shout of laughter rolled down the street. Men and women sat on the
+      curbstones and laughed until they were tired. Then, looking at the figure
+      upon the motionless horse, they laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy looked about him with troubled eyes. It is doubtful if he had ever
+      had a bugle to his lips until that moment, but he was filled with wonder
+      and astonishment that the reveille did not roll forth. He had heard the
+      thing a thousand times and had it clearly in his mind; with all his heart
+      he wanted it to roll forth, and could picture the street ringing with it
+      and the applause of the people; the thing, he felt, was in him, and it was
+      only a fatal blunder in nature that it did not come out at the flaring end
+      of the bugle. He was amazed at this dismal end of his great moment&mdash;he
+      was always amazed and helpless before facts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd began gathering about the motionless, astonished figure,
+      laughter continuing to send them off into something near convulsions.
+      Grasping the bridle of the horse, John Telfer began leading it off up the
+      street. Boys whooped and shouted at the rider, &ldquo;Blow! Blow!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The three McPhersons stood in a doorway leading into a shoe store. The boy
+      and the mother, white and speechless with humiliation, dared not look at
+      each other. In the flood of shame sweeping over them they stared straight
+      before them with hard, stony eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The procession led by John Telfer at the bridle of the white horse marched
+      down the street. Looking up, the eyes of the laughing, shouting man met
+      those of the boy and a look of pain shot across his face. Dropping the
+      bridle he hurried away through the crowd. The procession moved on, and
+      watching their chance the mother and the two children crept home along
+      side streets, Kate weeping bitterly. Leaving them at the door Sam went
+      straight on down a sandy road toward a small wood. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got my lesson.
+      I&rsquo;ve got my lesson,&rdquo; he muttered over and over as he went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the edge of the wood he stopped and leaning on a rail fence watched
+      until he saw his mother come out to the pump in the back yard. She had
+      begun to draw water for the day&rsquo;s washing. For her also the holiday was at
+      an end. A flood of tears ran down the boy&rsquo;s cheeks, and he shook his fist
+      in the direction of the town. &ldquo;You may laugh at that fool Windy, but you
+      shall never laugh at Sam McPherson,&rdquo; he cried, his voice shaking with
+      excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One evening, when he had grown so that he outtopped Windy, Sam McPherson
+      returned from his paper route to find his mother arrayed in her black,
+      church-going dress. An evangelist was at work in Caxton and she had
+      decided to hear him. Sam shuddered. In the house it was an understood
+      thing that when Jane McPherson went to church her son went with her. There
+      was nothing said. Jane McPherson did all things without words, always
+      there was nothing said. Now she stood waiting in her black dress when her
+      son came in at the door and he hurriedly put on his best clothes and went
+      with her to the brick church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Valmore, John Telfer, and Freedom Smith, who had taken upon themselves a
+      kind of common guardianship of the boy and with whom he spent evening
+      after evening at the back of Wildman&rsquo;s grocery, did not go to church. They
+      talked of religion and seemed singularly curious and interested in what
+      other men thought on the subject but they did not allow themselves to be
+      coaxed into a house of worship. To the boy, who had become a fourth member
+      of the evening gatherings at the back of the grocery store, they would not
+      talk of God, answering the direct questions he sometimes asked by changing
+      the subject. Once Telfer, the reader of poetry, answered the boy. &ldquo;Sell
+      papers and fill your pockets with money but let your soul sleep,&rdquo; he said
+      sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the absence of the others Wildman talked more freely. He was a
+      spiritualist and tried to make Sam see the beauties of that faith. On long
+      summer afternoons the grocer and the boy spent hours driving through the
+      streets in a rattling old delivery wagon, the man striving earnestly to
+      make clear to the boy the shadowy ideas of God that were in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although Windy McPherson had been the leader of a Bible class in his
+      youth, and had been a moving spirit at revival meetings during his early
+      days in Caxton, he no longer went to church and his wife did not ask him
+      to go. On Sunday mornings he lay abed. If there was work to be done about
+      the house or yard he complained of his wounds. He complained of his wounds
+      when the rent fell due, and when there was a shortage of food in the
+      house. Later in his life and after the death of Jane McPherson the old
+      soldier married the widow of a farmer by whom he had four children and
+      with whom he went to church twice on Sunday. Kate wrote Sam one of her
+      infrequent letters about it. &ldquo;He has met his match,&rdquo; she said, and was
+      tremendously pleased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In church on Sunday mornings Sam went regularly to sleep, putting his head
+      on his mother&rsquo;s arm and sleeping throughout the service. Jane McPherson
+      loved to have the boy there beside her. It was the one thing in life they
+      did together and she did not mind his sleeping the time away. Knowing how
+      late he had been upon the streets at the paper selling on Saturday
+      evenings, she looked at him with eyes filled with tenderness and sympathy.
+      Once the minister, a man with brown beard and hard, tightly-closed mouth,
+      spoke to her. &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you keep him awake?&rdquo; he asked impatiently. &ldquo;He needs
+      the sleep,&rdquo; she said and hurried past the minister and out of the church,
+      looking ahead of her and frowning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening of the evangelist meeting was a summer evening fallen on a
+      winter month. All day the warm winds had come up from the southwest. Mud
+      lay soft and deep in the streets and among the little pools of water on
+      the sidewalks were dry spots from which steam arose. Nature had forgotten
+      herself. A day that should have sent old fellows to their nests behind
+      stoves in stores sent them forth to loaf in the sun. The night fell warm
+      and cloudy. A thunder storm threatened in the month of February.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam walked along the sidewalk with his mother bound for the brick church,
+      wearing a new grey overcoat. The night did not demand the overcoat but Sam
+      wore it out of an excess of pride in its possession. The overcoat had an
+      air. It had been made by Gunther the tailor after a design sketched on the
+      back of a piece of wrapping paper by John Telfer and had been paid for out
+      of the newsboy&rsquo;s savings. The little German tailor, after a talk with
+      Valmore and Telfer, had made it at a marvellously low price. Sam swaggered
+      as he walked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not sleep in church that evening; indeed he found the quiet church
+      filled with a medley of strange noises. Folding carefully the new coat and
+      laying it beside him on the seat he looked with interest at the people,
+      feeling within him something of the nervous excitement with which the air
+      was charged. The evangelist, a short, athletic-looking man in a grey
+      business suit, seemed to the boy out of place in the church. He had the
+      assured business-like air of the travelling men who come to the New Leland
+      House, and Sam thought he looked like a man who had goods to be sold. He
+      did not stand quietly back of the pulpit giving out the text as did the
+      brown-bearded minister, nor did he sit with closed eyes and clasped hands
+      waiting for the choir to finish singing. While the choir sang he ran up
+      and down the platform waving his arms and shouting excitedly to the people
+      on the church benches, &ldquo;Sing! Sing! Sing! For the glory of God, sing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the song was finished, he began talking, quietly at first, of life in
+      the town. As he talked he grew more and more excited. &ldquo;The town is a
+      cesspool of vice!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;It reeks with evil! The devil counts it a
+      suburb of hell!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice rose, and sweat ran off his face. A sort of frenzy seized him.
+      He pulled off his coat and throwing it over a chair ran up and down the
+      platform and into the aisles among the people, shouting, threatening,
+      pleading. People began to stir uneasily in their seats. Jane McPherson
+      stared stonily at the back of the woman in front of her. Sam was horribly
+      frightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The newsboy of Caxton was not without a hunger for religion. Like all boys
+      he thought much and often of death. In the night he sometimes awakened
+      cold with fear, thinking that death must be just without the door of his
+      room waiting for him. When in the winter he had a cold and coughed, he
+      trembled at the thought of tuberculosis. Once, when he was taken with a
+      fever, he fell asleep and dreamed that he had died and was walking on the
+      trunk of a fallen tree over a ravine filled with lost souls that shrieked
+      with terror. When he awoke he prayed. Had some one come into his room and
+      heard his prayer he would have been ashamed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On winter evenings as he walked through the dark streets with the papers
+      under his arm he thought of his soul. As he thought a tenderness came over
+      him; a lump came into his throat and he pitied himself; he felt that there
+      was something missing in his life, something he wanted very badly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under John Telfer&rsquo;s influence, the boy, who had quit school to devote
+      himself to money making, read Walt Whitman and had a season of admiring
+      his own body with its straight white legs, and the head that was poised so
+      jauntily on the body. Sometimes he would awaken on summer nights and be so
+      filled with strange longing that he would creep out of bed and, pushing
+      open the window, sit upon the floor, his bare legs sticking out beyond his
+      white nightgown, and, thus sitting, yearn eagerly toward some fine
+      impulse, some call, some sense of bigness and of leadership that was
+      absent from the necessities of the life he led. He looked at the stars and
+      listened to the night noises, so filled with longing that the tears sprang
+      to his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once, after the affair of the bugle, Jane McPherson had been ill&mdash;and
+      the first touch of the finger of death reaching out to her&mdash;had sat
+      with her son in the warm darkness in the little grass plot at the front of
+      the house. It was a clear, warm, starlit evening without a moon, and as
+      the two sat closely together a sense of the coming of death crept over the
+      mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the evening meal Windy McPherson had talked voluminously, ranting and
+      shouting about the house. He said that a housepainter who had a real sense
+      of colour had no business trying to work in a hole like Caxton. He had
+      been in trouble with a housewife about a colour he had mixed for painting
+      a porch floor and at his own table he raved about the woman and what he
+      declared her lack of even a primitive sense of colour. &ldquo;I am sick of it
+      all,&rdquo; he shouted, going out of the house and up the street with uncertain
+      steps. His wife had been unmoved by his outburst, but in the presence of
+      the quiet boy whose chair touched her own she trembled with a strange new
+      fear and began to talk of the life after death, making effort after effort
+      to get at what she wanted to say, and only succeeding in finding
+      expression for her thoughts in little sentences broken by long painful
+      pauses. She told the boy she had no doubt at all that there was some kind
+      of future life and that she believed she should see and live with him
+      again after they had finished with this world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day the minister who had been annoyed because he had slept in his
+      church, stopped Sam on the street to talk to him of his soul. He said that
+      the boy should be thinking of making himself one of the brothers in Christ
+      by joining the church. Sam listened silently to the talk of the man, whom
+      he instinctively disliked, but in his silence felt there was something
+      insincere. With all his heart he wanted to repeat a sentence he had heard
+      from the lips of grey-haired, big-fisted Valmore&mdash;&ldquo;How can they
+      believe and not lead a life of simple, fervent devotion to their belief?&rdquo;
+       He thought himself superior to the thin-lipped man who talked with him and
+      had he been able to express what was in his heart he might have said,
+      &ldquo;Look here, man! I am made of different stuff from all the people there at
+      the church. I am new clay to be moulded into a new man. Not even my mother
+      is like me. I do not accept your ideas of life just because you say they
+      are good any more than I accept Windy McPherson just because he happens to
+      be my father.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During one winter Sam spent evening after evening reading the Bible in his
+      room. It was after Kate&rsquo;s marriage&mdash;she had got into an affair with a
+      young farmer that had kept her name upon the tongues of whisperers for
+      months but was now a housewife on a farm at the edge of a village some
+      miles from Caxton, and the mother was again at her endless task among the
+      soiled clothes in the kitchen and Windy McPherson off drinking and
+      boasting about town. Sam read the book in secret. He had a lamp on a
+      little stand beside his bed and a novel, lent him by John Telfer, beside
+      it. When his mother came up the stairway he slipped the Bible under the
+      cover of the bed and became absorbed in the novel. He thought it something
+      not quite in keeping with his aims as a business man and a money getter to
+      be concerned about his soul. He wanted to conceal his concern but with all
+      his heart wanted to get hold of the message of the strange book, about
+      which men wrangled hour after hour on winter evenings in the store.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not get it; and after a time he stopped reading the book. Left to
+      himself he might have sensed its meaning, but on all sides of him were the
+      voices of the men&mdash;the men at Wildman&rsquo;s who owned to no faith and yet
+      were filled with dogmatisms as they talked behind the stove in the
+      grocery; the brown-bearded, thin-lipped minister in the brick church; the
+      shouting, pleading evangelists who came to visit the town in the winter;
+      the gentle old grocer who talked vaguely of the spirit world,&mdash;all
+      these voices were at the mind of the boy pleading, insisting, demanding,
+      not that Christ&rsquo;s simple message that men love one another to the end,
+      that they work together for the common good, be accepted, but that their
+      own complex interpretation of his word be taken to the end that souls be
+      saved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the end the boy of Caxton got to the place where he had a dread of the
+      word soul. It seemed to him that the mention of the word in conversation
+      was something shameful and to think of the word or the shadowy something
+      for which the word stood an act of cowardice. In his mind the soul became
+      a thing to be hidden away, covered up, not thought of. One might be
+      allowed to speak of the matter at the moment of death, but for the healthy
+      man or boy to have the thought of his soul in his mind or word of it on
+      his lips&mdash;one might better become blatantly profane and go to the
+      devil with a swagger. With delight he imagined himself as dying and with
+      his last breath tossing a round oath into the air of his death chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime Sam continued to have inexplicable longings and hopes. He
+      kept surprising himself by the changing aspect of his own viewpoint of
+      life. He found himself indulging in the most petty meannesses, and
+      following these with flashes of a kind of loftiness of mind. Looking at a
+      girl passing in the street, he had unbelievably mean thoughts; and the
+      next day, passing the same girl, a line caught from the babbling of John
+      Telfer came to his lips and he went his way muttering, &ldquo;June&rsquo;s twice June
+      since she breathed it with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then into the complex nature of this boy came the sex motive. Already
+      he dreamed of having women in his arms. He looked shyly at the ankles of
+      women crossing the street, and listened eagerly when the crowd about the
+      stove in Wildman&rsquo;s fell to telling smutty stories. He sank to unbelievable
+      depths of triviality in sordidness, looking shyly into dictionaries for
+      words that appealed to the animal lust in his queerly perverted mind and,
+      when he came across it, lost entirely the beauty of the old Bible tale of
+      Ruth in the suggestion of intimacy between man and woman that it brought
+      to him. And yet Sam McPherson was no evil-minded boy. He had, as a matter
+      of fact, a quality of intellectual honesty that appealed strongly to the
+      clean-minded, simple-hearted old blacksmith Valmore; he had awakened
+      something like love in the hearts of the women school teachers in the
+      Caxton schools, at least one of whom continued to interest herself in him,
+      taking him with her on walks along country roads, and talking to him
+      constantly of the development of his mind; and he was the friend and boon
+      companion of Telfer, the dandy, the reader of poems, the keen lover of
+      life. The boy was struggling to find himself. One night when the sex call
+      kept him awake he got up and dressed, and went and stood in the rain by
+      the creek in Miller&rsquo;s pasture. The wind swept the rain across the face of
+      the water and a sentence flashed through his mind: &ldquo;The little feet of the
+      rain run on the water.&rdquo; There was a quality of almost lyrical beauty in
+      the Iowa boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this boy, who couldn&rsquo;t get hold of his impulse toward God, whose sex
+      impulses made him at times mean, at times full of beauty, and who had
+      decided that the impulse toward bargaining and money getting was the
+      impulse in him most worth cherishing, now sat beside his mother in church
+      and watched with wide-open eyes the man who took off his coat, who sweated
+      profusely, and who called the town in which he lived a cesspool of vice
+      and its citizens wards of the devil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evangelist from talking of the town began talking instead of heaven
+      and hell and his earnestness caught the attention of the listening boy who
+      began seeing pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into his mind there came a picture of a burning pit of fire in which great
+      flames leaped about the heads of the people who writhed in the pit. &ldquo;Art
+      Sherman would be there,&rdquo; thought Sam, materialising the picture he saw;
+      &ldquo;nothing can save him; he keeps a saloon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Filled with pity for the man he saw in the picture of the burning pit, his
+      mind centered on the person of Art Sherman. He liked Art Sherman. More
+      than once he had felt the touch of human kindness in the man. The roaring,
+      blustering saloonkeeper had helped the boy sell and collect for
+      newspapers. &ldquo;Pay the kid or get out of the place,&rdquo; the red-faced man
+      roared at drunken men leaning on the bar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, looking into the burning pit, Sam thought of Mike McCarthy, for
+      whom he had at that moment a kind of passion akin to a young girl&rsquo;s blind
+      devotion to her lover. With a shudder he realised that Mike also would go
+      into the pit, for he had heard Mike laughing at churches and declaring
+      there was no God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evangelist ran upon the platform and called to the people demanding
+      that they stand upon their feet. &ldquo;Stand up for Jesus,&rdquo; he shouted; &ldquo;stand
+      up and be counted among the host of the Lord God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the church people began getting to their feet. Jane McPherson stood
+      with the others. Sam did not stand. He crept behind his mother&rsquo;s dress,
+      hoping to pass through the storm unnoticed. The call to the faithful to
+      stand was a thing to be complied with or resisted as the people might
+      wish; it was something entirely outside of himself. It did not occur to
+      him to count himself among either the lost or the saved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the choir began singing and a businesslike movement began among the
+      people. Men and women went up and down the aisles clasping the hands of
+      people in the pews, talking and praying aloud. &ldquo;Welcome among us,&rdquo; they
+      said to certain ones who stood upon their feet. &ldquo;It gladdens our hearts to
+      see you among us. We are happy at seeing you in the fold among the saved.
+      It is good to confess Jesus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly a voice from the bench back of him struck terror to Sam&rsquo;s heart.
+      Jim Williams, who worked in Sawyer&rsquo;s barber shop, was upon his knees and
+      in a loud voice was praying for the soul of Sam McPherson. &ldquo;Lord, help
+      this erring boy who goes up and down in the company of sinners and
+      publicans,&rdquo; he shouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment the terror of death and the fiery pit that had possessed him
+      passed, and Sam was filled instead with blind, dumb rage. He remembered
+      that this same Jim Williams had treated lightly the honour of his sister
+      at the time of her disappearance, and he wanted to get upon his feet and
+      pour out his wrath on the head of the man, who, he felt, had betrayed him.
+      &ldquo;They would not have seen me,&rdquo; he thought; &ldquo;this is a fine trick Jim
+      Williams has played me. I shall be even with him for this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got to his feet and stood beside his mother. He had no qualms about
+      passing himself off as one of the lambs safely within the fold. His mind
+      was bent upon quieting Jim Williams&rsquo; prayers and avoiding the attention of
+      the people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The minister began calling on the standing people to testify of their
+      salvation. From various parts of the church the people spoke out, some
+      loudly and boldly and with a ring of confidence in their voices, some
+      tremblingly and hesitatingly. One woman wept loudly shouting between the
+      paroxysms of sobbing that seized her, &ldquo;The weight of my sins is heavy on
+      my soul.&rdquo; Girls and young men when called on by the minister responded
+      with shamed, hesitating voices asking that a verse of some hymn be sung,
+      or quoting a line of scripture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the back of the church the evangelist with one of the deacons and two
+      or three women had gathered about a small, black-haired woman, the wife of
+      a baker to whom Sam delivered papers. They were urging her to rise and get
+      within the fold, and Sam turned and watched her curiously, his sympathy
+      going out to her. With all his heart he hoped that she would continue
+      doggedly shaking her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly the irrepressible Jim Williams broke forth again. A quiver ran
+      over Sam&rsquo;s body and the blood rose to his cheeks. &ldquo;Here is another sinner
+      saved,&rdquo; shouted Jim, pointing to the standing boy. &ldquo;Count this boy, Sam
+      McPherson, in the fold among the lambs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the platform the brown-bearded minister stood upon a chair and looked
+      over the heads of the people. An ingratiating smile played about his lips.
+      &ldquo;Let us hear from the young man, Sam McPherson,&rdquo; he said, raising his hand
+      for silence, and, then, encouragingly, &ldquo;Sam, what have you to say for the
+      Lord?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Become the centre for the attention of the people in the church Sam was
+      terror-stricken. The rage against Jim Williams was forgotten in the spasm
+      of fear that seized him. He looked over his shoulder to the door at the
+      back of the church and thought longingly of the quiet street outside. He
+      hesitated, stammered, grew more red and uncertain, and finally burst out:
+      &ldquo;The Lord,&rdquo; he said, and then looked about hopelessly, &ldquo;the Lord maketh me
+      to lie out in green pastures.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the seats behind him a titter arose. A young woman sitting among the
+      singers in the choir put her handkerchief to her face and throwing back
+      her head rocked back and forth. A man near the door guffawed loudly and
+      went hurriedly out. All over the church people began laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam turned his eyes upon his mother. She was staring straight ahead of
+      her, and her face was red. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going out of this place and I&rsquo;m never
+      coming back again,&rdquo; he whispered, and, stepping into the aisle, walked
+      boldly toward the door. He had made up his mind that if the evangelist
+      tried to stop him he would fight. At his back he felt the rows of people
+      looking at him and smiling. The laughter continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the street he hurried along consumed with indignation. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll never go
+      into any church again,&rdquo; he swore, shaking his fist in the air. The public
+      avowals he had heard in the church seemed to him cheap and unworthy. He
+      wondered why his mother stayed in there. With a sweep of his arm he
+      dismissed all the people in the church. &ldquo;It is a place to make public
+      asses of the people,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson wandered through Main Street, dreading to meet Valmore and
+      John Telfer. Finding the chairs back of the stove in Wildman&rsquo;s grocery
+      deserted, he hurried past the grocer and hid in a corner. Tears of wrath
+      stood in his eyes. He had been made a fool of. He imagined the scene that
+      would go on when he came upon the street with the papers the next morning.
+      Freedom Smith would be there sitting in the old worn buggy and roaring so
+      that all the street would listen and laugh. &ldquo;Going to lie out in any green
+      pastures to-night, Sam?&rdquo; he would shout. &ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t you afraid you&rsquo;ll take
+      cold?&rdquo; By Geiger&rsquo;s drug store would stand Valmore and Telfer, eager to
+      join in the fun at his expense. Telfer would pound on the side of the
+      building with his cane and roar with laughter. Valmore would make a
+      trumpet of his hands and shout after the fleeing boy. &ldquo;Do you sleep out
+      alone in them green pastures?&rdquo; Freedom Smith would roar again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam got up and went out of the grocery. As he hurried along, blind with
+      wrath, he felt he would like a stand-up fight with some one. And, then,
+      hurrying and avoiding the people, he merged with the crowd on the street
+      and became a witness to the strange thing that happened that night in
+      Caxton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Main Street hushed people stood about in groups talking. The air was
+      heavy with excitement. Solitary figures went from group to group
+      whispering hoarsely. Mike McCarthy, the man who had denied God and who had
+      won a place for himself in the affection of the newsboy, had assaulted a
+      man with a pocket knife and had left him bleeding and wounded beside a
+      country road. Something big and sensational had happened in the life of
+      the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mike McCarthy and Sam were friends. For years the man had idled upon the
+      streets of the town, loitering about, boasting and talking. He had sat for
+      hours in a chair under a tree before the New Leland House, reading books,
+      doing tricks with cards, engaging in long discussions with John Telfer or
+      any who would stand up to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mike McCarthy got into trouble in a fight over a woman. A young farmer
+      living at the edge of Caxton had come home from the fields to find his
+      wife in the bold Irishman&rsquo;s arms and the two men had gone out of the house
+      together to fight in the road. The woman, weeping in the house, followed
+      to ask forgiveness of her husband. Running in the gathering darkness along
+      the road she had found him cut and bleeding terribly, lying in a ditch
+      under a hedge. On down the road she ran and appeared at the door of a
+      neighbour, screaming and calling for help.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of the fight in the road got to Caxton just as Sam came out of
+      the corner, back of the stove in Wildman&rsquo;s and appeared on the street. Men
+      ran from store to store and from group to group along the street saying
+      that the young farmer had died and that murder had been done. On a street
+      corner Windy McPherson harangued the crowd declaring that the men of
+      Caxton should arise in the defence of their homes and string the murderer
+      to a lamp post. Hop Higgins, driving a horse from Culvert&rsquo;s livery,
+      appeared on Main Street. &ldquo;He will be at the McCarthy farm,&rdquo; he shouted.
+      When several men, coming out of Geiger&rsquo;s drug store, stopped the marshal&rsquo;s
+      horse, saying, &ldquo;You will have trouble out there; you had better take
+      help,&rdquo; the little red-faced marshal with the crippled leg laughed. &ldquo;What
+      trouble?&rdquo; he asked&mdash;&ldquo;To get Mike McCarthy? I shall ask him to come
+      and he will come. The rest of that lot won&rsquo;t cut any figure. Mike can wrap
+      the entire McCarthy family around his finger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There were six of the McCarthy men, all, except Mike, silent, sullen men
+      who only talked when they were in liquor. Mike furnished the town&rsquo;s social
+      touch with the family. It was a strange family to live there in that fat,
+      corn-growing country, a family with something savage and primitive about
+      it, one that belonged among western mining camps or among the half savage
+      dwellers in deep alleys in cities, and the fact that it lived on a corn
+      farm in Iowa was, in the words of John Telfer, &ldquo;something monstrous in
+      Nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The McCarthy farm, lying some four miles east of Caxton, had once
+      contained a thousand acres of good corn-growing land. Lem McCarthy, the
+      father of the family, had inherited it from a brother, a gold miner, a
+      forty-niner, a sport owning fast horses, who planned to breed race horses
+      on the Iowa land. Lem had come out of the back streets of an eastern city,
+      bringing his brood of tall, silent, savage boys to live upon the land and,
+      like the forty-niner, to be a sport. Thinking the wealth that had come to
+      him vast beyond spending, he had plunged into horse racing and gambling.
+      When, within two years, five hundred acres of the farm had to be sold to
+      pay gambling debts, and the wide acres lay covered with weeds, Lem became
+      alarmed, and settled down to hard work, the boys working all day in the
+      field and at long intervals coming into town at night to get into trouble.
+      Having no mother or sister, and knowing that no Caxton woman could be
+      hired to go upon the place, they did their own housework; and on rainy
+      days sat about the old farmhouse playing cards and fighting. On other days
+      they would stand around the bar in Art Sherman&rsquo;s saloon in Piety Hollow
+      drinking until they had lost their savage silence and had become loud and
+      quarrelsome, going from there upon the streets to seek trouble. Once,
+      going into Hayner&rsquo;s restaurant, they took stacks of plates from shelves
+      back of the counter and, standing in the doorway, threw them at people
+      passing in the street, the crash of the breaking crockery accompanying
+      their roaring laughter. When they had driven the people to cover they got
+      upon their horses and with wild shouts raced up and down Main Street
+      between the rows of tied horses until Hop Higgins, the town marshal,
+      appeared, when they rode off into the country awakening the farmers along
+      the darkened road as they fled, shouting and singing, toward home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the McCarthy boys got into trouble in Caxton, old Lem McCarthy drove
+      into town and got them out of it, paying for the damage done and going
+      about declaring the boys meant no harm. When told to keep them out of town
+      he shook his head and said he would try.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mike McCarthy did not ride swearing and singing with the five brothers
+      along the dark road. He did not work all day in the hot corn fields. He
+      was the family gentleman, and, wearing good clothes, strolled instead upon
+      the street or loitered in the shade before the New Leland House. Mike had
+      been educated. For some years he had attended a college in Indiana from
+      which he was expelled for an affair with a woman. After his return from
+      college he stayed in Caxton, living at the hotel and making a pretence of
+      studying law in the office of old Judge Reynolds. He paid slight attention
+      to the study of law, but with infinite patience had so trained his hands
+      that he became wonderfully dexterous with coins and cards, plucking them
+      out of the air and making them appear in the shoes, the hats, and even in
+      the mouths, of bystanders. During the day he walked the streets looking at
+      the girl clerks in the stores, or stood upon the station platform waving
+      his hand to women passengers on passing trains. He told John Telfer that
+      the flattery of women was a lost art that he intended to restore. Mike
+      McCarthy carried in his pockets books which he read sitting in a chair
+      before the hotel or on the stones before store windows. When on Saturdays
+      the streets were filled with people, he stood on the corners giving
+      gratuitous performances of his magical art with cards and coins, and
+      eyeing country girls in the crowd. Once, a woman, the town stationer&rsquo;s
+      wife, shouted at him, calling him a lazy lout, whereupon he threw a coin
+      in the air, and when it did not come down rushed toward her shouting, &ldquo;She
+      has it in her stocking.&rdquo; When the stationer&rsquo;s wife ran into her shop and
+      banged the door the crowd laughed and shouted with delight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer had a liking for the tall, grey-eyed, loitering McCarthy and
+      sometimes sat with him discussing a novel or a poem; Sam in the background
+      listened eagerly. Valmore did not care for the man, shaking his head and
+      declaring that such a fellow could come to no good end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rest of the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this,
+      sunned himself in the town&rsquo;s displeasure. For the sake of the public furor
+      it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist, an
+      anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone cared
+      greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations of his
+      passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in Wildman&rsquo;s
+      grocery store he would stand whipping them into a frenzy by declaring for
+      free love, and vowing that he would have the best of any woman who gave
+      him the chance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For this man the frugal, hard working newsboy had conceived a regard
+      amounting to a passion. As he listened to McCarthy he got continuous
+      delightful little thrills. &ldquo;There is nothing he would not dare,&rdquo; thought
+      the boy. &ldquo;He is the freest, the boldest, the bravest man in town.&rdquo; When
+      the young Irishman, seeing the admiration in his eyes, flung him a silver
+      dollar saying, &ldquo;That is for your fine brown eyes, my boy; it I had them I
+      would have half the women in town after me,&rdquo; Sam kept the dollar in his
+      pocket and counted it a kind of treasure like the rose given a lover by
+      his sweetheart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was past eleven o&rsquo;clock when Hop Higgins returned to town with
+      McCarthy, driving quietly along the street and through an alley at the
+      back of the town hall. The crowd upon the street had broken up. Sam had
+      gone from one to another of the muttering groups, his heart quaking with
+      fear. Now he stood at the back of the mass of men gathered at the jail
+      door. An oil lamp, burning at the top of the post above the door, threw
+      dancing, flickering lights on the faces of the men before him. The thunder
+      storm that had threatened had not come, but the unnatural warm wind
+      continued and the sky overhead was inky black.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the alley, to the jail door, drove the town marshal, the young
+      McCarthy sitting in the buggy beside him. A man rushed forward to hold the
+      horse. McCarthy&rsquo;s face was chalky white. He laughed and shouted, raising
+      his hand toward the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Michael, son of God. I have cut a man with a knife so that his red
+      blood ran upon the ground. I am the son of God and this filthy jail shall
+      be my sanctuary. In there I shall talk aloud with my Father,&rdquo; he roared
+      hoarsely, shaking his fist at the crowd. &ldquo;Sons of this cesspool of
+      respectability, stay and hear! Send for your females and let them stand in
+      the presence of a man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking the white, wild-eyed man by the arm Marshal Higgins led him into
+      the jail, the clank of locks, the low murmur of the voice of Higgins and
+      the wild laughter of McCarthy floating out to the group of silent men
+      standing in the mud of the alley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson ran past the group of men to the side of the jail and
+      finding John Telfer and Valmore leaning silently against the wall of Tom
+      Folger&rsquo;s wagon shop slipped between them. Telfer put out his arm and laid
+      it upon the boy&rsquo;s shoulder. Hop Higgins, coming out of the jail, addressed
+      the crowd. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t answer if he talks,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;he is as crazy as a
+      loon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam moved closer to Telfer. The voice of the imprisoned man, loud, and
+      filled with a startling boldness, rolled out of the jail. He began
+      praying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hear me, Father Almighty, who has permitted this town of Caxton to exist
+      and has let me, Thy son, grow to manhood. I am Michael, Thy son. They have
+      put me in this jail where rats run across the floor and they stand in the
+      mud outside as I talk with Thee. Are you there, old Truepenny?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A breath of cold air blew up the alley followed by a flaw of rain. The
+      group under the flickering lamp by the jail entrance drew back against the
+      walls of the building. Sam could see them dimly, pressing closely against
+      the wall. The man in the jail laughed loudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had a philosophy of life, O Father,&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;I have seen men
+      and women here living year after year without children. I have seen them
+      hoarding pennies and denying Thee new life on which to work Thy will. To
+      these women I have gone secretly talking of carnal love. With them I have
+      been gentle and kind; them I have flattered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A roaring laugh broke from the lips of the imprisoned man. &ldquo;Are you there,
+      oh dwellers in the cesspool of respectability?&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;Do you stand
+      in the mud with cold feet listening? I have been with your wives. Eleven
+      Caxton wives without babes have I been with and it has been fruitless. The
+      twelfth woman I have just left, leaving her man in the road a bleeding
+      sacrifice to thee. I shall call out the names of the eleven. I shall have
+      revenge also upon the husbands of the women, some of whom wait with the
+      others in the mud outside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began calling off the names of Caxton wives. A shudder ran through the
+      body of the boy, sensitised by the new chill in the air and by the
+      excitement of the night. Among the men standing along the wall of the jail
+      a murmur arose. Again they grouped themselves under the flickering light
+      by the jail door, disregarding the rain. Valmore, stumbling out of the
+      darkness beside Sam, stood before Telfer. &ldquo;The boy should be going home,&rdquo;
+       he said; &ldquo;this isn&rsquo;t fit for him to hear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer laughed and drew Sam closer to him. &ldquo;He has heard enough lies in
+      this town,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Truth won&rsquo;t hurt him. I would not go myself, nor
+      would you, and the boy shall not go. This McCarthy has a brain. Although
+      he is half insane now he is trying to work something out. The boy and I
+      will stay to hear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice from the jail continued calling out the names of Caxton wives.
+      Voices in the group before the jail door began shouting: &ldquo;This should be
+      stopped. Let us tear down the jail.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McCarthy laughed aloud. &ldquo;They squirm, oh Father, they squirm; I have them
+      in the pit and I torture them,&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An ugly feeling of satisfaction came over Sam. He had a sense of the fact
+      that the names shouted from the jail would be repeated over and over
+      through the town. One of the women whose names had been called out had
+      stood with the evangelist at the back of the church trying to induce the
+      wife of the baker to rise and be counted in the fold with the lambs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rain, falling on the shoulders of the men by the jail door, changed to
+      hail, the air grew colder and the hailstones rattled on the roofs of
+      buildings. Some of the men joined Telfer and Valmore, talking in low,
+      excited voices. &ldquo;And Mary McKane, too, the hypocrite,&rdquo; Sam heard one of
+      them say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice inside the jail changed. Still praying, Mike McCarthy seemed
+      also to be talking to the group in the darkness outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sick of my life. I have sought leadership and have not found it. Oh
+      Father! Send down to men a new Christ, one to get hold of us, a modern
+      Christ with a pipe in his mouth who will swear and knock us about so that
+      we vermin who pretend to be made in Thy image will understand. Let him go
+      into churches and into courthouses, into cities, and into towns like this,
+      shouting, &lsquo;Be ashamed! Be ashamed of your cowardly concern over your
+      snivelling souls!&rsquo; Let him tell us that never will our lives, so miserably
+      lived, be repeated after our bodies lie rotting in the grave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sob broke from his lips and a lump came into Sam&rsquo;s throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh Father! help us men of Caxton to understand that we have only this,
+      our lives, this life so warm and hopeful and laughing in the sun, this
+      life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls
+      with their long legs and freckles on their noses, that are meant to carry
+      life within themselves, new life, kicking and stirring, and waking them at
+      night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice of the prayer broke. Wild sobs took the place of speech.
+      &ldquo;Father!&rdquo; shouted the broken voice, &ldquo;I have taken a life, a man that moved
+      and talked and whistled in the sunshine on winter mornings; I have
+      killed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice inside the jail became inaudible. Silence, broken by low sobs
+      from the jail, fell on the little dark alley and the listening men began
+      going silently away. The lump in Sam&rsquo;s throat grew larger. Tears stood in
+      his eyes. He went with Telfer and Valmore out of the alley and into the
+      street, the two men walking in silence. The rain had ceased and a cold
+      wind blew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy felt that he had been shriven. His mind, his heart, even his tired
+      body seemed strangely cleansed. He felt a new affection for Telfer and
+      Valmore. When Telfer began talking he listened eagerly, thinking that at
+      last he understood him and knew why men like Valmore, Wildman, Freedom
+      Smith, and Telfer loved each other and went on being friends year after
+      year in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings. He thought that he
+      had got hold of the idea of brotherhood that John Telfer talked of so
+      often and so eloquently. &ldquo;Mike McCarthy is only a brother who has gone the
+      dark road,&rdquo; he thought and felt a glow of pride in the thought and in the
+      apt expression of it in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Telfer, forgetting the boy, talked soberly to Valmore, the two men
+      stumbling along in the darkness intent upon their own thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is an odd thought,&rdquo; said Telfer and his voice seemed far away and
+      unnatural like the voice from the jail; &ldquo;it is an odd thought that but for
+      a quirk in the brain this Mike McCarthy might himself have been a kind of
+      Christ with a pipe in his mouth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Valmore stumbled and half fell in the darkness at a street crossing.
+      Telfer went on talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The world will some day grope its way into some kind of an understanding
+      of its extraordinary men. Now they suffer terribly. In success or in such
+      failures as has come to this imaginative, strangely perverted Irishman
+      their lot is pitiful. It is only the common, the plain, unthinking man who
+      slides peacefully through this troubled world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the house Jane McPherson sat waiting for her boy. She was thinking of
+      the scene in the church and a hard light was in her eyes. Sam went past
+      the sleeping room of his parents, where Windy McPherson snored peacefully,
+      and up the stairway to his own room. He undressed and, putting out the
+      light, knelt upon the floor. From the wild ravings of the man in the jail
+      he had got hold of something. In the midst of the blasphemy of Mike
+      McCarthy he had sensed a deep and abiding love of life. Where the church
+      had failed the bold sensualist succeeded. Sam felt that he could have
+      prayed in the presence of the entire town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Father!&rdquo; he cried, sending up his voice in the silence of the little
+      room, &ldquo;make me stick to the thought that the right living of this, my
+      life, is my duty to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By the door below, while Valmore waited on the sidewalk, Telfer talked to
+      Jane McPherson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted Sam to hear,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;He needs a religion. All young men
+      need a religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man like Mike McCarthy
+      keeps instinctively trying to justify himself before God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      John Telfer&rsquo;s friendship was a formative influence upon Sam McPherson. His
+      father&rsquo;s worthlessness and the growing realisation of the hardship of his
+      mother&rsquo;s position had given life a bitter taste in his mouth, and Telfer
+      sweetened it. He entered with zeal into Sam&rsquo;s thoughts and dreams, and
+      tried valiantly to arouse in the quiet, industrious, money-making boy some
+      of his own love of life and beauty. At night, as the two walked down
+      country roads, the man would stop and, waving his arms about, quote Poe or
+      Browning or, in another mood, would compel Sam&rsquo;s attention to the rare
+      smell of a hayfield or to a moonlit stretch of meadow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before people gathered on the streets he teased the boy, calling him a
+      little money grubber and saying, &ldquo;He is like a little mole that works
+      underground. As the mole goes for a worm so this boy goes for a five-cent
+      piece. I have watched him. A travelling man goes out of town leaving a
+      stray dime or nickel here and within an hour it is in this boy&rsquo;s pocket. I
+      have talked to banker Walker of him. He trembles lest his vaults become
+      too small to hold the wealth of this young Croesus. The day will come when
+      he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For all his public teasing of the boy Telfer had the genius to adopt a
+      different attitude when they were alone together. Then he talked to him
+      openly and freely as he talked to Valmore and Freedom Smith and to other
+      cronies of his on the streets of Caxton. Walking along the road he would
+      point with his cane to the town and say, &ldquo;You and that mother of yours
+      have more of the real stuff in you than the rest of the boys and mothers
+      of the town put together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In all Caxton Telfer was the only man who knew books and who took them
+      seriously. Sam sometimes found his attitude toward them puzzling and would
+      stand with open mouth listening as Telfer swore or laughed at a book as he
+      did at Valmore or Freedom Smith. He had a fine portrait of Browning which
+      he kept hung in the stable and before this he would stand, his legs spread
+      apart, and his head tilted to one side, talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A rich old sport you are, eh?&rdquo; he would say, grinning. &ldquo;Getting yourself
+      discussed by women and college professors in clubs, eh? You old fraud!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Toward Mary Underwood, the school teacher who had become Sam&rsquo;s friend and
+      with whom the boy sometimes walked and talked, Telfer had no charity. Mary
+      Underwood was a sort of cinder in the eyes of Caxton. She was the only
+      child of Silas Underwood, the town harness maker, who once had worked in a
+      shop belonging to Windy McPherson. After the business failure of Windy he
+      had started independently and for a time did well, sending his daughter to
+      a school in Massachusetts. Mary did not understand the people of Caxton
+      and the people misunderstood and distrusted her. Taking no part in the
+      life of the town and keeping to herself and to her books she awoke a kind
+      of fear in others. Because she did not join them at church suppers, or go
+      from porch to porch gossiping with other women through the long summer
+      evenings, they thought her something abnormal. On Sundays she sat alone in
+      her pew at church and on Saturday afternoons, come storm, come sunshine,
+      she walked on country roads and through the woods accompanied by a collie
+      dog. She was a small woman with a straight, slender figure and had fine
+      blue eyes filled with changing lights, hidden by the eye-glasses she
+      almost constantly wore. Her lips were very full and red, and she sat with
+      them parted so that the edges of her fine teeth showed. Her nose was
+      large, and a fine reddish-brown colour glowed in her cheeks. Though
+      different, she had, like Jane McPherson, a habit of silence; and under her
+      silence, she, like Sam&rsquo;s mother, possessed an unusually strong and
+      vigorous mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a child she was a sort of half invalid and had not been on friendly
+      footing with other children. It was then that her habit of silence and
+      reticence had been established. The years in the school in Massachusetts
+      restored her health but did not break this habit. She came home and took
+      the place in the schools to earn money with which to take her back East,
+      dreaming of a position as instructor in an eastern college. She was that
+      rare thing, a woman scholar, loving scholarship for its own sake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood&rsquo;s position in the town and in the schools was insecure. Out
+      of her silent, independent way of life had sprung a misunderstanding that,
+      at least once, had taken definite form and had come near driving her from
+      the town and schools. That she did not succumb to the storm of criticism
+      that for some weeks beat about her head was due to her habit of silence
+      and to a determination to get her own way in the face of everything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a suggestion of scandal that had put the grey hairs upon her head.
+      The scandal had blown over before the time of her friendship for Sam, but
+      he had known of it. In those days he knew of everything that went on in
+      the town&mdash;his quick ears and eyes missed nothing. More than once he
+      had heard the men waiting to be shaved in Sawyer&rsquo;s barber shop speak of
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tale ran that she had been involved in an affair with a real estate
+      agent who had afterward left town. It was said that the man, a tall,
+      fine-looking fellow, had been in love with Mary and had wanted to desert
+      his wife and go away with her. One night he had driven to Mary&rsquo;s house in
+      a closed buggy and the two had driven into the country. They had sat for
+      hours in the covered buggy at the side of the road and talked, and people
+      driving past had seen them there talking together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then she had got out of the buggy and walked home alone through snow
+      drifts. The next day she was at school as usual. When told of it the
+      school superintendent, a puttering old fellow with vacant eyes, had shaken
+      his head in alarm and declared that it must be looked into. He called Mary
+      into his little narrow office in the school building, but lost courage
+      when she sat before him, and said nothing. The man in the barber shop, who
+      repeated the tale, said that the real estate man drove on to a distant
+      station and took a train to the city, and that some days later he came
+      back to Caxton and moved his family out of town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam dismissed the story from his mind. Having begun a friendship for Mary
+      he put the man in the barber shop into a class with Windy McPherson and
+      thought of him as a pretender and liar who talked for the sake of talk. He
+      remembered with a shock the crude levity with which the loafers in the
+      shop had greeted the repetition of the tale. Their comments had come back
+      to his mind as he walked through the streets with his newspapers and had
+      given him a kind of jolt. He went along under the trees thinking of the
+      sunlight falling upon the grey hair as they walked together on summer
+      afternoons, and bit his lip and opened and closed his fist convulsively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During Mary&rsquo;s second year in the Caxton schools her mother died, and at
+      the end of another year, her father, failing in the harness business, Mary
+      became a fixture in the schools. The house at the edge of the town, the
+      property of her mother, had come down to her and she lived there with an
+      old aunt. After the passing of the wind of scandal concerning the real
+      estate man the town lost interest in her. She was thirty-six at the time
+      of her first friendship with Sam and lived alone among her books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had been deeply moved by her friendship. It had seemed to him
+      something significant that grown people with affairs of their own should
+      be so in earnest about his future as she and Telfer were. Boylike, he
+      counted it a tribute to himself rather than to the winsome youth in him,
+      and was made proud by it. Having no real feeling for books, and only
+      pretending to have out of a desire to please, he sometimes went from one
+      to the other of his two friends, passing off their opinions as his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this trick Telfer invariably caught him. &ldquo;That is not your notion,&rdquo; he
+      would shout, &ldquo;you have it from that school teacher. It is the opinion of a
+      woman. Their opinions, like the books they sometimes write, are founded on
+      nothing. They are not the real things. Women know nothing. Men only care
+      for them because they have not had what they want from them. No woman is
+      really big&mdash;except maybe my woman, Eleanor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam continued to be much in the company of Mary, Telfer grew more
+      bitter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would have you observe women&rsquo;s minds and avoid letting them influence
+      your own,&rdquo; he told the boy. &ldquo;They live in a world of unrealities. They
+      like even vulgar people in books, but shrink from the simple, earthy folk
+      about them. That school teacher is so. Is she like me? Does she, while
+      loving books, love also the very smell of human life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a way Telfer&rsquo;s attitude toward the kindly little school teacher became
+      Sam&rsquo;s attitude. Although they walked and talked together the course of
+      study she had planned for him he never took up and as he grew to know her
+      better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced appealed to him less
+      and less. He thought that she, as Telfer held, lived in a world of
+      illusion and unreality and said so. When she lent him books, he put them
+      in his pocket and did not read them. When he did read, he thought the
+      books reminded him of something that hurt him. They were in some way false
+      and pretentious. He thought they were like his father. One day he tried
+      reading aloud to Telfer from a book Mary Underwood had lent him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story was one of a poetic man with long, unclean fingernails who went
+      among people preaching the doctrine of beauty. It began with a scene on a
+      hillside in a rainstorm where the poetic man sat under a tent writing a
+      letter to his sweetheart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer was beside himself. Jumping from his seat under a tree by the
+      roadside he waved his arms and shouted:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop! Stop it! Do not go on with it. The story lies. A man could not
+      write love letters under the circumstances and he was a fool to pitch his
+      tent on a hillside. A man in a tent on a hillside in a storm would be cold
+      and wet and getting the rheumatism. To be writing letters he would need to
+      be an unspeakable ass. He had better be out digging a trench to keep the
+      water from running through his tent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Waving his arms, Telfer went off up the road and Sam followed thinking him
+      altogether right, and, if later in life he learned that there are men who
+      could write love letters on a piece of housetop in a flood, he did not
+      know it then and the least suggestion of windiness or pretence lay heavy
+      in his stomach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer had a vast enthusiasm for Bellamy&rsquo;s &ldquo;Looking Backward,&rdquo; and read it
+      aloud to his wife on Sunday afternoons, sitting under the apple trees in
+      the garden. They had a fund of little personal jokes and sayings that they
+      were forever laughing over, and she had infinite delight in his comments
+      on the life and people of Caxton, but did not share his love of books.
+      When she sometimes went to sleep in her chair during the Sunday afternoon
+      readings he poked her with his cane and laughingly told her to wake up and
+      listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning&rsquo;s verses his
+      favourites were &ldquo;A Light Woman&rdquo; and &ldquo;Fra Lippo Lippi,&rdquo; and he would recite
+      these aloud with great gusto. He declared Mark Twain the greatest man in
+      the world and in certain moods he would walk the road beside Sam reciting
+      over and over one or two lines of verse, often this from Poe:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  Helen, thy beauty is to me
+  Like some Nicean bark of yore.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Then, stopping and turning upon the boy, he would demand whether or not
+      the writing of such lines wasn&rsquo;t worth living a life for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer had a pack of dogs that always went with them on their walks at
+      night and he had for them long Latin names that Sam could never remember.
+      One summer be bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and gave great
+      attention to the colt, which he named Bellamy Boy, trotting him up and
+      down a little driveway by the side of his house for hours at a time and
+      declaring he would be a great trotting horse. He could recite the colt&rsquo;s
+      pedigree with great gusto and when he had been talking to Sam of some book
+      he would repay the boy&rsquo;s attention by saying, &ldquo;You, my boy, are as far
+      superior to the run of boys about town as the colt, Bellamy Boy, is
+      superior to the farm horses that are hitched along Main Street on Saturday
+      afternoons.&rdquo; And then, with a wave of his hand and a look of much
+      seriousness on his face, he would add, &ldquo;And for the same reason. You have
+      been, like him, under a master trainer of youth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening Sam, now grown to man&rsquo;s stature and full of the awkwardness
+      and self-consciousness of his new growth, was sitting on a cracker barrel
+      at the back of Wildman&rsquo;s grocery. It was a summer evening and a breeze
+      blew through the open doors swaying the hanging oil lamps that burned and
+      sputtered overhead. As usual he was listening in silence to the talk that
+      went on among the men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Standing with legs wide apart and from time to time jabbing with his cane
+      at Sam&rsquo;s legs, John Telfer held forth on the subject of love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a theme that poets do well to write of,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;In writing
+      of it they avoid the necessity of embracing it. In trying for a
+      well-turned line they forget to look at well-turned ankles. He who sings
+      most passionately of love has been in love the least; he woos the goddess
+      of poesy and only gets into trouble when he, like John Keats, turns to the
+      daughter of a villager and tries to live the lines he has written.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stuff and nonsense,&rdquo; roared Freedom Smith, who had been sitting tilted
+      far back in a chair with his feet against the cold stove, smoking a short,
+      black pipe, and who now brought his feet down upon the floor with a bang.
+      Admiring Telfer&rsquo;s flow of words he pretended to be filled with scorn. &ldquo;The
+      night is too hot for eloquence,&rdquo; he bellowed. &ldquo;If you must be eloquent
+      talk of ice cream or mint juleps or recite a verse about the old swimming
+      pool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer, wetting his finger, thrust it into the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The wind is in the north-west; the beasts roar; we will have a storm,&rdquo; he
+      said, winking at Valmore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Banker Walker came into the store, followed by his daughter. She was a
+      small, dark-skinned girl with black, quick eyes. Seeing Sam sitting with
+      swinging legs upon the cracker barrel she spoke to her father and went out
+      of the store. At the sidewalk she stopped and, turning, made a quick
+      motion with her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam jumped off the cracker barrel and strolled toward the street door. A
+      flush was on his cheeks. His mouth felt hot and dry. He went with extreme
+      deliberateness, stopping to bow to the banker, and for a moment lingering
+      to read a newspaper that lay upon the cigar case, to avoid the comments he
+      feared his going might excite among the men by the stove. In his heart he
+      trembled lest the girl should have disappeared down the street, and with
+      his eyes, he looked guiltily at the banker, who had joined the group at
+      the back of the store and who now stood listening to the talk, while he
+      read from a list held in his hand and Wildman went here and there doing up
+      packages and repeating aloud the names of articles called off by the
+      banker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of the lighted business section of Main Street, Sam found the
+      girl waiting for him. She began to tell of the subterfuge by which she had
+      escaped her father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told him I would go home with my sister,&rdquo; she said, tossing her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking hold of the boy&rsquo;s hand, she led him along the shaded street. For
+      the first time Sam walked in the company of one of the strange beings that
+      had begun to bring him uneasy nights, and overcome with the wonder of it
+      the blood climbed through his body and made his head reel so that he
+      walked in silence unable to understand his own emotions. He felt the soft
+      hand of the girl with delight; his heart pounded against the walls of his
+      chest and a choking sensation gripped at his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking along the street, past lighted residences where the low voices of
+      women in talk greeted his ears, Sam was inordinately proud. He thought
+      that he should like to turn and walk with this girl through the lighted
+      Main Street. Had she not chosen him from among all the boys of the town;
+      had she not, with a flutter of her little, white hand, called to him with
+      a call that he wondered the men upon the cracker barrels had not heard?
+      Her boldness and his own took his breath away. He could not talk. His
+      tongue seemed paralysed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down the street went the boy and girl, loitering in the shadows, hurrying
+      past the dim oil lamps at street crossings, getting from each other wave
+      after wave of exquisite little thrills. Neither spoke. They were beyond
+      words. Had they not together done this daring thing?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the shadow of a tree they stopped and stood facing each other; the girl
+      looked at the ground and stood facing the boy. Putting out his hand he
+      laid it upon her shoulder. In the darkness on the other side of the street
+      a man stumbled homeward along a board sidewalk. The lights of Main Street
+      glowed in the distance. Sam drew the girl toward him. She raised her head.
+      Their lips met, and then, throwing her arms about his neck, she kissed him
+      again and again eagerly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;s return to Wildman&rsquo;s was marked by extreme caution. Although he had
+      been absent but fifteen minutes it seemed to him that hours must have
+      passed and he would not have been surprised to see the stores locked and
+      darkness settled down on Main Street. It was inconceivable that the grocer
+      could still be wrapping packages for banker Walker. Worlds had been
+      remade. Manhood had come to him. Why! the man should have wrapped the
+      entire store, package after package, and sent it to the ends of the earth.
+      He lingered in the shadows at the first of the store lights where ages
+      before he had gone, a mere boy, to meet her, a mere girl, and looked with
+      wonder at the lighted way before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam crossed the street and, from the front of Sawyer&rsquo;s barber shop, looked
+      into Wildman&rsquo;s. He felt like a spy looking into the camp of an enemy.
+      There before him sat the men into whose midst he had it in his power to
+      cast a thunderbolt. He might walk to the door and say, truthfully enough,
+      &ldquo;Here before you is a boy that by the flutter of a white hand has been
+      made into a man; here is one who has wrung the heart of womankind and
+      eaten his fill at the tree of the knowledge of life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the grocery the talk still continued among the men upon the cracker
+      barrels who seemed unconscious of the boy&rsquo;s slinking entrance. Indeed,
+      their talk had sunk. From talking of love and of poets they talked of corn
+      and of steers. Banker Walker, his packages of groceries lying on the
+      counter, smoked a cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can fairly hear the corn growing to-night,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It wants but
+      another shower or two and we shall have a record crop. I plan to feed a
+      hundred steers at my farm out Rabbit Road this winter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy climbed again upon a cracker barrel and tried to look unconcerned
+      and interested in the talk. Still his heart thumped; still a throbbing
+      went on in his wrists. He turned and looked at the floor hoping his
+      agitation would pass unnoticed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The banker, taking up the packages, walked out at the door. Valmore and
+      Freedom Smith went over to the livery barn for a game of pinochle. And
+      John Telfer, twirling his cane and calling to a troup of dogs that
+      loitered in an alley back of the store, took Sam for a walk into the
+      country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will continue this talk of love,&rdquo; said Telfer, striking at weeds along
+      the road with his cane and from time to time calling sharply to the dogs
+      that, filled with delight at being abroad, ran growling and tumbling over
+      each other in the dusty road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Freedom Smith is a sample of life in this town. At the word love he
+      drops his feet upon the floor and pretends to be filled with disgust. He
+      will talk of corn or steers or of the stinking hides that he buys, but at
+      the mention of the word love he is like a hen that has seen a hawk in the
+      sky. He runs about in circles making a fuss. &lsquo;Here! Here! Here!&rsquo; he cries,
+      &lsquo;you are making public something that should be kept hidden. You are doing
+      in the light of day what should only be done with a shamed face in a
+      darkened room.&rsquo; Why, boy, if I were a woman in this town I would not stand
+      it&mdash;I would go to New York, to France, to Paris&mdash;To be wooed for
+      but a passing moment by a shame-faced yokel without art&mdash;uh&mdash;it
+      is unthinkable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man and the boy walked in silence. The dogs, scenting a rabbit,
+      disappeared across a long pasture, their master letting them go. From time
+      to time he threw back his head and took long breaths of the night air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not like banker Walker,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;He thinks of the growing corn
+      in terms of fat steers feeding on the Rabbit Run farm; I think of it as
+      something majestic. I see the long corn rows with the men and the horses
+      half hidden, hot and breathless, and I think of a vast river of life. I
+      catch a breath of the flame that was in the mind of the man who said, &lsquo;The
+      land is flowing with milk and honey.&rsquo; I am made happy by my thoughts not
+      by the dollars clinking in my pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then in the fall when the corn stands shocked I see another picture.
+      Here and there in companies stand the armies of the corn. It puts a ring
+      in my voice to look at them. &lsquo;These orderly armies has mankind brought out
+      of chaos,&rsquo; I say to myself. &lsquo;On a smoking black ball flung by the hand of
+      God out of illimitable space has man stood up these armies to defend his
+      home against the grim attacking armies of want.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer stopped and stood in the road with his legs spread apart. He took
+      off his hat and throwing back his head laughed up at the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Freedom Smith should hear me now,&rdquo; he cried, rocking back and forth with
+      laughter and switching his cane at the boy&rsquo;s legs so that Sam had to hop
+      merrily about in the road to avoid it. &ldquo;Flung by the hand of God out of
+      illimitable space&mdash;eh! not bad, eh! I should be in Congress. I am
+      wasted here. I am throwing priceless eloquence to dogs who prefer to chase
+      rabbits and to a boy who is the worst little money grubber in the town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The midsummer madness that had seized Telfer passed and for a time he
+      walked in silence. Suddenly, putting his arm on the boy&rsquo;s shoulder, he
+      stopped and pointed to where a faint light in the sky marked the lighted
+      town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are good people,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but their ways are not my ways or your
+      ways. You will go out of the town. You have genius. You will be a man of
+      finance. I have watched you. You are not niggardly and you do not cheat
+      and lie&mdash;result&mdash;you will not be a little business man. What
+      have you? You have the gift of seeing dollars where the rest of the boys
+      of the town see nothing and you are tireless after those dollars&mdash;you
+      will be a big man of dollars, it is plain.&rdquo; Into his voice came a touch of
+      bitterness. &ldquo;I also was marked out. Why do I carry a cane? why do I not
+      buy a farm and raise steers? I am the most worthless thing alive. I have
+      the touch of genius without the energy to make it count.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;s mind that had been inflamed by the kiss of the girl cooled in the
+      presence of Telfer. In the summer madness of the talking man there was
+      something soothing to the fever in his blood. He followed the words
+      eagerly, seeing pictures, getting thrills, filled with happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the edge of town a buggy passed the walking pair. In the buggy sat a
+      young farmer, his arm about the waist of a girl, her head upon his
+      shoulder. Far in the distance sounded the faint call of the dogs. Sam and
+      Telfer sat down on a grassy bank under a tree while Telfer rolled and
+      lighted a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I promised, I will talk to you of love,&rdquo; he said, making a wide sweep
+      with his arm each time as he put his cigarette into his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grassy bank on which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot
+      days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind
+      them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of
+      serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer and his
+      face became serious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My foolishness is more than half earnest,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I think that a man
+      or boy who has set for himself a task had better let women and girls
+      alone. If he be a man of genius, he has a purpose independent of all the
+      world, and should cut and slash and pound his way toward his mark,
+      forgetting every one, particularly the woman that would come to grips with
+      him. She also has a mark toward which she goes. She is at war with him and
+      has a purpose that is not his purpose. She believes that the pursuit of
+      women is an end for a life. For all they now condemn Mike McCarthy who
+      went to the asylum because of them and who, while loving life, came near
+      to taking life, the women of Caxton do not condemn his madness for
+      themselves; they do not blame him for loitering away his good years or for
+      making an abortive mess of his good brain. While he made an art of the
+      pursuit of women they applauded secretly. Did not twelve of them accept
+      the challenge thrown out by his eyes as he loitered in the streets?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man, who had begun talking quietly and seriously, raised his voice and
+      waved the lighted cigarette in the air and the boy who had begun to think
+      again of the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker listened attentively.
+      The barking of the dogs grew nearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you as a boy can get from me, a grown man, an understanding of the
+      purpose of women you will not have lived in this town for nothing. Set
+      your mark at money making if you will, but drive at that. Let yourself but
+      go and a sweet wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd or a pair of
+      little feet running over a dance floor will retard your growth for years.
+      No man or boy can grow toward the purpose of a life while he thinks of
+      women. Let him try it and he will be undone. What is to him a passing
+      humour is to them an end. They are diabolically clever. They will run and
+      stop and run and stop again, keeping just without his reach. He sees them
+      here and there about him. His mind is filled with vague, delicious
+      thoughts that come out of the very air; before he realises what he has
+      done he has spent his years in vain pursuit and turning finds himself old
+      and undone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer began jabbing at the ground with his stick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had my chance. In New York I had money to live on and time to have made
+      an artist of myself. I won prize after prize. The master, walking up and
+      down back of us, lingered longest over my easel. There was a fellow sat
+      beside me who had nothing. I made sport of him and called him Sleepy Jock
+      after a dog we used to have about our house here in Caxton. Now I am here
+      idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only last week I saw in
+      a paper that he had won a place among the world&rsquo;s great artists by a
+      picture he has painted. In the school I watched for a look in the eyes of
+      the girl students and went about with them night after night winning, like
+      Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy Jock had the best of it. He did
+      not look about with open eyes but kept peering instead at the face of the
+      master. My days were full of small successes. I could wear clothes. I
+      could make soft-eyed girls turn to look at me in a dance hall. I remember
+      a night. We students gave a dance and Sleepy Jock came. He went about
+      asking for dances and the girls laughed and told him they had none to
+      give, that the dances were taken. I followed him and had my ears filled
+      with flattery and my card with names. In riding the wave of small success
+      I got the habit of small success. When I could not catch the line I wanted
+      to make a drawing live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my
+      arm, went for a day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I
+      overheard two women talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy
+      for a week.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me?
+      Let me tell you. It has brought me to this&mdash;that at fifty I, who
+      might have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of
+      beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a
+      flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising corn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small success
+      and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you that I got it
+      when I saw it lurking in a woman&rsquo;s eyes and heard the pleasant little
+      songs that lull to sleep upon a woman&rsquo;s lips.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy, sitting upon the grassy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of
+      life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare
+      silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at night,
+      of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little
+      blue-eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith&rsquo;s home and of
+      how he had gone at night to stand under her window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Caxton adolescent love had about it a virility befitting a land that
+      raised so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers through
+      the streets to be loaded upon cars. Men and women went their ways
+      believing, with characteristic American what-boots-it attitude toward the
+      needs of childhood, that it was well for growing boys and girls to be much
+      alone together. To leave them alone together was a principle with them.
+      When a young man called upon his sweetheart, her parents sat in the
+      presence of the two with apologetic eyes and presently disappeared leaving
+      them alone together. When boys&rsquo; and girls&rsquo; parties were given in Caxton
+      houses, parents went away leaving the children to shift for themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now have a good time and don&rsquo;t tear the house down,&rdquo; they said, going off
+      upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Left to themselves the children played kissing games and young men and
+      tall half-formed girls sat on the front porches in the darkness, thrilled
+      and half frightened, getting through their instincts, crudely and without
+      guidance, their first peep at the mystery of life. They kissed
+      passionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds fevered
+      and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing
+      aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a
+      kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as a
+      drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on the
+      next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost their
+      keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men about the
+      station and in the stores, they went slinking through the streets in
+      groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said, &ldquo;It is the
+      loutish age.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to
+      increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to
+      the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and
+      to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now sat
+      musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to do with
+      the Walker girl. He remembered his sister&rsquo;s affair with a young farmer and
+      shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the shoulder of the
+      man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the rolling fields
+      stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came Telfer&rsquo;s speech. So
+      vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the armies of standing corn which
+      men had set up in the fields to protect themselves against the march of
+      pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the picture in his mind as he followed
+      the sense of Telfer&rsquo;s talk, thought that all society had resolved itself
+      into a few sturdy souls who went on and on regardless, and a hunger to
+      make of himself such another arose engulfing him. The desire within him
+      seemed so compelling that he turned and haltingly tried to express what
+      was in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will try,&rdquo; he stammered, &ldquo;I will try to be a man. I will try to not
+      have anything to do with them&mdash;with women. I will work and make money&mdash;and&mdash;and&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the
+      ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Hell with women and girls,&rdquo; he burst forth as though throwing
+      something distasteful out of his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits,
+      came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the grassy bank,
+      covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his sensitive
+      nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. His <i>sang froid</i> had
+      returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the dogs he
+      cried joyfully, &ldquo;We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy, and dog.
+      We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked into bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to him.
+      For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun come up
+      hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the streets in
+      the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from the north came
+      into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on the deserted
+      little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry
+      with his work that they might get back into the warm stale air of the
+      smoking car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become a
+      man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some subtle
+      way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that to make money
+      and to have money would in some way make up for the old half-forgotten
+      humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and would set it on a
+      more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had provided, grew and
+      influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly he kept at his efforts to
+      get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of dollars. Jane McPherson had
+      herself a passion for frugality. In spite of Windy&rsquo;s incompetence and her
+      own growing ill health, she would not permit the family to go into debt,
+      and although, in the long hard winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush
+      until his mind revolted at the thought of a corn field, yet was the rent
+      of the little house paid on the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to
+      increase the totals in the yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the
+      death of his wife had lived in a loft above his shop and who was a
+      blacksmith of the old days, a workman first and a money maker later, did
+      not despise the thought of gain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is money makes the mare go,&rdquo; he said with a kind of reverence as
+      banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of
+      Wildman&rsquo;s grocery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of John Telfer&rsquo;s attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain. The
+      man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right,&rdquo; he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express
+      opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly that
+      the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their
+      achievements, &ldquo;Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big world!
+      Get your name up for a modern, high-class American!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to berate
+      the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that the day
+      would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning, he shouted,
+      &ldquo;Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old clerkliness lies
+      asleep!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who
+      had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a man,
+      was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they talked
+      to him of the city and of the money to be made there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the place for a live young man,&rdquo; they said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their
+      affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into his
+      nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the great ways
+      filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching the sky, the men
+      running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks going on year after
+      year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of, and yet not
+      understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises that supported
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of
+      life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a
+      sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing, had
+      he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he not
+      introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the Saturday
+      night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the totals in
+      the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He felt within
+      him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and would do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will be richer than any man in town here,&rdquo; he declared in his pride. &ldquo;I
+      will be richer than Ed Walker.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks in
+      the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn venders,
+      for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses close by the
+      beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the farmers, and the
+      labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth to mingle with their
+      fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores, the sidewalks, and
+      drinking places, and men stood about in groups talking while young girls
+      with their lovers walked up and down. In the hall over Geiger&rsquo;s drug store
+      a dance went on and the voice of the caller-off rose above the clatter of
+      voices and the stamping of horses in the street. Now and then a fight
+      broke out among the roisterers in Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was
+      killed with a knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon,&rdquo; he said, pushing a paper into
+      the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. &ldquo;Recipes for cooking new dishes,&rdquo; he
+      urged to the farmer&rsquo;s wife. &ldquo;There is a page of new fashions in dress,&rdquo; he
+      told the young girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and
+      the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Saturday
+      paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day&rsquo;s business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it was on a Saturday night that he decided to drop paper selling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will take you into business with me,&rdquo; announced Freedom Smith, stopping
+      him as he hurried by. &ldquo;You are getting too old to sell papers and you know
+      too much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday
+      night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year he
+      had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he nodded
+      his head as he hurried away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the end of romance,&rdquo; shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom Smith
+      before Geiger&rsquo;s drug store and who had heard the offer. &ldquo;A boy, who has
+      seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe and
+      Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am overcome
+      by the thought.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to
+      Sam of the matter at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place,&rdquo; he
+      declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time to
+      time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. &ldquo;For any boy I put
+      money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who despise
+      money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she puts into the
+      selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been the making of
+      her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without the millinery
+      business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon clothes and with it
+      she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the
+      ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking
+      thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the
+      boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret
+      regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by
+      throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making
+      the words roll and tumble from his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes
+      many virtues that are forever on men&rsquo;s lips,&rdquo; he declared fiercely as
+      though trying to down an opponent. &ldquo;It is one of the virtues that proves
+      man not a savage. It has lifted him up&mdash;not money-making, but the
+      power to make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and
+      destroys fear. Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It
+      brings into men&rsquo;s lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to
+      go adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
+      wealth,&rdquo; he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. &ldquo;No doubt the
+      things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct
+      to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty,
+      the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of
+      the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the
+      defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man&rsquo;s
+      city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at
+      the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and
+      I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not
+      acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables him to get on, may
+      build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is diseased and decaying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his
+      eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that makes
+      our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for shrewd
+      money getting or it will destroy itself,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;And the really
+      great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve in
+      garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages on Fifth
+      Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for yourself. Visit
+      the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to one that you will
+      find him not only incapable in money getting but also incapable in the
+      very art for which he starves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer
+      for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted a
+      chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and hides
+      he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged persistency
+      with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank had caught
+      Freedom&rsquo;s imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty
+      dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn
+      business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with
+      the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business,
+      backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the
+      cashier telling of Sam&rsquo;s record as a depositor, and the seven hundred
+      dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with Freedom,
+      Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his savings as he
+      had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was impressed. He
+      thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a week Sam had seen
+      the silent suggestive power of cash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to more
+      than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have two-thirds
+      of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other hand was to
+      furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam was to take care
+      of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things bought were to be fixed
+      each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at less than the prices named
+      two-thirds of the savings went to him. The arrangement was suggested by
+      Sam, who thought he would make more from the saving than from the wage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice,
+      roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great
+      inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man,
+      woman and child he knew and liked. &ldquo;Old Maybe-Not&rdquo; he called Windy
+      McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed
+      rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low
+      phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip in
+      the top. To Sam&rsquo;s knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed
+      during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying.
+      Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar until
+      the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him. And then
+      haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his way while the
+      farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton&rsquo;s best
+      streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked
+      him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing
+      and roaring about it. &ldquo;Good morning, Mary,&rdquo; he would shout at the neat
+      German woman across the street. &ldquo;Wait and you&rsquo;ll see me clean up about
+      here. I&rsquo;m going at it right now. I&rsquo;m going to brush the flies off the
+      fence first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the
+      county.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and agricultural
+      implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard, gathering rust and
+      decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the lot were a half dozen
+      buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction engine, a mowing machine,
+      several farm wagons and other farm tools gone beyond naming. Every few
+      days he came home bringing a new prize. They overflowed the yard and crept
+      onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell any of this stuff. He had at
+      one time sixteen sets of harness all broken and unrepaired in the barn and
+      in a shed back of the house. A great flock of chickens and two or three
+      pigs wandered about among this junk and all the children of the
+      neighbourhood joined Freedom&rsquo;s four and ran howling and shouting over and
+      under the mass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom&rsquo;s wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house. She
+      had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally stood
+      at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at evening as he
+      stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both she and Freedom
+      treated him with great respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling. He was
+      a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very systematically
+      and within a year more than doubling the bulk of Freedom&rsquo;s purchases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a little of Windy McPherson&rsquo;s grotesque pretentiousness in every
+      man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of it. He
+      let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value of their
+      goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they had recovered
+      from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam&rsquo;s day, farmers did not
+      watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets were not systematised
+      and regulated as they were later, and the skill of the buyer was of the
+      first importance. Having the skill, Sam used it constantly to put money
+      into his pockets, but in some way kept the confidence and respect of the
+      men with whom he traded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading
+      ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the
+      streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy,&rdquo; he would shout to the
+      loafers in the store.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his own
+      affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom&rsquo;s affairs,
+      but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and apples, butter
+      and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working always to swell his
+      commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business and many times
+      profited little, but the two liked and respected each other and it was
+      through Freedom&rsquo;s efforts that Sam finally got out of Caxton and into
+      larger affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam stood
+      taking the harness off his horse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is a chance for you, my boy,&rdquo; he said, putting his hand
+      affectionately on Sam&rsquo;s shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his
+      voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the
+      things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had replied
+      making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might hope for in
+      Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for
+      him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at
+      last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in
+      the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the
+      door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb
+      to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told him that
+      in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and filled with
+      uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom&rsquo;s stable wishing
+      that he also might be gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken
+      from the horse upon a peg in the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will be glad to go,&rdquo; he said heavily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who had
+      come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man of eighteen.
+      He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago company because of
+      his affection for the boy and because he believed him capable of something
+      more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence holding the lantern
+      aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the yard, filled with
+      regrets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who,
+      putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her
+      eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street,
+      Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From a
+      street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could see
+      them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom&rsquo;s hand and the
+      slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving
+      March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom&rsquo;s hand. At the
+      front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on
+      the gate and looking at the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall have a rain,&rdquo; he said in a quavering voice, as though giving a
+      decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an answer
+      went along a narrow path into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The incident brought a smile to Sam&rsquo;s lips followed by a kind of weariness
+      of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had, day after
+      day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking at the sky.
+      The man was one of Sam&rsquo;s old newspaper customers who stood as a kind of
+      figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he had been a
+      gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part in more than
+      one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he had come to end
+      his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself by keeping year
+      after year a carefully tabulated record of weather variations. Once or
+      twice a month during the warm season he stumbled into Wildman&rsquo;s and,
+      sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the accuracy of his records and
+      the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at his heels. In his present mood
+      the endless sameness and uneventfulness of the man&rsquo;s life seemed to Sam
+      amusing and in some way sad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point to
+      a day&mdash;to look forward to and depend upon that&mdash;what
+      deadliness!&rdquo; he thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt
+      with pleasure the letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much
+      of the big outside world to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he
+      felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought
+      on by his mother&rsquo;s approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of
+      confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost cheerful.
+      The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom was renewed
+      by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching a
+      mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer,&rdquo; he
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three years in Freedom Smith&rsquo;s service had taught Sam not to doubt his
+      ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his way. He
+      knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business man, one of
+      the men who direct and control the affairs in which they are concerned
+      because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He recalled with
+      pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped calling him a bright
+      boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these
+      things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old man
+      he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his mother&rsquo;s life
+      had been as barren as that of the man who depended for companionship upon
+      a dog and a thermometer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo; he said to himself, pursuing the thought, &ldquo;it has been worse.
+      She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the
+      remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the last
+      days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old man
+      watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house chasing
+      playthings.&rdquo; The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the wind
+      singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional drop of
+      rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with his mother.
+      During the last two or three years he had been trying to make things up to
+      her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the beginning of his
+      success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub and since the
+      beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after evening with her
+      instead of going to Wildman&rsquo;s to sit with the four friends and hear the
+      talk that went on among them. No more did he walk with Telfer or Mary
+      Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the bedside of the sick
+      woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an arm chair upon the
+      grass plot at the front of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an
+      understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to the
+      ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together, the
+      mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much
+      speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it
+      unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought of
+      the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had been
+      made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which he had
+      been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the doings of the
+      pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane&rsquo;s illness continued to go off
+      after pension day for long periods of drunkenness, and who only came home
+      to weep and wail through the house, when the pension money was gone,
+      regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the loss of both the washwoman
+      and the wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has been the most wonderful woman in the world,&rdquo; he told himself and
+      tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend, John
+      Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy trotting
+      beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of her long
+      gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A picture of
+      George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness in the kitchen of
+      Freedom Smith&rsquo;s house, had caught his eye some days before, and in the
+      darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his lips, realising that
+      in some indescribable way it was like his mother as she had been before
+      her illness. Freedom&rsquo;s wife had given him the picture and he had been
+      carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on lonely stretches of road as he
+      went about his work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of an
+      attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue the
+      thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details of a
+      long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It was
+      extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could
+      remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her
+      youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy&rsquo;s mind.
+      She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of a
+      thin-lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a farm,
+      and of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved to buy
+      books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a school
+      teacher, and of her marriage to Windy&mdash;then John McPherson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in the
+      town&rsquo;s life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man who
+      walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and who
+      taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him
+      eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should
+      have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour and
+      unhappiness for me,&rdquo; the sick woman had told her son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton where
+      he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the store into
+      the sheriff&rsquo;s hands and his wife into the position of town laundress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted
+      across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy and
+      another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the state
+      giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs and had
+      written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the applause that
+      greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances, the little
+      dimly-lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces shining in the
+      light of the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted Windy running here and
+      there, talking the jargon of stageland, arraying himself in his motley and
+      strutting upon the little stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And all winter he did not send me a penny,&rdquo; the sick woman had said,
+      interrupting his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth,
+      the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been killed
+      in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an anecdote,
+      touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for an
+      hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old woman
+      looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter feel she
+      had been a fool to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The story
+      ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding the woman
+      alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman, then in her
+      prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house. The railroad
+      agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She knocked him out, too,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;knocked him cold upon the ground and
+      then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town
+      declaring her the finest woman in the state.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the darkness by the broken shed Sam&rsquo;s mind turned from thoughts of his
+      mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young farmer. He
+      thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of the failings
+      of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of the house to
+      wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of war talk
+      always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of the night
+      when, getting a rig from Culvert&rsquo;s livery, she had driven off alone into
+      the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show her wedding
+      ring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before him there rose a picture of a summer afternoon when he had seen a
+      part of the love making that had preceded this. He had gone into the store
+      to see his sister when the young farmer came in, looked awkwardly about
+      and pushed a new gold watch across the counter to Kate. A sudden wave of
+      respect for his sister had pervaded the boy. &ldquo;What a sum it must have
+      cost,&rdquo; he thought, and looked with new interest at the back of the lover
+      and at the flushed cheek and shining eyes of his sister. When the lover,
+      turning, had seen young McPherson standing at the counter, he laughed
+      self-consciously and walked out at the door. Kate had been embarrassed and
+      secretly pleased and flattered by the look in her brother&rsquo;s eyes, but had
+      pretended to treat the gift lightly, twirling it carelessly back and forth
+      on the counter and walking up and down swinging her arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t go telling,&rdquo; she had said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then don&rsquo;t go pretending,&rdquo; the boy had answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam thought that his sister&rsquo;s indiscretion, which had brought her a babe
+      and a husband in the same month had, after all, ended better than the
+      indiscretion of his mother in her marriage with Windy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for
+      the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of
+      his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and
+      presently returned, bringing a daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in a
+      house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an
+      attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code, if
+      she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The
+      thought amused and saddened him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would have thought her safe,&rdquo; he mused. She was fifty, small, nervous
+      and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled as she
+      talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue because of
+      nervousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the door
+      holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My wife&mdash;my wife is dying. She may die any day,&rdquo; he wailed, tears
+      standing in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed had
+      been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with anger
+      and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and began
+      sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped and Sam
+      could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as the man
+      turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels rose a
+      voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had begun to
+      rain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has got into the wrong street,&rdquo; thought the boy stupidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs
+      echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air
+      of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother&rsquo;s ironing board stood
+      against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering
+      in Sam&rsquo;s heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store
+      doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of his
+      father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate&rsquo;s wedding, when Windy
+      had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and the
+      mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house, sick
+      with humiliation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores
+      replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy&rsquo;s anger. Sam began thinking
+      again of his mother&rsquo;s life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now
+      seemed utterly fruitless. &ldquo;I would like to repay him,&rdquo; he thought, shaken
+      with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him. The
+      cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages on
+      the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol of
+      the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he turned
+      his face and stared at the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith&rsquo;s house. Freedom
+      had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just as to-night
+      he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and just as Sam was
+      shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the stable door had
+      come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy girl of fourteen with
+      the strength of a man and an inclination to burst out of her clothes at
+      unexpected places, they had come charging into the stables to carry Sam
+      off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them on, his voice roaring in
+      the stable so that the horses jumped about in their stalls. Into the house
+      they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of four, sitting astride his back
+      and beating on his head with a woollen cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern
+      and giving an occasional helpful push with his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of the
+      big dining room in Freedom&rsquo;s house came back into the mind of the boy now
+      sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted, badly-cooked
+      food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great dishes heaped
+      with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had always been just enough
+      food for the single meal. The thing was nicely calculated, when you had
+      finished the table was bare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a
+      flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and
+      passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh
+      supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the
+      children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the tomboy
+      girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mother never knew anything like that,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking
+      loudly&mdash;some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he
+      talked of the cost of school books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They change the books in the school too often,&rdquo; he declared in a loud
+      voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an
+      audience. &ldquo;It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I
+      will not stand it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a
+      message upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be silent,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;If you say another word or make another sound to
+      disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the
+      street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a fork
+      taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under the
+      lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a desire to
+      spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had brought his
+      mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking at her very
+      death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared about the
+      kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not
+      understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his
+      pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A dog is dead, eh?&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;Well you&rsquo;re getting too big and smart,
+      lad. What do I care for a dead dog?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put
+      his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must not kill,&rdquo; he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a
+      stranger. &ldquo;I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise,
+      struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at him
+      and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a start
+      that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly it
+      stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had become.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub
+      by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with so
+      little extra pressure,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the
+      forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon of
+      drunken carousing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it looks
+      now all the days of my life,&rdquo; thought the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman
+      speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the
+      sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and went
+      carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down upon
+      him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind, shaking
+      loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it against
+      his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before the house
+      he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into the road.
+      Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will go for Mary Underwood,&rdquo; he thought, his mind returning to the
+      friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose
+      friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer&rsquo;s tirades against all
+      women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his bare
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We need a woman in our house,&rdquo; he kept saying over and over to himself.
+      &ldquo;We need a woman in our house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Leaning against the wall under the veranda of Mary Underwood&rsquo;s house, Sam
+      tried to get in his mind a remembrance of what had brought him there. He
+      had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along a country road.
+      Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He had forgotten the
+      purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The unexpected and terrible
+      hatred of his father that had come upon him in the tense silence of the
+      kitchen had so paralysed his brain that he now felt light-headed and
+      wonderfully happy and carefree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been doing something,&rdquo; he thought; &ldquo;I wonder what it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The house faced a grove of pine trees and was reached by climbing a little
+      rise and following a winding road out beyond the graveyard and the last of
+      the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled on the tin
+      roof overhead, and Sam, his back closely pressed against the front of the
+      house, fought to regain control of his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For an hour he stood there staring into the darkness and watched with
+      delight the progress of the storm. He had&mdash;an inheritance from his
+      mother&mdash;a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a
+      boy and his mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the
+      house singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did not
+      hear, and in his bed upstairs Sam had lain awake listening to the noises&mdash;the
+      rain on the roof, the occasional crash of thunder, the snoring of Windy,
+      and the unusual and, he thought, beautiful sound of the mother singing in
+      the storm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, lifting up his head, he looked about with delight. Trees in the grove
+      in front of him bent and tossed in the wind. The inky blackness of the
+      night was relieved by the flickering oil lamp in the road beyond the
+      graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the windows
+      of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which he stood
+      made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees through which
+      the raindrops fell gleaming and sparkling. An occasional flash of
+      lightning lit up the trees and the winding road, and the cannonry of the
+      skies rolled and echoed overhead. A kind of wild song sang in Sam&rsquo;s heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish it would last all night,&rdquo; he thought, his mind fixed on the
+      singing of his mother in the dark house when he was a boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door opened and a woman stepped out upon the veranda and stood before
+      him facing the storm, the wind tossing the soft kimono in which she was
+      clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air was filled
+      with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted her head
+      and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her fine
+      contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and going
+      on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover riding
+      through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the song&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch and
+      leaning forward into the storm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who had
+      been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind had
+      turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman standing
+      singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother singing on
+      the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on, seeing pictures as
+      he used to see them when a boy walking under the stars and listening to
+      the talk of John Telfer. He saw a broad-shouldered man shouting defiance
+      to the storm as he rode down a mountain path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak,&rdquo; went on the voice of
+      the singer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood&rsquo;s singing there in the rain made her seem near and likeable
+      as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;John Telfer was wrong about her,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down
+      across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating the
+      spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon his
+      clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation of
+      surprise broke from her lips:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the
+      rain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like it here,&rdquo; replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at
+      the storm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary looked
+      into the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been a long time coming to see me,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the
+      veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon a
+      table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the shelves
+      along the walls. On a table burned a student&rsquo;s lamp and in the corners of
+      the room lay heavy shadows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned clad
+      in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began moving
+      about the room picking up odds and ends of woman&rsquo;s clothing scattered on
+      the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks piled in an
+      open grate at the side of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was the storm made me want to sing,&rdquo; she said self-consciously, and
+      then briskly, &ldquo;we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in the
+      road and got yourself covered with mud.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into
+      his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come here courting,&rdquo; he thought; &ldquo;I have come to ask Mary
+      Underwood to be my wife and live in my house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused
+      something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore, falling
+      away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by the kimono,
+      wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the soft grey hair
+      and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks caused a jumping of
+      his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are needing a woman in our house,&rdquo; he said heavily, repeating the
+      words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept
+      streets and along the mud-covered roads. &ldquo;We are needing a woman in our
+      house, and I have come to take you there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I intend to marry you,&rdquo; he added, lurching across the room and grasping
+      her roughly by the shoulders. &ldquo;Why not? I am needing a woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood was dismayed and frightened by the face looking down at
+      her, and by the strong hands clenched upon her shoulders. In his youth she
+      had conceived a kind of maternal passion for the newsboy and had planned a
+      future for him. Her plans if followed would have made him a scholar, a man
+      living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had chosen to live his
+      life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about the country like
+      Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen him driving at
+      evening through the street to Freedom&rsquo;s house, going in and out of
+      Wildman&rsquo;s, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim way she knew
+      that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from the things of
+      which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John Telfer, the
+      talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had come back to
+      her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of the road, and
+      talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother, of marriage and of
+      coming to live with him in his house. She stood, chilled, looking into the
+      eager, strong face and the eyes with the pained, dazed look in them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to Sam,
+      and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;it was
+      because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired of
+      them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little
+      schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew
+      tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks and
+      looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to get
+      out of there and into the streets myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and stared
+      into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from his trousers
+      legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to reconstruct an
+      old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer&rsquo;s, that had years before
+      come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and Telfer had made of the
+      ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central figure, a stoop-shouldered,
+      feeble old man stumbling along the street, muttering to himself and poking
+      in a gutter with a stick. The picture was a caricature of puttering old
+      Frank Huntley, superintendent of the Caxton schools.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood&rsquo;s house, become, for the moment,
+      a boy, facing a boy&rsquo;s problems, Sam did not want to be such a man. He
+      wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the kind of man
+      he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of the world and
+      making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get expressed when
+      he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind, he felt that he
+      must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that the schools were
+      not giving him what he wanted. His brain worked on the problem of how to
+      tell her about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: &ldquo;I am going to quit the
+      schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the
+      chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the door
+      opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called
+      sharply, &ldquo;Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A startled, trembling voice answered from above, &ldquo;Who is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her hand
+      gently on his shoulder, said, &ldquo;It is your mother and you are only a sick,
+      half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head. &ldquo;She is still there in the bed, coughing.&rdquo; He roused
+      himself and stood up. &ldquo;I have just killed my father,&rdquo; he announced. &ldquo;I
+      choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the
+      house. He made horrible noises in the kitchen and mother was tired and
+      wanted to sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood began running about the room. From a little alcove under a
+      stairway she took clothes, throwing them upon the floor about the room.
+      She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam&rsquo;s presence, raised her
+      skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the stockinged foot and
+      the other on the bare one, she turned to him. &ldquo;We will go back to your
+      house. I think you are right. You need a woman there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the street she walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall
+      fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over Sam.
+      He felt he had accomplished something&mdash;something he had set out to
+      accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion
+      that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith&rsquo;s, began planning
+      the evening he would spend with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will tell her of the letter from the Chicago company and of what I will
+      do when I go to the city,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the gate before the McPherson house Mary looked into the road below the
+      grassy bank that ran down from the fence, but in the darkness she could
+      see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and shouted
+      as it rushed through the bare branches of the trees. Sam went through the
+      gate and around the house to the kitchen door intent upon getting to his
+      mother&rsquo;s bedside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the house the neighbour woman sat asleep in a chair before the kitchen
+      stove. The daughter had gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam went through the house to the parlour and sat down in a chair beside
+      his mother&rsquo;s bed, picking up her hand and holding it in his own. &ldquo;She must
+      be asleep,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the kitchen door Mary Underwood stopped, and, turning, ran away into
+      the darkness along the street. By the kitchen fire the neighbour woman
+      still slept. In the parlour Sam, sitting on the chair beside his mother&rsquo;s
+      bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little stand beside
+      the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a tall,
+      aristocratic-looking woman with rings on her fingers, that hung upon the
+      wall. The picture belonged to Windy and was claimed by him as a portrait
+      of his mother, and it had once brought on a quarrel between Sam and his
+      sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kate had taken the portrait of the lady seriously, and the boy had come
+      upon her sitting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands
+      lying in her lap in imitation of the pose maintained so haughtily by the
+      great lady who looked down at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a fraud,&rdquo; he had declared, irritated by what he believed his
+      sister&rsquo;s devotion to one of the father&rsquo;s pretensions. &ldquo;It is a fraud he
+      has picked up somewhere and now claims as his mother to make people
+      believe he is something big.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl, ashamed at having been caught in the pose, and furious because
+      of the attack upon the authenticity of the portrait, had gone into a spasm
+      of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the floor
+      with her foot. Then she had run across the room and dropped upon her knees
+      before a little couch, buried her face in a pillow and shook with anger
+      and grief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had turned and walked out of the room. The emotions of the sister had
+      seemed to him to have the flavour of one of Windy&rsquo;s outbreaks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She likes it,&rdquo; he had thought, dismissing the incident. &ldquo;She likes
+      believing in lies. She is like Windy and would rather believe in them than
+      not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer&rsquo;s house and beat on the
+      door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, holding a lamp above
+      her head, appeared at the door. With Telfer she went back through the
+      streets to the front of Sam&rsquo;s house thinking of the terrible choked and
+      disfigured man they should find there. She went along clinging to Telfer&rsquo;s
+      arm as she had clung to Sam&rsquo;s, unconscious of her bare head and scanty
+      attire. In his hand Telfer carried a lantern secured from the stable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the road before the house they found nothing. Telfer went up and down
+      swinging the lantern and peering into gutters. The woman walked beside
+      him, her skirts lifted and the mud splashing upon her bare leg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Telfer threw back his head and laughed. Taking her hand he led
+      Mary with a rush up the bank and through the gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a muddle-headed old fool I am!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I am getting old and
+      addle-pated! Windy McPherson is not dead! Nothing could kill that old war
+      horse! He was in at Wildman&rsquo;s grocery after nine o&rsquo;clock to-night covered
+      with mud and swearing he had been in a fight with Art Sherman. Poor Sam
+      and you&mdash;to have come to me and to have found me a stupid ass! Fool!
+      Fool! What a fool I have become!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In at the kitchen door ran Mary and Telfer, frightening the woman by the
+      stove so that she sprang to her feet and began nervously making the false
+      teeth rattle with her tongue. In the parlour they found Sam, his head upon
+      the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand of Jane
+      McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood stooped over and
+      kissed his wet hair as the neighbour woman came in at the doorway bearing
+      the kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, holding his finger to his lips,
+      commanded silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He thought
+      that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become coarsened&mdash;she
+      looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had an air of having
+      quarrelled with her husband when they came out of their bedroom in the
+      morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the parlour, astonished and
+      irritated by the endless number of women that crowded into the house. They
+      were everywhere, in the kitchen, the sleeping room back of the parlour;
+      and in the parlour, where the dead woman lay in her coffin, they were
+      massed. When the thin-lipped minister, holding a book in his hand, held
+      forth upon the virtues of the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the
+      floor and thought that thus they would have wept over the body of the dead
+      Windy, had his fingers but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister
+      would have talked in the same way&mdash;blatantly and without knowledge&mdash;of
+      the virtues of the dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved
+      husband, in new black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious
+      undertaker kept moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his
+      trade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the floor
+      at Sam&rsquo;s feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to distract
+      his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of the weeping
+      women, none of whom had before been in the house and all of whom he
+      thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of privacy. The
+      note was from John Telfer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will not come to your mother&rsquo;s funeral,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;I respected your
+      mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she is
+      dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in
+      Wildman&rsquo;s, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the
+      moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore&rsquo;s shop, I will
+      go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If he
+      or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their
+      friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know
+      that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take
+      them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of the
+      dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something
+      that had slipped from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is good sense, after all,&rdquo; he thought, and realised that even in the
+      days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the fact
+      that Jane McPherson&rsquo;s long, hard role was just being played out to the
+      end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore was beating upon
+      his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with a flourish. He arose,
+      interrupting the minister&rsquo;s discourse. Mary Underwood had come in just as
+      the minister began talking and had dropped into an obscure corner near the
+      door leading into the street. Sam crowded past the women who stared and
+      the minister who frowned and the baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands
+      and, dropping the note into her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking
+      and listening with breathless curiosity, &ldquo;It is from John Telfer. Read it.
+      Even he, hating women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their
+      heads together and their hands before their faces, nodded toward the
+      school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had created,
+      went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting until the
+      talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the streets should
+      be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have become older than all of these people here,&rdquo; thought the youth.
+      &ldquo;They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of my
+      hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood, lacking Sam&rsquo;s unconsciousness of the people, looked about
+      with burning cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and putting their heads
+      together, a chill of fear ran through her. Into the room had been thrust
+      the face of an old enemy to her&mdash;the scandal of a small town. Picking
+      up the note she slipped out at the door and stole away along the street.
+      The old maternal love for Sam had returned strengthened and ennobled by
+      the terror through which she had passed with him that night in the rain.
+      Going to her house she whistled the collie dog and set out along a country
+      road. At the edge of a grove of trees she stopped, sat down on a log, and
+      read Telfer&rsquo;s note. From the soft ground into which her feet sank there
+      came the warm pungent smell of the new growth. Tears came into her eyes.
+      She thought that in a few days much had come to her. She had got a boy
+      upon whom she could pour out the mother love in her heart, and she had
+      made a friend of Telfer, whom she had long regarded with fear and doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a month Sam lingered in Caxton. It seemed to him there was something
+      that wanted doing there. He sat with the men at the back of Wildman&rsquo;s, and
+      walked aimlessly through the streets and out of the town along the country
+      roads, where men worked all day in the fields behind sweating horses,
+      ploughing the land. The thrill of spring was in the air, and in the
+      evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree below his bedroom window.
+      Sam walked and loitered in silence, looking at the ground. In his mind was
+      the dread of people. The talk of the men in the store wearied him and when
+      he went alone into the country he found himself accompanied by the voices
+      of all of those he had come out of town to escape. On the street corner
+      the thin-lipped, brown-bearded minister stopped him and talked of the
+      future life as he had stopped and talked to a bare-legged newsboy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your mother,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;has but gone before. It is for you to get into
+      the narrow path and follow her. God has sent this sorrow as a warning to
+      you. He wants you also to get into the way of life and in the end to join
+      her. Begin coming to our church. Join in the work of the Christ. Find
+      truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The
+      minister&rsquo;s talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of
+      which he got but one thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Find truth,&rdquo; he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his mind
+      play with the idea. &ldquo;The best men are all trying to do that. They spend
+      their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the
+      interpretation he had put upon the minister&rsquo;s words. The terrible moments
+      in the kitchen followed by his mother&rsquo;s death had put a new look of
+      seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of
+      responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the
+      street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become
+      public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public
+      affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour&rsquo;s wife,&rdquo; said
+      John Telfer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken him to
+      its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had encouraged
+      him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father, and patronised
+      him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was a boy, scurrying
+      between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a Saturday night,
+      there was always some one to speak a word to him of his morals and to
+      shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected to remain there,
+      with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the Savings Bank&mdash;built
+      to that during his years with Freedom Smith&mdash;he might soon become one
+      of the town&rsquo;s solid men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and
+      that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the train
+      and be off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences, hearing
+      the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the smell of the
+      new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town and sat down on a
+      low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the railroad station, to
+      wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken on a new meaning to
+      him since any day might see him on such a train bound into his new life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed
+      by two women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here, watch these,&rdquo; he said to the women, setting the bags upon the
+      platform; &ldquo;I will go for the tickets,&rdquo; and disappeared into the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two women resumed their interrupted talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ed&rsquo;s wife has been poorly these ten years,&rdquo; said one of them. &ldquo;It will be
+      better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long ride.
+      I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to be
+      train-sick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John
+      Telfer&rsquo;s old talks with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away from
+      here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending
+      shoes on a side street back of Geiger&rsquo;s drug store and the two women, one
+      short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery shop and
+      were Eleanor Telfer&rsquo;s only competitors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, the town knows her now for what she is,&rdquo; said the tall woman.
+      &ldquo;Milly Peters says she won&rsquo;t rest until she has put that stuck-up Mary
+      Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house and it
+      was her told Milly. I never heard such a story. To think of Jane McPherson
+      working all these years and then having such goings-on in her house when
+      she lay dying, Milly says that Sam went away early in the evening and came
+      home late with that Underwood thing, half dressed, hanging on his arm.
+      Milly&rsquo;s mother looked out of the window and saw them. Then she ran out by
+      the kitchen stove and pretended to be asleep. She wanted to see what was
+      up. And the bold hussy came right into the house with Sam. Then she went
+      away, and after a while back she came with that John Telfer. Milly is
+      going to see that Eleanor Telfer finds it out. I guess it will bring her
+      down, too. And there is no telling how many other men in this town Mary
+      Underwood is running with. Milly says&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two women turned as out of the darkness came a tall figure roaring and
+      swearing. Two hands flashed out and sank into their hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop it!&rdquo; growled Sam, beating the two heads together, &ldquo;stop your dirty
+      lies!&mdash;you ugly she-beasts!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hearing the two women screaming the man who had gone for the railroad
+      tickets came running down the station platform followed by Jerry Donlin.
+      Springing forward Sam knocked the shoemaker over the iron fence into a
+      newly spaded flower bed and then turned to the baggage man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They were telling lies about Mary Underwood,&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;She tried to
+      save me from killing my father and now they are telling lies about her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two women picked up the bags and ran whimpering away along the station
+      platform. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and confronted the
+      surprised and frightened shoemaker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the Hell are you doing in my flower bed?&rdquo; he growled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hurrying through the streets Sam&rsquo;s mind was in a ferment. Like the Roman
+      emperor he wished that all the world had but one head that he might cut it
+      off with a slash. The town that had seemed so paternal, so cheery, so
+      intent upon wishing him well, now seemed horrible. He thought of it as a
+      great, crawling, slimy thing lying in wait amid the cornfields.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be saying that of her, of that white soul!&rdquo; he exclaimed aloud in the
+      empty street, all of his boyish loyalty and devotion to the woman who had
+      put out a hand to him in his hour of trouble aroused and burning in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a swinging
+      blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to his own
+      house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing
+      meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets
+      past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone
+      and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and quiet.
+      He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane
+      McPherson&rsquo;s funeral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy he
+      saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with
+      coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They were
+      the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers. He
+      remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the papers
+      and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational murder
+      cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive and the
+      details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain their
+      curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing the
+      newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and over on
+      their tongues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the thought
+      of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small, unaired,
+      unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and clothes&mdash;only
+      their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean thoughts,
+      are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a darkened room
+      by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a yokel, live lives
+      of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these women come the husbands
+      at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly and then go again
+      into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical exhaustion having come
+      to them, to sit for an hour in stockinged feet before crawling away to
+      sleep and oblivion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed
+      ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the man
+      they have snatched from society they cling also with a tenacity to be
+      measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the craving for
+      food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the despair of
+      reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put the black
+      dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, &ldquo;The female of the species is
+      more deadly than the male.&rdquo; At their worst they are to be seen drunk with
+      emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution or immersed in the
+      secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious persecution. At their
+      best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth coming to them, they throw
+      themselves into garish display of it and flash upon the sight of Newport
+      or Palm Beach. In their native lair in the close little houses, they sleep
+      in the bed of the man who has put clothes upon their backs and food into
+      their mouths because that is the usage of their kind and give him of their
+      bodies grudgingly or willingly as the laws of their physical needs direct.
+      They do not love, they sell, instead, their bodies in the market place and
+      cry out that man shall witness their virtue because they had had the joy
+      of finding one buyer instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce
+      animalism in them makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the
+      days of its softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch
+      again an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy,
+      no longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite.
+      Having passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of
+      emotions and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the
+      eloquence of evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell&mdash;the call to
+      the one being brother to the call of the other&mdash;crying upon the
+      troubled air of hot little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of
+      vulgarity, &ldquo;The weight of my sins is heavy on my soul.&rdquo; Along streets they
+      go lifting heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel
+      to roll upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the
+      life of a Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its
+      offal. Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air,
+      dream dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of
+      animal youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door to
+      kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has found a
+      carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it forward to
+      the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the fine emotion of
+      achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having hysteria rather than
+      reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of femininity&mdash;and
+      none of it. For the most part they live and die unseen, unknown, eating
+      rank food, sleeping overmuch, and sitting through summer afternoons
+      rocking in chairs and looking at people passing in the street. In the end
+      they die full of faith, hoping for a life to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making on
+      Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields that lay
+      beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness and he
+      thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that had been
+      marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and shivered as
+      he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air aggravating the
+      dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the assurance of the
+      days before his mother&rsquo;s illness and to get again the strong belief in his
+      own destiny that had kept him at the money making and saving and had urged
+      him to the efforts to rise above the level of the man who bred him. He
+      didn&rsquo;t succeed. The feeling of age that had settled upon him in the midst
+      of the people mourning over the body of his mother came back, and,
+      turning, he went along the road toward the town, saying to himself: &ldquo;I
+      will go and talk to Mary Underwood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While he waited on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided that
+      after all a marriage with her might lead to happiness. The half spiritual,
+      half physical love of woman that is the glory and mystery of youth was
+      gone from him. He thought that if he could only drive from her presence
+      the fear of the faces that had been coming and going in his own mind he
+      would, for his own part, be content to live his life as a worker and money
+      maker, one without dreams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood came to the door wearing the same heavy long coat she had
+      worn on that other night and taking her by the hand Sam led her to the
+      edge of the veranda. He looked with content at the pine trees before the
+      house, thinking that some benign influence must have guided the hand that
+      planted them there to stand clothed and decent amid the barrenness of the
+      land at the end of winter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it, boy?&rdquo; asked the woman, and her voice was filled with anxiety.
+      The maternal passion again glowing in her had for days coloured all her
+      thoughts, and with all the ardour of an intense nature she had thrown
+      herself into her love of Sam. Thinking of him, she felt in fancy the pangs
+      of birth, and in her bed at night relived with him his boyhood in the town
+      and built again her plans for his future. In the day time she laughed at
+      herself and said tenderly, &ldquo;You are an old fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brutally and frankly Sam told her of the thing he had heard on the station
+      platform, looking past her at the pine trees and gripping the veranda
+      rail. From the dead land there came again the smell of the new growth as
+      it had come to him on the road before the revelation at the railroad
+      station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something kept telling me not to go away,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It must have been in
+      the air&mdash;this thing. Already these evil crawling things were at work.
+      Oh, if only all the world, like you and Telfer and some of the others
+      here, had an appreciation of the sense of privacy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood laughed quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making you
+      a man at work upon the things of the mind,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The sense of
+      privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer&rsquo;s method was
+      better than my own. He has given you the knack of saying things with a
+      flourish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh,&rdquo; he said
+      stoutly. &ldquo;Here is something at you&mdash;it is tearing at you&mdash;it has
+      got to be met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter
+      over in their minds. To-morrow they will be at you again. There is but one
+      way and we must take it. You and I will have to marry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary looked at the serious new lines of his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a proposal!&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On an impulse she began singing, her voice fine and strong running through
+      the quiet night.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      she sang, and laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You should come like that,&rdquo; she said, and then, &ldquo;you poor muddled boy.
+      Don&rsquo;t you know that I am your new mother?&rdquo; she added, taking hold of his
+      two arms and turning him about facing her. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be absurd. I don&rsquo;t want
+      a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him. I
+      adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick and
+      covered with mud. As for these women&mdash;away with them&mdash;I&rsquo;ll face
+      them down&mdash;I did it once before and I&rsquo;ll do it again. Go to your city
+      and make your fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman&rsquo;s fight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is horrible. You don&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; Sam protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I have been on that battlefield. It is to be
+      won only by silence and tireless waiting. Your very effort to help would
+      make the matter worse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman and the tall boy, suddenly become a man, stood in thought. She
+      was thinking of the end toward which her life was drifting. How
+      differently she had planned it. She thought of the college in
+      Massachusetts and of the men and women walking under the elm trees there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I have got me a son and I am going to keep him,&rdquo; she said aloud,
+      putting her hand on Sam&rsquo;s arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very serious and troubled, Sam went down the gravel path toward the road.
+      He felt there was something cowardly in the part she had given him to
+      play, but he could see no alternative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all,&rdquo; he reflected, &ldquo;it is sensible&mdash;it is a woman&rsquo;s battle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Half way to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his arms
+      and gave her a great hug.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye, little Mother,&rdquo; he cried and kissed her upon the lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was overcome
+      with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning against the
+      house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling through her
+      tears she called after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you crack their heads hard, boy?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Mary&rsquo;s house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had come
+      to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen table with
+      pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the parlour he
+      could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and writing again.
+      Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read over and over
+      what he had written, and putting on his coat went through the dawn to the
+      house of Tom Comstock, editor of the <i>Caxton Argus</i>, and roused him
+      out of bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won&rsquo;t cost you anything,&rdquo;
+       Comstock promised. &ldquo;But why run it? Let the matter drop.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago,&rdquo;
+       Sam thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at Valmore&rsquo;s
+      suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter&rsquo;s jewelry store. For an hour they
+      bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When the choice
+      was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a box on the
+      counter Telfer made a speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will talk straight to that boy,&rdquo; he declared, laughing. &ldquo;I am not going
+      to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have him fail
+      me. I shall tell him that if he doesn&rsquo;t make money in that Chicago I shall
+      come and take the watch from him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along
+      the street to Eleanor&rsquo;s shop. He strutted through the display room and
+      into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What am I going to do, Eleanor?&rdquo; he demanded, standing with legs spread
+      apart and frowning down upon her, &ldquo;what am I going to do without Sam?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A freckle-faced boy opened the shop door and threw a newspaper on the
+      floor. The boy had a ringing voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer went again
+      through the display room, touching with his cane the posts upon which hung
+      the finished hats, and whistling. Standing before the shop, with the cane
+      hooked upon his arm, he rolled a cigarette and watched the boy running
+      from door to door along the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall have to be adopting a new son,&rdquo; he said musingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood in his white nightgown and re-read the
+      statement just given him. He read it over and over, and then, laying it on
+      the kitchen table, filled and lighted a corncob pipe. A draft of wind blew
+      into the room under the kitchen door chilling his thin shanks so that he
+      drew his bare feet, one after the other, up behind the protective walls of
+      his nightgown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the night of my mother&rsquo;s death,&rdquo; ran the statement, &ldquo;I sat in the
+      kitchen of our house eating my supper when my father came in and began
+      shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother who was asleep. I put my
+      hand at his throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, and carried
+      him around the house and threw him into the road. Then I ran to the house
+      of Mary Underwood, who was once my schoolteacher, and told her what I had
+      done. She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went to look for the
+      body of my father, who was not dead after all. John McPherson knows this
+      is true, if he can be made to tell the truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous woman with red cheeks,
+      who set up type in the shop, did her own housework, and gathered most of
+      the news and advertising for <i>The Argus</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t that a slasher?&rdquo; he asked, handing her the statement Sam had
+      written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it ought to stop the mean things they are saying about Mary
+      Underwood,&rdquo; she snapped. Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and
+      looking at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her much help with
+      <i>The Argus</i>, was the best checker player in Caxton and had once been
+      to a state tournament of experts in that sport, she added, &ldquo;Poor Jane
+      McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better father for him than
+      that liar Windy. Choked him, eh? Well, if the men of this town had any
+      spunk they would finish the job.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns in
+      Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like Freedom
+      Smith, bought the farmers&rsquo; products. On Sundays he sat in chairs before
+      country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or, getting
+      back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown streets and
+      among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on the road. From
+      time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with the men in
+      Wildman&rsquo;s, stealing away later for an evening with Mary Underwood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the
+      farmer&rsquo;s widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In the
+      store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose&mdash;the same John Telfer
+      had watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show
+      Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker
+      barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging cane
+      and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer had not
+      got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad station and
+      make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the loss of that
+      opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and thinking of
+      many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour to the speech he
+      had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam, while the gift had
+      touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind the essential solid
+      goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he lost much of the
+      bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood, had been able to
+      make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his room in Chicago he
+      had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting in and taking out
+      flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of thanks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now
+      that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom
+      Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in the
+      wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore&rsquo;s shop as the blacksmith
+      walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What has happened to Sam&mdash;he has changed so much?&rdquo; he asked,
+      dropping a foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel.
+      &ldquo;Already the city has changed him,&rdquo; he added regretfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He bites off his words,&rdquo; continued Valmore; &ldquo;he sits for an hour in the
+      store and then goes away, and doesn&rsquo;t come back to say good-bye when he
+      leaves town. What has got into him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust of
+      the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had been
+      hurled at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all
+      right,&rdquo; he exploded. &ldquo;He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes
+      to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing,
+      hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy from
+      the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the
+      money-maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems of
+      life and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great game
+      in which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited
+      patiently until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would
+      possess. With the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they
+      pounced and Sam felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with
+      country buyers used it ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look that
+      came into the eyes of unsuccessful business men at critical moments and
+      watched for it and took advantage of it as a successful prize fighter
+      watches for a similar vague, uncertain look in the eyes of an opponent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that comes
+      with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the successful
+      business men about him is the stroke also of the master painter,
+      scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of Whistler,
+      Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been in him when
+      as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook, and now and
+      then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road. In the city
+      where men of wealth and power in affairs rubbed elbows with him in the
+      street cars and walked past him in hotel lobbies he watched and waited
+      saying to himself, &ldquo;I also will be such a one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked
+      on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of
+      himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a
+      knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of vast
+      work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but for the
+      most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about him,
+      keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton
+      family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but that
+      still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer
+      vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed
+      him during the month after his mother&rsquo;s death, and letters regarding him
+      had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down to
+      dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and talk
+      of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking of old John Moore to-day&mdash;does he still drive that
+      team of black ponies?&rdquo; the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman of
+      thirty, would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a
+      conversation of baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new office
+      building to be erected in the Loop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, he don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in a
+      machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake been
+      the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that he looked
+      upon Sam as an intruder. &ldquo;John told me last summer when I was home that he
+      intended to sell the blacks and buy mules,&rdquo; he would add, looking at the
+      youth challengingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar and
+      bustle of Chicago&rsquo;s vast west side, it still turned with hungry heart
+      toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for Jake, its
+      mainstay, could be found in that paradise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey moustache,
+      and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so that they
+      stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn,
+      worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night, going to
+      bed at nine o&rsquo;clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling, from room
+      to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers, or sitting
+      in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the habits formed
+      in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home with his pay in his
+      pocket, settled with the two sisters for the week&rsquo;s living, sat down to
+      dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then disappeared upon the troubled
+      waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening he re-appeared, with empty
+      pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and a noisy attempt at
+      self-possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl into bed in
+      preparation for another week of toil and respectability. The man had a
+      certain Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new ladies met
+      on his weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall. He once took
+      Sam upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half around the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of thirty-five
+      who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and blessed with a
+      remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical student in the
+      front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired woman
+      stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer from a
+      wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little Southern
+      wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The women in the Pergrin house seemed to Sam tremendously concerned about
+      their health and each evening talked of the matter, he thought, more than
+      his mother had talked during her illness. While Sam lived with them they
+      were all under the influence of a strange sort of faith healer and took
+      what they called &ldquo;Health Suggestion&rdquo; treatments. Twice each week the faith
+      healer came to the house, laid his hands upon their backs and took their
+      money. The treatment afforded Jake a never-ending source of amusement and
+      in the evening he went through the house putting his hands upon the backs
+      of the women and demanding money from them, but the dry-goods buyer&rsquo;s
+      wife, who for years had coughed at night, slept peacefully after some
+      weeks of the treatment and the cough did not return while Sam remained in
+      the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the house Sam had a standing. Glowing tales of his shrewdness in
+      business, his untiring industry, and the size of his bank account, had
+      preceded him from Caxton, and these tales the Pergrins, in their loyalty
+      to the town and to all the products of the town, did not allow to shrink
+      in the re-telling. The housekeeping sister, a kindly woman, became fond of
+      Sam, and in his absence would boast of him to chance callers or to the
+      boarders gathered in the living room in the evening. She it was who laid
+      the foundation of the medical student&rsquo;s belief that Sam was a kind of
+      genius in money matters, a belief that enabled him later to make a
+      successful assault upon a legacy which came to that young man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank Eckardt, the medical student, Sam took as a friend. On Sunday
+      afternoons they went to walk in the streets, or, taking two girl friends
+      of Frank&rsquo;s, who were also students at the medical school, on their arms,
+      they went to the park and sat upon benches under the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For one of these young women Sam conceived a regard that approached
+      tenderness. Sunday after Sunday he spent with her, and once, walking
+      through the park on an evening in the late fall, the dry brown leaves
+      rustling under their feet and the sun going down in red splendour before
+      their eyes, he took her hand and walked in silence, feeling tremendously
+      alive and vital as he had felt on that other night walking under the trees
+      of Caxton with the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That nothing came of the affair and that after a time he did not see the
+      girl again was due, he thought, to his own growing interest in money
+      making and to the fact that there was in her, as in Frank Eckardt, a blind
+      devotion to something that he could not himself understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once he had a talk with Eckardt of the matter. &ldquo;She is fine and purposeful
+      like a woman I knew in my home town,&rdquo; he said, thinking of Eleanor Telfer,
+      &ldquo;but she will not talk to me of her work as sometimes she talks to you. I
+      want her to talk. There is something about her that I do not understand
+      and that I want to understand. I think that she likes me and once or twice
+      I have thought she would not greatly mind my making love to her, but I do
+      not understand her just the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One day in the office of the company for which he worked Sam became
+      acquainted with a young advertising man named Jack Prince, a brisk, very
+      much alive young fellow who made money rapidly, spent it lavishly, and had
+      friends and acquaintances in every office, every hotel lobby, every bar
+      room and restaurant in the down-town section of the city. The chance
+      acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. The clever, witty Prince made a
+      kind of hero of Sam, admiring his reserve and good sense and boasting of
+      him far and wide through the town. With Prince, Sam occasionally went on
+      mild carouses, and, once, in the midst of thousands of people sitting
+      about tables and drinking beer at the Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, he and
+      Prince got into a fight with two waiters, Prince declaring he had been
+      cheated and Sam, although he thought his friend in the wrong, striking out
+      with his fist and dragging Prince through the door and into a passing
+      street car in time to avoid a rush of other waiters hurrying to the aid of
+      the one who lay dazed and sputtering on the sawdust floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After these evenings of carousal, carried on with Jack Prince and with
+      young men met on trains and about country hotels, Sam spent hour after
+      hour walking about town absorbed in his own thoughts and getting his own
+      impressions of what he saw. In the affairs with the young men he played,
+      for the most part, a passive rôle, going with them from place to place and
+      drinking until they became loud and boisterous, or morose and quarrelsome,
+      and then slipping away to his own room, amused or irritated as the
+      circumstances, or the temperament of his companions, had made or marred
+      the joviality of the evening. On his nights alone, he put his hands into
+      his pockets and walked for endless miles through the lighted streets,
+      getting in a dim way a realisation of the hugeness of life. All of the
+      faces going past him, the women in their furs, the young men with cigars
+      in their mouths going to the theatres, the bald old men with watery eyes,
+      the boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and the slim
+      prostitutes lurking in the hallways, should have interested him deeply. In
+      his youth, and with the pride of sleeping power in him, he saw them only
+      as so many individuals that might some day test their ability against his
+      own. And if he peered at them closely and marked down face after face in
+      the crowds it was as a sitter in the great game of business that he
+      looked, exercising his mind by imagining this or that one arrayed against
+      him in deals, and planning the method by which he would win in the
+      imaginary struggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was at that time in Chicago a place, to be reached by a bridge above
+      the Illinois Central Railroad track, that Sam sometimes visited on stormy
+      nights to watch the lake lashed by the wind. Great masses of water moving
+      swiftly and silently broke with a roar against wooden piles, backed by
+      hills of stone and earth, and the spray from the broken waves fell upon
+      Sam&rsquo;s face and on winter nights froze on his coat. He had learned to
+      smoke, and leaning upon the railing of the bridge would stand for hours
+      with a pipe in his mouth looking at the moving water, filled with awe and
+      admiration of the silent power of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One night in September, when he was walking alone in the streets, an
+      incident happened that showed him also a silent power within himself, a
+      power that startled and for the moment frightened him. Walking into a
+      little street back of Dearborn, he was suddenly aware of the faces of
+      women looking out at him through small square windows cut in the fronts of
+      the houses. Here and there, before and behind him, were the faces; voices
+      called, smiles invited, hands beckoned. Up and down the street went men
+      looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their necks, their
+      hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces of the women
+      pressed against the little squares of glass and then, turning, suddenly,
+      sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued. Among the walkers on
+      the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats whose feet scuffled as they
+      hurried along, and young boys with the pink of virtue in their cheeks. In
+      the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It got into Sam&rsquo;s brain and he stood
+      hesitating and uncertain, startled, nerveless, afraid. He remembered a
+      story he had once heard from John Telfer, a story of the disease and death
+      that lurks in the little side streets of cities, and ran into Van Buren
+      Street and from that into lighted State. He climbed up the stairway of the
+      elevated railroad and jumping on the first train went away south to walk
+      for hours on a gravel roadway at the edge of the lake in Jackson Park. The
+      wind from the lake and the laughter and talk of people passing under the
+      lights cooled the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the
+      eloquence of John Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his
+      voice marshalling the armies of the standing corn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into Sam&rsquo;s mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great
+      masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there
+      was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of,
+      moving always forward, silent, powerful&mdash;the force of sex. He
+      wondered how the force would be broken in his own case, against what
+      breakwater it would spend itself. At midnight, he went home across the
+      city and crept into his alcove in the Pergrin house, puzzled and for the
+      time utterly tired. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and
+      resolutely closing his eyes tried to sleep. &ldquo;There are things not to be
+      understood,&rdquo; he told himself. &ldquo;To live decently is a matter of good sense.
+      I will keep thinking of what I want to do and not go into such a place
+      again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One day, when he had been in Chicago two years, there happened an incident
+      of another sort, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, so full of youth,
+      that for days after it happened he thought of it with delight, and walked
+      in the streets or sat in a passenger train laughing joyfully at the
+      remembrance of some new detail of the affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, who was the son of Windy McPherson and who had more than once
+      ruthlessly condemned all men who put liquor into their mouths, got drunk,
+      and for eighteen hours went shouting poetry, singing songs, and yelling at
+      the stars like a wood god on the bend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in
+      DeJonge&rsquo;s restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before him
+      on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers, talked
+      to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will be late, of course,&rdquo; he exclaimed, refilling Sam&rsquo;s glass. &ldquo;The
+      man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would
+      take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from the
+      cheeks of a maiden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had already seen the man for whom they waited. He was thirty-five,
+      small and narrow-shouldered, with a little wrinkled face, a huge nose, and
+      a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. Sam had seen him in a
+      Michigan Avenue club with Prince solemnly pitching silver dollars at a
+      chalk mark on the floor with a group of serious, solid-looking old men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are the crowd that have just put through the big deal in Kansas oil
+      stock and the little one is Morris, who handled the publicity for them,&rdquo;
+       Prince had explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later, when they were walking down Michigan Avenue, Prince talked at
+      length of Morris, whom he admired immensely. &ldquo;He is the best advertising
+      and publicity man in America,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;He isn&rsquo;t a four-flusher, as I
+      am, and does not make as much money, but he can take another man&rsquo;s ideas
+      and express them so simply and forcibly that they tell the man&rsquo;s story
+      better than he knew it himself. And that&rsquo;s all there is to advertising.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the man
+      for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every pat
+      phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He will
+      howl like a beast at paying Tom&rsquo;s bill, and then the next time he will try
+      to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so that he has to
+      send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like shelling corn off
+      the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge
+      pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. &ldquo;I am on my way to
+      the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company,&rdquo; he
+      explained to Prince. &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t stop at all. I have here the layout of a
+      circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common stock
+      of theirs that hasn&rsquo;t paid a dividend for ten years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. &ldquo;Never mind
+      the Biscuit Machine people and their stock,&rdquo; he commanded; &ldquo;they will
+      always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to meet
+      McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help him
+      with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Morris reached across the table and took Sam&rsquo;s hand; his own was small and
+      soft like that of a woman. &ldquo;I am worked to death,&rdquo; he complained; &ldquo;I have
+      my eye on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am going down there to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For an hour the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked of a
+      place in Wisconsin where the fish should be biting. &ldquo;A man has told me of
+      the place twenty times,&rdquo; he declared; &ldquo;I am sure I could find it on a
+      railroad folder. I have never been fishing nor have you, and Sam here
+      comes from a place to which they carry water in wagons over the plains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little man who had been drinking copiously of the wine looked from
+      Prince to Sam. From time to time he took off his glasses and wiped them
+      with a handkerchief. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand your being in such society,&rdquo; he
+      announced; &ldquo;you have the solid, substantial look of a bucket-shop man.
+      Prince here will get nowhere. He is honest, sells wind and his charming
+      society, and spends the money that he gets, instead of marrying and
+      putting it in his wife&rsquo;s name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prince arose. &ldquo;It is useless to waste time in persiflage,&rdquo; he began and
+      then turning to Sam, &ldquo;There is a place in Wisconsin,&rdquo; he said uncertainly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morris picked up the portfolio and with a grotesque effort at steadiness
+      started for the door followed by Prince and Sam walking with wavering
+      steps. In the street Prince took the portfolio out of the little man&rsquo;s
+      hand. &ldquo;Let your mother carry it, Tommy,&rdquo; he said, shaking his finger under
+      Morris&rsquo;s nose. He began singing a lullaby. &ldquo;When the bough bends the
+      cradle will fall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The three men walked out of Monroe and into State Street, Sam&rsquo;s head
+      feeling strangely light. The buildings along the street reeled against the
+      sky. A sudden fierce longing for wild adventure seized him. On a corner
+      Morris stopped, took the handkerchief from his pocket and again wiped his
+      glasses. &ldquo;I want to be sure that I see clearly,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;it seems to me
+      that in the bottom of that last glass of wine I saw three of us in a cab
+      with a basket of life oil on the seat between us going to the station to
+      catch the train for that place Jack&rsquo;s friend told fish lies about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next eighteen hours opened up a new world to Sam. With the fumes of
+      liquor rising in his brain, he rode for two hours on a train, tramped in
+      the darkness along dusty roads and, building a bonfire in a woods, danced
+      in the light of it upon the grass, holding the hands of Prince and the
+      little man with the wrinkled face. Solemnly he stood upon a stump at the
+      edge of a wheatfield and recited Poe&rsquo;s &ldquo;Helen,&rdquo; taking on the voice, the
+      gestures and even the habit of spreading his legs apart, of John Telfer.
+      And then overdoing the last, he sat down suddenly on the stump, and
+      Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand said, &ldquo;Fill the lamp, man&mdash;the
+      light of reason has gone out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From the bonfire in the woods and Sam&rsquo;s recital from the stump, the three
+      friends emerged again upon the road, and a belated farmer driving home
+      half asleep on the seat of his wagon caught their attention. With the
+      skill of an Indian boy the diminutive Morris sprang upon the wagon and
+      thrust a ten dollar bill into the farmer&rsquo;s hand. &ldquo;Lead us, O man of the
+      soil!&rdquo; he shouted, &ldquo;Lead us to a gilded palace of sin! Take us to a
+      saloon! The life oil gets low in the can!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond the long, jolting ride in the wagon Sam never became quite clear.
+      In his mind ran vague notions of a wild carousal in a country tavern, of
+      himself acting as bartender, and a huge red-faced woman rushing here and
+      there under the direction of a tiny man, dragging reluctant rustics to the
+      bar and commanding them to keep on drinking the beer that Sam drew until
+      the last of the ten dollars given to the man of the wagon should have gone
+      into her cash drawer. Also, he thought that Jack Prince had put a chair
+      upon the bar and that he sat on it explaining to the hurrying drawer of
+      beer that although the Egyptian kings had built great pyramids to
+      celebrate themselves they never built anything more gigantic than the jag
+      Tom Morris was building among the farm hands in the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later Sam thought that he and Jack Prince tried to sleep under a pile of
+      grain sacks in a shed and that Morris came to them weeping because every
+      one in the world was asleep and most of them lying under tables.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, his head clearing, Sam found himself with the two others walking
+      again upon the dusty road in the dawn and singing songs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the train, with the help of a Negro porter, the three men tried to
+      efface the dust and the stains of the wild night. The pasteboard portfolio
+      containing the circular for the Biscuit Machine Company was still under
+      Jack Prince&rsquo;s arm and the little man, wiping and re-wiping his glasses,
+      peered at Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you come with us or are you a child we have adopted here in these
+      parts?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street in Chicago where Sam
+      came to make his business start in the city, and it was proof of the dry
+      unresponsiveness in him that he did not sense more fully its meaning and
+      its message. All day the food stuff of a vast city flowed through the
+      narrow streets. Blue-shirted, broad-shouldered teamsters from the tops of
+      high piled wagons bawled at scurrying pedestrians. On the sidewalks in
+      boxes, bags, and barrels, lay oranges from Florida and California, figs
+      from Arabia, bananas from Jamaica, nuts from the hills of Spain and the
+      plains of Africa, cabbages from Ohio, beans from Michigan, corn and
+      potatoes from Iowa. In December, fur-coated men hurried through the
+      forests of northern Michigan gathering Christmas trees that found their
+      way to warm firesides through the street. And summer and winter a million
+      hens laid the eggs that were gathered there, and the cattle on a thousand
+      hills sent their yellow butter fat packed in tubs and piled upon trucks to
+      add to the confusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into this street Sam walked, thinking little of the wonder of these things
+      and thinking haltingly, getting his sense of the bigness of it in dollars
+      and cents. Standing in the doorway of the commission house for which he
+      was to work, strong, well clad, able and efficient, he looked through the
+      streets, seeing and hearing the hurry and the roar and the shouting of
+      voices, and then with a smile upon his lips went inside. In his brain was
+      an unexpressed thought. As the old Norse marauders looked at the cities
+      sitting in their splendour on the Mediterranean so looked he. &ldquo;What loot!&rdquo;
+       a voice within him said, and his brain began devising methods by which he
+      should get his share of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Years later, when Sam was a man of big affairs, he drove one day in a
+      carriage through the streets and turning to his companion, a grey-haired,
+      dignified Boston man who sat beside him, said, &ldquo;I worked here once and
+      used to sit on a barrel of apples at the edge of the sidewalk thinking how
+      clever I was to make more money in one month than the man who raised the
+      apples made in a year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Boston man, stirred by the sight of so much foodstuff and moved to
+      epigram by his mood, looked up and down the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The foodstuff of an empire rattling o&rsquo;er the stones,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should have made more money here,&rdquo; answered Sam dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The commission firm for which Sam worked was a partnership, not a
+      corporation, and was owned by two brothers. Of the two Sam thought that
+      the elder, a tall, bald, narrow-shouldered man, with a long narrow face
+      and a suave manner, was the real master, and represented most of the
+      ability in the partnership. He was oily, silent, tireless. All day he went
+      in and out of the office and warehouses and up and down the crowded
+      street, sucking nervously at an unlighted cigar. He was a great worker in
+      a suburban church, but a shrewd and, Sam suspected, an unscrupulous
+      business man. Occasionally the minister or some of the women of the
+      suburban church came into the office to talk with him, and Sam was amused
+      at the thought that Narrow Face, when he talked of the affairs of the
+      church, bore a striking resemblance to the brown-bearded minister of the
+      church in Caxton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other brother was a far different sort, and, in business, Sam thought,
+      a much inferior man. He was a heavy, broad-shouldered, square-faced man of
+      about thirty, who sat in the office dictating letters and who stayed out
+      two or three hours to lunch. He sent out letters signed by him on the
+      firm&rsquo;s stationery with the title of General Manager, and Narrow Face let
+      him do it. Broad Shoulders had been educated in New England and even after
+      several years away from his college seemed more interested in it than in
+      the welfare of the business. For a month or more in the spring he took
+      most of the time of one of the two stenographers employed by the firm
+      writing letters to graduates of Chicago high schools to induce them to go
+      East to finish their education; and when a graduate of the college came to
+      Chicago seeking employment, he closed his desk and spent entire days going
+      from place to place, introducing, urging, recommending. Sam noticed,
+      however, that when the firm employed a new man in their own office or on
+      the road it was Narrow-Face who chose the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Broad-shoulders had been a famous football player in his day and wore an
+      iron brace on his leg. The offices, like most of the offices on the
+      street, were dark and narrow, and smelled of decaying vegetables and
+      rancid butter. Noisy Greek and Italian hucksters wrangled on the sidewalk
+      in front, and among these went Narrow-Face hurrying about making deals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In South Water Street Sam did well, multiplying his thirty-six hundred
+      dollars by ten during the three years that he stayed there, or went out
+      from there to towns and cities directing a part of the great flowing river
+      of foodstuff through his firm&rsquo;s front door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With almost his first day on the street he began seeing on all sides of
+      him opportunity for gain, and set himself industriously at work to get his
+      hand upon money with which to take advantage of the chances that he
+      thought lay so invitingly about. Within a year he had made much progress.
+      From a woman on Wabash Avenue he got six thousand dollars, and he planned
+      and executed a coup that gave him the use of twenty thousand dollars that
+      had come as a legacy to his friend, the medical student, who lived at the
+      Pergrin house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had eggs and apples lying in warehouse against a rise; game, smuggled
+      across the state line from Michigan and Wisconsin, lay frozen in cold
+      storage tagged with his name and ready to be sold at a long profit to
+      hotels and fashionable restaurants; and there were even secret bushels of
+      corn and wheat lying in other warehouses along the Chicago River ready to
+      be thrown on the market at a word from him, or, the margins by which he
+      kept his hold on the stuff not being forthcoming, at a word from a LaSalle
+      Street broker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Getting the twenty thousand dollars out of the hands of the medical
+      student was a turning point in Sam&rsquo;s life. Sunday after Sunday he walked
+      with Eckardt in the streets or loitered with him in the parks thinking of
+      the money lying idle in the bank and of the deals he might be turning with
+      it in the street or on the road. Daily he saw more clearly the power of
+      cash. Other commission merchants along South Water Street came running
+      into the office of his firm with tense, anxious faces asking Narrow-Face
+      to help them over rough spots in the day&rsquo;s trading. Broad-Shoulders, who
+      had no business ability but who had married a rich woman, went on month
+      after month taking half the profits brought in by the ability of his tall,
+      shrewd brother, and Narrow-Face, who had taken a liking for Sam and who
+      occasionally stopped for a word with him, spoke of the matter often and
+      eloquently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Spend your time with no one who hasn&rsquo;t money to help you,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;on
+      the road look for the men with money and then try to get it. That&rsquo;s all
+      there is to business&mdash;money-getting.&rdquo; And then looking across to the
+      desk of his brother he would add, &ldquo;I would kick half the men in business
+      out of it if I could, but I myself must dance to the tune that money
+      plays.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One day Sam went to the office of an attorney named Webster, whose
+      reputation for the shrewd drawing of contracts had come to him from
+      Narrow-Face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want a contract drawn that will give me absolute control of twenty
+      thousand dollars with no risk on my part if I lose the money and no
+      promise to pay more than seven per cent if I do not lose,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attorney, a slender, middle-aged man with a swarthy skin and black
+      hair, put his hands on the desk before him and looked at the tall young
+      man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What collateral?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head. &ldquo;Can you draw such a contract that will be legal and
+      what will it cost me?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawyer laughed good naturedly. &ldquo;I can draw it of course. Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, taking a roll of bills from his pocket, counted the amount upon the
+      table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you anyway?&rdquo; asked Webster. &ldquo;If you can get twenty thousand and
+      without collateral you&rsquo;re worth knowing. I might be getting up a gang to
+      rob a mail train.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;There is no use his knowing I
+      have been to a lawyer,&rdquo; he thought guiltily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;In my hands it will double itself every year,&rdquo;
+       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. &ldquo;I will run factories and
+      banks and maybe mines and railroads,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s word picture&mdash;&ldquo;You will be a big man of dollars&mdash;it is
+      plain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then into Sam&rsquo;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&rsquo;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, &ldquo;But,
+      man, my honour is at stake,&rdquo; and of a coldness in the answering voice
+      replying persistently, &ldquo;With me it is not a matter of honour but of
+      dollars, and I am going to get them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;I will do what I can,&rdquo; when in truth he meant, &ldquo;I will get
+      what I can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;I will get Frank&rsquo;s money if I can,&rdquo; he told himself, settling
+      the matter that had been in his mind. &ldquo;Most men are fools and if I do not
+      get his money some other man will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s just it,&rdquo; said Frank Eckardt, falling quickly into the trap Sam
+      had set, and hungering for profits; &ldquo;I have money but no head on my
+      shoulders for using it. I wish you would take it and see what you can do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a thumping heart Sam went home across the city to the Pergrin house,
+      Eckardt beside him in the elevated train. In Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the agreement turned out to Eckardt&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through Jack Prince&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the kind of connection Sam had unconsciously been seeking&mdash;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&mdash;these
+      things were of course remote&mdash;to be dreamed of and worked toward&mdash;the
+      company made it a part of its policy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over against these advantages the place at Rainey&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rainey Arms Company, at the time of Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Do this, or that,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There must be loose ends lying about everywhere,&rdquo; he thought and followed
+      the thought with another. &ldquo;A man will come along, pick up these loose
+      ends, and run the whole shop. Why not I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the Civil War, and Colonel Tom&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>he</i> intended
+      to save.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One afternoon in a room in the Palmer House a scene was played out that
+      for days stayed in Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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, &ldquo;You are short here; you will have to
+      build this pile higher if you expect to interest me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man by the window shrugged his shoulders&mdash;he was a slender,
+      young-looking man in a fancy waistcoat&mdash;and then turning and taking a
+      roll of bills from his pocket he walked to the table, facing Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall expect you to be reasonable,&rdquo; he said, as he laid the bills on
+      the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the pile had reached twenty thousand, Sam reached out his hand and
+      taking it up put it in his pocket. &ldquo;You will get a receipt for this when I
+      get back to the office,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&mdash;written by Sam&mdash;on
+      a man&rsquo;s place in the organisation and conducting of a great modern
+      industry and his duty to perfect himself as a workman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;that
+      was Colonel Tom&rsquo;s own touch and the rousing reception of it brought a glow
+      of pride to his cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t have your time taken up by them,&rdquo; Sam explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s innovations&mdash;to be replaced
+      later by two&mdash;their stock by a prearranged agreement came back into
+      the company&rsquo;s hands. This stock and another block, secured for him by the
+      colonel, got into Sam&rsquo;s hands through the use of Eckardt&rsquo;s money, that of
+      the Wabash Avenue woman, and his own snug pile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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. &ldquo;I have in my hand a great tool,&rdquo; he thought; &ldquo;with it
+      I will pry my way into the place I mean to occupy among the big men of
+      this city and this nation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;of whom he
+      intended to be one&mdash;intent upon growth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Edith!&rdquo; he called, and running forward thrust the roses into her hand.
+      &ldquo;For Janet,&rdquo; he said, and lifting his hat walked beside her along State to
+      Van Buren Street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;ll be a hot time in the old town to-night,&rdquo; sang the voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;There&rsquo;ll
+      be a hot time in the old town to-night,&rdquo; again insisted the voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Ladies&rsquo; Entrance,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Take it and make money for me,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s
+      ability in affairs. &ldquo;What is the good of having a talent if you do not use
+      it to benefit those who haven&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Going up the stairway after the ride in the cable car Sam stood beside
+      Janet&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk!&rdquo; she broke out. &ldquo;Books are not full of pretence and lies; you
+      business men are&mdash;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&rsquo;t read books, not real ones. Didn&rsquo;t my father know; didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little woman, a light, half scorn, half amusement in her eyes, leaned
+      forward and ran her fingers through Sam&rsquo;s hair, laughing down into the
+      astonished face he turned up to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m not afraid, in spite of what Edith and Jack Prince say of you,&rdquo;
+       she went on impulsively. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam grinned. &ldquo;You are like your father, driving the mowing machine up and
+      down under the church windows on Sunday mornings,&rdquo; he declared; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Janet, closing her eyes and lying back in her chair, laughed with delight
+      and declared that they would have a splendid quarrelsome evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam did not understand Janet&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Janet&rsquo;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&rsquo;s money had grown in his hands and did not see her again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sam, were you ever in love?&rdquo; asked the colonel, with a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam turned and buried his face in the pillow and the white covering of his
+      bed danced up and down. &ldquo;The old fool, has it come to that with him?&rdquo; he
+      asked himself. &ldquo;After all these years of single life is he going to begin
+      running after women now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not answer the colonel&rsquo;s question. &ldquo;There are breakers ahead for
+      you, old boy,&rdquo; he thought, the figure of quiet, determined, little Sue
+      Rainey, the colonel&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel, oblivious of Sam&rsquo;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. &ldquo;Children are so unfair,&rdquo; he complained; &ldquo;they forget
+      about a man&rsquo;s feelings and can&rsquo;t realise that his heart is still young.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a smile on his lips, Sam began trying to picture a woman&rsquo;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. &ldquo;She is an actress, a
+      working girl,&rdquo; he said feelingly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sat up in bed. &ldquo;Letters!&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;The old dog is going to get
+      himself involved.&rdquo; He dropped again upon the pillow. &ldquo;Well, let him. Why
+      need I bother myself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel, having begun talking, could not stop. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A worried sigh broke from the colonel. &ldquo;I want Sue to invite her to the
+      house, but I am afraid,&rdquo; he complained; &ldquo;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&rsquo;s feelings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The moon had risen, shedding its light in Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would not hurt her feelings for anything. She is the squarest little
+      woman alive,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;It is a wonderful thing,&rdquo; half sobbed the
+      colonel, &ldquo;when a young and beautiful woman gives her whole heart into the
+      keeping of a man like me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The colonel,&rdquo; she began, and then hesitated and smiled. &ldquo;You, Mr.
+      McPherson, have become a figure in my father&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam watched her gravely. A flicker of mirth ran through him, but his face
+      was grave and disinterested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; he said, looking into her eyes. &ldquo;Have you met Miss London?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have,&rdquo; answered Sue Rainey. &ldquo;Have you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is impossible,&rdquo; declared the colonel&rsquo;s daughter, clutching the glove
+      held in her hand and staring at the floor. A flush of anger rose in her
+      cheeks. &ldquo;She is a crude, hard, scheming woman. She colours her hair, she
+      cries when you look at her, she hasn&rsquo;t even the grace to be ashamed of
+      what she is trying to do, and she has got the colonel into a fix.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at the brown of Sue Rainey&rsquo;s cheek and thought the texture of
+      it beautiful. He wondered why he had heard her called a plain woman. The
+      heightened colour brought to her face by her anger had, he thought,
+      transfigured her. He liked her direct, forceful way of putting the matter
+      of the colonel&rsquo;s affair, and felt keenly the compliment implied by her
+      having come to him. &ldquo;She has self-respect,&rdquo; he told himself, and felt a
+      thrill of pride in her attitude as though it had been inspired by himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been hearing of you a great deal,&rdquo; she continued, glancing up at
+      him and smiling. &ldquo;At our house you are brought to the table with the soup
+      and taken away with the liqueur. My father interlards his table talk, and
+      introduces all of his wise new axioms on economy and efficiency and
+      growth, with a constant procession of &lsquo;Sam says&rsquo; and &lsquo;Sam thinks.&rsquo; And the
+      men who come to the house talk of you also. Teddy Foreman says that at
+      directors&rsquo; meetings they all sit about like children waiting for you to
+      tell them what to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She threw out her hand with an impatient little gesture. &ldquo;I am in a hole,&rdquo;
+       she said. &ldquo;I might handle my father but I cannot handle that woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While she had been talking to him Sam looked past her and out at a window.
+      When her eyes wandered from his face he looked again at her brown firm
+      cheeks. From the beginning of the interview he had been intending to help
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me the lady&rsquo;s address,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go look her over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Three evenings later Sam took Miss Luella London to a midnight supper at
+      one of the town&rsquo;s best restaurants. She knew the motive of his taking her,
+      as he had been quite frank in the few minutes&rsquo; talk near the stage door of
+      the theatre when the engagement was made. As they ate, they talked of the
+      plays at the Chicago theatres, and Sam told her a story of an amateur
+      performance that had once taken place in the hall over Geiger&rsquo;s drug store
+      in Caxton when he was boy. In the performance Sam had taken the rôle of a
+      drummer boy killed on the field of battle by a swaggering villain in a
+      grey uniform, and John Telfer, in the rôle of villain, had become so in
+      earnest that, a pistol not exploding at a critical moment, he had chased
+      Sam about the stage trying to hit him with the butt of the weapon while
+      the audience roared with delight at the realism of Telfer&rsquo;s rage and at
+      the frightened boy begging for mercy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Luella London laughed heartily at Sam&rsquo;s story and then, the coffee being
+      served, she fingered the handle of the cup and a shrewd look came into her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now you are a big business man and have come to see me about Colonel
+      Rainey,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam lighted a cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just how much are you counting on this marriage between yourself and the
+      colonel?&rdquo; he asked bluntly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The actress laughed and poured cream into her coffee. A line came and went
+      on her forehead between her eyes. Sam thought she looked capable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking of what you told me at the stage door,&rdquo; she said,
+      and a childlike smile played about her lips. &ldquo;Do you know, Mr. McPherson,
+      I can&rsquo;t just figure you. I can&rsquo;t just see how you get into this. Where are
+      your credentials, anyway?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, keeping his eyes upon her face, took a jump into the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s this way,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m something of an adventurer myself. I fly
+      the black flag. I come from where you do. I had to reach out my hand and
+      take what I wanted. I do not blame you in the least, but it just happens
+      that I saw Colonel Tom Rainey first. He is my game and I do not propose to
+      have you fooling around. I am not bluffing. You have got to get off him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaning forward, he stared at her intently, and then lowered his voice.
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got your record. I know the man you used to live with. He&rsquo;s going to
+      help me get you if you do not drop it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting back in his chair Sam watched her gravely. He had taken the odd
+      chance to win quickly by a bluff and had won. But Luella London was not to
+      be defeated without a struggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You lie,&rdquo; she cried, half springing from her chair. &ldquo;Frank has never&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, Frank has,&rdquo; answered Sam, turning as though to call a waiter; &ldquo;I
+      will have him here in ten minutes if you wish to be shown.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Picking up a fork the woman began nervously picking holes in the table
+      cloth and a tear appeared upon her cheek. She took a handkerchief from a
+      bag that hung hooked over the back of a chair at the side of the table and
+      wiped her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right! All right!&rdquo; she said, bracing herself, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll drop it. If
+      you&rsquo;ve dug up Frank Robson you&rsquo;ve got me. He&rsquo;ll do anything you say for a
+      piece of money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some minutes the two sat in silence. A tired look had come into the
+      woman&rsquo;s eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish I was a man,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I get whipped at everything I tackle
+      because I&rsquo;m a woman. I&rsquo;m getting past my money-making days in the theatre
+      and I thought the colonel was fair game.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is,&rdquo; answered Sam dispassionately, &ldquo;but you see I beat you to it. He&rsquo;s
+      mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glancing cautiously about the room, he took a roll of bills from his
+      pocket and began laying them one at a time upon the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you&rsquo;ve done a good piece of work. You should have
+      won. For ten years half the society women of Chicago have been trying to
+      marry their daughters or their sons to the Rainey fortune. They had
+      everything to help them, wealth, good looks, and a standing in the world.
+      You have none of these things. How did you do it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anyway,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not going to see you trimmed. I&rsquo;ve got ten
+      thousand dollars here, as good Rainey money as ever was printed. You sign
+      this paper and then put the roll in your purse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s square,&rdquo; said Luella London, signing, and with the light coming
+      back into her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam beckoned to the proprietor of the restaurant whom he knew and had him
+      and a waiter sign as witnesses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Luella London put the roll of bills into her purse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you give me that money for when you had me beat anyway?&rdquo; she
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam lighted a fresh cigar and folding the paper put it in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I like you and I admire your skill,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and anyway I did
+      not have you beaten until right now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat studying the people getting up from the tables and going through
+      the door to waiting carriages and automobiles, the well-dressed women with
+      assured airs serving Sam&rsquo;s mind to make a contrast for the woman who sat
+      with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I presume you are right about women,&rdquo; he said musingly, &ldquo;it must be a
+      stiff game for you if you like winning on your own hook.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Winning! We don&rsquo;t win.&rdquo; The lips of the actress drew back showing her
+      white teeth. &ldquo;No woman ever won who tried to play a straight fighting game
+      for herself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice grew tense and the lines upon her forehead reappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Woman can&rsquo;t stand alone,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;she is a sentimental fool. She
+      reaches out her hand to some man and that in the end beats her. Why, even
+      when she plays the game as I played it against the colonel some rat of a
+      man like Frank Robson, for whom she has given up everything worth while to
+      a woman, sells her out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at her hand, covered with rings, lying on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s not misunderstand each other,&rdquo; he said quietly, &ldquo;do not blame Frank
+      for this. I never knew him. I just imagined him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A puzzled look came into the woman&rsquo;s eyes and a flush rose in her cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You grafter!&rdquo; she sneered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam called to a passing waiter and ordered a fresh bottle of wine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the use being sore?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s simple enough. You staked
+      against a better mind. Anyway you have the ten thousand, haven&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Luella reached for her purse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll look. Haven&rsquo;t you decided to steal it back
+      yet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m coming to that,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;don&rsquo;t hurry me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For several minutes they sat eyeing each other, and then, with an earnest
+      ring in his voice and a smile on his lips, Sam began talking again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m no Frank Robson and I do not like giving a
+      woman the worst of it. I have been studying you and I can&rsquo;t see you
+      running around loose with ten thousand dollars of real money on you. You
+      do not fit into the picture and the money will not last a year in your
+      hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give it to me,&rdquo; he urged; &ldquo;let me invest it for you. I&rsquo;m a winner. I&rsquo;ll
+      double it for you in a year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The actress stared past Sam&rsquo;s shoulder to where a group of young men sat
+      about a table drinking and talking loudly. Sam began telling an anecdote
+      of an Irish baggage man in Caxton. When he had finished he looked at her
+      and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As that shoemaker looked to Jerry Donlin so you, as the colonel&rsquo;s wife,
+      looked to me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I had to make you get out of my flower bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A gleam of resolution came into the wandering eyes of Luella London and
+      she took the purse from the back of the chair and brought out the roll of
+      bills.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a sport,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and I&rsquo;m going to lay a bet on the best horse I
+      ever saw. You may trim me, but I always would take a chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning, she called a waiter and, handing him a bill from her purse, threw
+      the roll on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take the pay for the spread and the wine we have had out of that,&rdquo; she
+      said, handing him the loose bill and then turning to Sam. &ldquo;You ought to
+      beat the world. Anyway your genius gets recognition from me. I pay for
+      this party and when you see the colonel say good-bye to him for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day, at his request, Sue Rainey called at the offices of the Arms
+      Company and Sam handed her the paper signed by Luella London. It was an
+      agreement on her part to divide with Sam, half and half, any money she
+      might be able to blackmail out of Colonel Rainey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel&rsquo;s daughter glanced from the paper to Sam&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought so,&rdquo; she said, and a puzzled look came into her eyes. &ldquo;But I do
+      not understand this. What does this paper do and what did you pay for it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The paper,&rdquo; Sam answered, &ldquo;puts her in a hole and I paid ten thousand
+      dollars for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue Rainey laughed and taking a checkbook from her handbag laid it on the
+      desk and sat down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you get your half?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I get it all,&rdquo; answered Sam, and then leaning back in his chair launched
+      into an explanation. When he had told her of the talk in the restaurant
+      she sat with the checkbook lying before her and with the puzzled look
+      still in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without giving her time for comment, Sam plunged into the midst of what
+      had been in his mind to say to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The woman will not bother the colonel any more,&rdquo; he declared; &ldquo;if that
+      paper won&rsquo;t hold her something else will. She respects me and she is
+      afraid of me. We had a talk after she had signed the paper and she gave me
+      the ten thousand dollars to invest for her. I promised to double it for
+      her within a year and I want to make good. I want you to double it now.
+      Make the check for twenty thousand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue Rainey wrote the check, making it payable to bearer, and pushed it
+      across the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot say that I understand yet,&rdquo; she confessed. &ldquo;Did you also fall in
+      love with her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam grinned. He was wondering whether he would be able to get into words
+      just what he wanted to tell her of the actress soldier of fortune. He
+      looked across the table at her frank grey eyes and then on an impulse
+      decided that he would tell it straight out as though she had been a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I like ability and good brains and that woman
+      has them. She isn&rsquo;t a good woman, but nothing in her life has made her
+      want to be good. All her life she has been going the wrong way, and now
+      she wants to get on her feet and squared around. That&rsquo;s what she was after
+      the colonel for. She did not want to marry him, she wanted to make him
+      give her the start she was after. I got the best of her because somewhere
+      there is a snivelling little whelp of a man who has taken all the good and
+      the fineness out of her and who now stands ready to sell her out for a few
+      dollars. I imagined there would be such a man when I saw her and I bluffed
+      my way through to him. But I do not want to whip a woman, even in such an
+      affair, through the cheapness of some man. I want to do the square thing
+      by her. That&rsquo;s why I asked you to make that check for twenty thousand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue Rainey rose and stood by the desk looking down at him. He was thinking
+      how wonderfully clear and honest her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what about the colonel?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;What will he think of all this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam walked around the desk and took her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll have to agree not to consider him,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We really did that
+      you know when we started this thing. I think we can depend upon Miss
+      London&rsquo;s putting the finishing touches on the job.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Miss London did. She sent for Sam a week later and put tweny-five
+      hundred dollars into his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s not to invest for me,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that&rsquo;s for yourself. By the
+      agreement I signed with you we were to split anything I got out of the
+      colonel. Well, I went light. I only got five thousand dollars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the money in his hand Sam stood by the side of a little table in her
+      room looking at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you tell the colonel?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I called him up here to my room last night and lying here in bed I told
+      him that I had just discovered I was the victim of an incurable disease. I
+      told him that within a month I would be in bed for keeps and asked him to
+      marry me at once and to take me away with him to some quiet place where I
+      could die in his arms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Coming over to Sam, Luella London put a hand upon his arm and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He began to beg off and make excuses,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;and then I brought
+      out his letters to me and talked straight. He wilted at once and paid the
+      five thousand dollars I asked for the letters without a murmur. I might
+      have made it fifty and with your talent you ought to get all he has in six
+      months.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook hands with her and told her of his success in doubling the money
+      she had put into his hands. Then putting the twenty-five hundred dollars
+      in his pocket he went back to his desk. He did not see her again and when,
+      through a lucky market turn, he had increased the twenty thousand dollars
+      she had left with him to twenty-five, he placed it in the hands of a trust
+      company for her and forgot the incident. Years later he heard that she was
+      running a fashionable dressmaking establishment in a western city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Colonel Tom Rainey, who had for months talked of nothing but factory
+      efficiency and of what he and young Sam McPherson were going to do in the
+      way of enlarging the business, began the next morning a tirade against
+      women that lasted the rest of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sue Rainey had long touched the fancy of the youths of Chicago society
+      who, while looking at her trim little figure and at the respectable size
+      of the fortune behind it, were yet puzzled and disconcerted by her
+      attitude toward themselves. On the wide porches at golf clubs, where young
+      men in white trousers lounged and smoked cigarettes, and in the down-town
+      clubs, where the same young men spent winter afternoons playing Kelly
+      pool, they spoke of her, calling her an enigma. &ldquo;She&rsquo;ll end by being an
+      old maid,&rdquo; they declared, and shook their heads at the thought of so good
+      a connection dangling loosely in the air just without their reach. From
+      time to time, one of the young men tore himself loose from the group that
+      contemplated her, and, with an opening volley of books, candy, flowers and
+      invitations to theatres, charged down upon her, only to have the youthful
+      ardour of his attack cooled by her prolonged attitude of indifference.
+      When she was twenty-one, a young English cavalry officer, who came to
+      Chicago to ride in the horse show had, for some weeks, been seen much in
+      her company and a report of their engagement had been whispered through
+      the town and talked of about the nineteenth hole at the country clubs. The
+      rumour proved to be without foundation, the attraction to the cavalry
+      officer having been a certain brand of rare old wine the colonel had
+      stored in his cellar and a feeling of brotherhood with the swaggering old
+      gun maker, rather than the colonel&rsquo;s quiet little daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the beginning of his acquaintanceship with her, and all during the
+      days when he stirred things up in the offices and shops of the gun
+      company, tales of the assiduous and often needy young men who were camped
+      on her trail reached Sam&rsquo;s ears. They would be in at the office to see and
+      talk with the colonel, who had several times confided to Sam that his
+      daughter Sue was already past the age at which right-minded young women
+      should marry, and in the absence of the father two or three of them had
+      formed a habit of stopping for a word with Sam, whom they had met through
+      the colonel or Jack Prince. They declared that they were &ldquo;squaring
+      themselves with the colonel.&rdquo; Not a difficult thing to do, Sam thought, as
+      he drank the wine, smoked the cigars, and ate the dinners of all without
+      prejudice. Once, at luncheon, Colonel Tom discussed these young men with
+      Sam, pounding on a table so that the glasses jumped about, and calling
+      them damned upstarts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For his own part, Sam did not feel that he knew Sue Rainey, and although,
+      after their first meeting one evening at the Rainey house, he had been
+      pricked by a mild curiosity concerning her, no opportunity to satisfy it
+      had presented itself. He knew that she was athletic, travelled much, rode,
+      shot, and sailed a boat; and he had heard Jack Prince speak of her as a
+      woman of brains, but, until the incident of the colonel and Luella London
+      threw them for the moment into the same enterprise and started him
+      thinking of her with real interest, he had seen and talked with her for
+      but brief passing moments brought about by their mutual interest in the
+      affairs of her father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Janet Eberly&rsquo;s sudden death, and while he was yet in the midst of
+      his grief at her loss, Sam had his first long talk with Sue Rainey. It was
+      in Colonel Tom&rsquo;s office, and Sam, walking hurriedly in, found her sitting
+      at the colonel&rsquo;s desk and staring out of the window at a broad expanse of
+      flat roofs. A man, climbing a flag pole to replace a slipped rope, caught
+      his attention and standing by the window looking at the minute figure
+      clinging to the swaying pole, he began talking of the absurdity of human
+      endeavour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel&rsquo;s daughter listened respectfully to his rather obvious
+      banalities and getting up from her chair came to stand beside him. Sam
+      turned slyly to look at her firm brown cheeks as he had looked on the
+      morning when she had come to see him about Luella London and was struck by
+      the thought that she in some faint way reminded him of Janet Eberly. In a
+      moment, and rather to his own surprise, he burst into a long speech
+      telling of Janet, of the tragedy of her loss and something of the beauty
+      of her life and character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The nearness of his loss and the nearness also of what he thought might be
+      a sympathetic listener spurred him and he found himself getting a kind of
+      relief for the aching sense of loss for his dead comrade by heaping
+      praises upon her life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had finished saying what was in his mind, he stood by the window
+      feeling awkward and embarrassed. The man who climbed the flag pole having
+      put the rope through the ring at the top slid suddenly down the pole and
+      thinking for the moment that he had fallen Sam made a quick clutch at the
+      air with his hand. His gripping fingers closed over Sue Rainey&rsquo;s hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned, amused by the incident, and began making a halting explanation.
+      There were tears in Sue Rainey&rsquo;s eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish I had known her,&rdquo; she said and drew her hand from between his
+      fingers. &ldquo;I wish you had known me better that I also might have known your
+      Janet. They are rare&mdash;such women. They are worth much to know. Most
+      women like most men&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made an impatient gesture with her hand and Sam, turning, walked
+      toward the door. He felt that he might not trust himself to answer her.
+      For the first time since coming to manhood he felt that tears might at any
+      moment come into his eyes. Grief for the loss of Janet surged through him
+      disconcerting and engulfing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been doing you an injustice,&rdquo; said Sue Rainey, looking at the
+      floor. &ldquo;I have thought of you as something different from what you are.
+      There is a story I heard of you which gave me a wrong impression.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam smiled. Having conquered the commotion within himself, he laughed and
+      explained the incident of the man who had slid down the pole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was the story you heard?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a story a young man told at our house,&rdquo; she explained
+      hesitatingly, refusing to be carried away from her mood of seriousness.
+      &ldquo;It was about a little girl you saved from drowning and a purse made up
+      and given you. Why did you take the money?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at her squarely. The story was one that Jack Prince had delight
+      in telling. It concerned an incident of his early business life in the
+      city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One afternoon, when he was still in the employ of the commission firm, he
+      had taken a party of men for a trip on an excursion steamer on the lake.
+      He had a project into which he wanted them to go with him and had taken
+      them aboard the steamer to get them together and present the merits of his
+      scheme. During the trip a little girl had fallen overboard and Sam,
+      springing after her, had brought her safely aboard the boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the excursion steamer a cheer had arisen. A young man in a
+      broad-brimmed cowboy hat ran about taking up a collection. People crowded
+      forward to grasp Sam&rsquo;s hand and he had accepted the money collected and
+      had put it in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the men aboard the boat were several who, while they did not draw
+      back from going into Sam&rsquo;s project, had thought his taking the money not
+      manly. They had told the story, and it had come to the ears of Jack
+      Prince, who never tired of repeating it and always ended the story with
+      the request that the listener ask Sam why he had taken the money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now in Colonel Tom&rsquo;s office facing Sue Rainey, Sam made the explanation
+      that had so delighted Jack Prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The crowd wanted to give me the money,&rdquo; he said, slightly perplexed. &ldquo;Why
+      shouldn&rsquo;t I have taken it? I did not save the little girl for the money,
+      but because she was a little girl; and the money paid for my ruined
+      clothes and the expenses of the trip.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With his hand on the doorknob he looked steadily at the woman before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I wanted the money,&rdquo; he announced, a ring of defiance in his voice.
+      &ldquo;I have always wanted money, any money I could get.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam went back to his own office and sat down at his desk. He had been
+      surprised by the cordiality and friendliness Sue Rainey had shown toward
+      him. On an impulse, he wrote a letter, defending his position in the
+      matter of the money taken on the excursion steamer and setting forth
+      something of the attitude of his mind toward money and business affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot see myself believing in the rot most business men talk,&rdquo; he
+      wrote at the end of the letter. &ldquo;They are full of sentiment and ideals
+      which are not true. Having a thing to sell they always say it is the best,
+      although it may be third rate. I do not object to that. What I do object
+      to is the way they have of nursing a hope within themselves that the third
+      rate thing is first rate until the hope becomes a belief. In the talk I
+      had with that actress Luella London I told her that I myself flew the
+      black flag. Well, I do. I would lie about goods to sell them, but I would
+      not lie to myself. I will not stultify my own mind. If a man crosses
+      swords with me in a business deal and I come out of the affair with the
+      money, it is no sign that I am the greater rascal, rather it is a sign
+      that I am the keener man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the note lying before him on the desk Sam wondered why he had written
+      it. It seemed to him an accurate and straightforward statement of the
+      business creed he had adopted for himself, but a rather absurd note to
+      write to a woman. And then, not allowing himself time to reconsider his
+      action, he addressed an envelope and going out into the general offices
+      dropped it into the mail chute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will let her know where I stand anyway,&rdquo; he thought, with a return of
+      the defiant mood in which he had told her the motive of his action on the
+      boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within the next ten days after the talk in Colonel Tom&rsquo;s office Sam saw
+      Sue Rainey several times coming to or going from her father&rsquo;s office.
+      Once, meeting in the little lobby by the office entrance, she stopped and
+      put out her hand which Sam took awkwardly. He had a feeling that she would
+      not have regretted an opportunity to continue the sudden little intimacy
+      that had sprung up between them in the few minutes&rsquo; talk of Janet Eberly.
+      The feeling did not come from vanity but from a belief in Sam that she was
+      in some way lonely and wanting companionship. Although she had been much
+      courted she lacked, he thought, the talent for comradeship or quick
+      friendliness. &ldquo;Like Janet she is more than half intellect,&rdquo; he told
+      himself, and felt a pang of regret for the slight disloyalty of the
+      further thought that there was in Sue a something more substantial and
+      solid than there had been in Janet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Sam began wondering whether or not he would like to marry Sue
+      Rainey. His mind played with the idea. He took it with him to bed, and it
+      went with him all day in his hurried trips through offices and shops. The
+      thought having come to him persisted, and he began seeing her in a new
+      light. The odd half awkward little movements of her hands, and their
+      expressiveness, the brown fine texture of her cheeks, the clearness and
+      honesty of her grey eyes, the quick sympathy and understanding of his
+      feeling for Janet, and the subtle flattery of the notion he had got that
+      she was interested in him&mdash;all of these things came and went in his
+      mind while he ran through columns of figures and laid plans for the
+      expansion of the business of the Arms Company. Unconsciously he began to
+      make her a part of his plans for the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later, Sam discovered that during the days after the first talk together
+      the thought of a marriage between them was in Sue&rsquo;s mind also. After the
+      talk she went home and stood for an hour before the glass studying herself
+      and she once told Sam that in her bed that night she shed tears because
+      she had never been able to arouse in a man the note of tenderness that had
+      been in his voice when he talked to her of Janet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then two months after the first talk they had another. Sam, who had
+      not allowed his grief over the loss of Janet or his nightly efforts to
+      drown the sting of it in hard drinking, to check the big forward movement
+      that he felt he was getting into the work of the offices and shops, sat
+      one afternoon deeply absorbed in a pile of factory cost sheets. His shirt
+      sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his white muscular forearms. He
+      was absorbed, intent upon the sheets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I stepped in,&rdquo; said a voice above his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glancing up quickly, Sam sprang to his feet. &ldquo;She must have been there
+      some minutes looking down at me,&rdquo; he thought, and had a thrill of pleasure
+      in the thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into his mind came the contents of the letter he had written her, and he
+      wondered if after all he had been a fool, and whether the thoughts of a
+      marriage with her were but vagaries. &ldquo;Perhaps it would not be attractive
+      to either her or myself when we came up to it,&rdquo; he decided.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I stepped in,&rdquo; she began again. &ldquo;I have been thinking. Some things you
+      said&mdash;in the letter and when you talked of your friend Janet who died&mdash;some
+      things of men and women and work. You may not remember them. I&mdash;I got
+      interested. I&mdash;are you a socialist?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe not,&rdquo; Sam answered, wondering what had given her that thought.
+      &ldquo;Are you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed and shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just what are you?&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;What do you believe? I am curious to
+      know. I thought your note&mdash;you will pardon me&mdash;I thought it a
+      kind of pretence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam winced. A shadow of doubt of the sincerity of his business philosophy
+      crossed his mind accompanied by the swaggering figure of Windy McPherson.
+      He came around the desk and leaning against it looked at her. His
+      secretary had gone out of the room and they were alone together. Sam
+      laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a man in the town where I was raised used to say that I was a
+      little mole working underground, intent upon worms,&rdquo; he said, and then,
+      waving his arms toward the papers on the desk, added, &ldquo;I am a business
+      man. Isn&rsquo;t that enough? If you could go with me through some of these cost
+      sheets you would agree they are needed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned and faced her again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What should I be doing with beliefs?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I think you have them&mdash;some kind of beliefs,&rdquo; she insisted,
+      &ldquo;you must have them. You get things done. You should hear the men talk of
+      you. Sometimes at the house they are quite foolish about what a wonderful
+      fellow you are and what you are doing here. They say that you drive on and
+      on. What drives you? I want to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the moment Sam half suspected that she was secretly laughing at him.
+      Finding her quite serious he started to reply and then stopped, regarding
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence between them went on and on. A clock on the wall ticked
+      loudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stepped nearer to her and stood looking down into the face she slowly
+      turned up to his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to have a talk with you,&rdquo; he said, and his voice broke. He had the
+      illusion of a hand gripping at his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a flash he had definitely decided that he would try to marry her. Her
+      interest in the motives of his life had clinched the sort of half decision
+      he had made. In an illuminating moment during the prolonged silence
+      between them he had seen her in a new light. The feeling of vague intimacy
+      brought to him by his thoughts of her became a fixed belief that she
+      belonged to him&mdash;was a part of him&mdash;and he was charmed with her
+      manner, and her person, standing there, as with a gift given him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then into his mind came a hundred other thoughts, clamouring thoughts,
+      come out of the hidden parts of him. He began to think that she could lead
+      the way on a road he wanted to travel. He thought of her wealth and what
+      it would mean to a man filled with his hunger for power. And through these
+      thoughts shot others. Something in her had taken hold of him&mdash;something
+      that had been also in Janet. He was curious concerning her curiosity about
+      his beliefs, and wanted to question her concerning her own beliefs. He
+      could see none of Colonel Tom&rsquo;s blustering incompetence in her and thought
+      her filled with truth as a deep spring is filled with clear water. He
+      believed she would give him something, something that all his life he had
+      been wanting. An old aching hunger that had haunted his nights as a boy
+      came back and he thought that at her hand it might be fed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I must read a book about socialism,&rdquo; he said lamely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again they stood in silence, she looking at the floor, he past her head
+      and out at the window. He could not bring himself to speak again of the
+      proposed talk. He had a boyish dread of having her notice the tremor in
+      his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Colonel Tom came into the room, bursting with an idea Sam had given him at
+      the lunch hour and which in working its way into his mind had become to
+      the colonel&rsquo;s entirely honest belief an idea of his own. The interruption
+      brought to Sam an intense feeling of relief and he began talking of the
+      colonel&rsquo;s idea as though it had taken him unawares.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue, walking to a window, began tying and untying the curtain cord. When
+      Sam, raising his eyes, looked at her, he caught her eyes watching him
+      intently and she smiled, continuing to look at him squarely. It was his
+      eyes that first broke away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From that day Sam&rsquo;s mind was afire with thoughts of Sue Rainey. In his
+      room he sat, or going into Grant Park stood by the lake, looking at the
+      silent, moving water as he had looked in the days when he first came to
+      the city. He did not dream of having her in his arms or of kissing her
+      lips; he thought, instead, with a glowing heart, of a life lived with her.
+      He wanted to walk beside her through the streets, to have her come
+      suddenly in at his office door, to look into her eyes and to have her
+      question him, as she had questioned, concerning his beliefs and his hopes.
+      He thought that in the evening he would like to go to a house of his own
+      and find her sitting there waiting for him. All the charm of his aimless,
+      half-dissolute way of life died in him, and he believed that with her he
+      could begin to live more fully and completely. From the moment when he had
+      definitely decided that he wanted Sue as a wife, Sam stopped overdrinking,
+      going to his room or walking through the streets or in the parks instead
+      of seeking his old companions in the clubs and drinking places. Sometimes
+      pushing his bed to the window overlooking the lake, he would undress
+      immediately after dinner and opening the window would spend half the night
+      watching the lights of boats far away over the water and thinking of her.
+      He would imagine her in the room, moving here and there, and coming
+      occasionally to put her hand in his hair and look down at him as Janet had
+      done, helping by her sane talk and quiet ways to get his life straightened
+      out for good living.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when he had fallen asleep the face of Sue Rainey came to visit his
+      dreams. One night he thought she had become blind and sat in the room with
+      sightless eyes saying over and over like one demented, &ldquo;Truth, truth, give
+      me back the truth that I may see,&rdquo; and he awoke sick with horror at the
+      thought of the look of suffering that had been in her face. Never did Sam
+      dream of having her in his arms or of raining kisses on her lips and neck
+      as he had dreamed of other women who in the past had won his favour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For all that he thought of her so constantly and built so confidently his
+      dream of a life to be spent with her, months passed before he saw her
+      again. Through Colonel Tom he learned that she had gone for a visit to the
+      East and he went earnestly about his work, keeping his mind on his
+      business during the day and only in the evening allowing himself to become
+      absorbed in thoughts of her. He had a feeling that although he had said
+      nothing she knew of his desire for her and that she wanted time to think
+      it over. Several times in the evening in his room he wrote her long
+      letters filled with minute, boyish explanations of his thoughts and
+      motives, letters which after writing he immediately destroyed. A woman of
+      the west side, with whom he had once had an affair, met him one day on the
+      street, and put her hand familiarly on his arm and for the moment
+      reawakened in him an old desire. After leaving her he did not go back to
+      the office, but taking a south-bound car, spent the afternoon walking in
+      Jackson Park, watching the children at play on the grass, sitting on
+      benches under the trees, getting out of his body and his mind the
+      insistent call of the flesh that had come back to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then in the evening, he came suddenly upon Sue riding a spirited black
+      horse in a bridle path at the upper end of the park. It was just at the
+      grey beginning of night. Stopping the horse, she sat looking at him and
+      going to her he put a hand on the bridle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might have that talk,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled down at him and the colour began to rise in her brown cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking of it,&rdquo; she said, the familiar serious look coming
+      into her eyes. &ldquo;After all what have we to say to each other?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam watched her steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a lot of things to say to you,&rdquo; he announced. &ldquo;That is to say&mdash;well&mdash;I
+      have, if things are as I hope.&rdquo; She got off the horse and they stood
+      together by the side of the path. Sam never forgot the few minutes of
+      silence that followed. The wide prospects of green sward, the golf player
+      trudging wearily toward them through the uncertain light, his bag upon his
+      shoulder, the air of physical fatigue with which he walked, bending
+      slightly forward, the faint, soft sound of waves washing over a low beach,
+      and the intense waiting look on the face she turned up to him, made an
+      impression on his mind that stayed with him through life. It seemed to him
+      that he had arrived at a kind of culmination, a starting point, and that
+      all the vague shadowy uncertainties that had, in reflective moments,
+      flitted through his mind, were to be brushed away by some act, some word,
+      from the lips of this woman. With a rush he realised how consistently he
+      had been thinking of her and how enormously he had been counting on her
+      falling in with his plans, and the realisation was followed by a sickening
+      moment of fear. How little he actually knew of her and of her way of
+      thought. What assurance had he that she would not laugh, jump back upon
+      the horse, and ride away? He was afraid as he had never been afraid
+      before. Dumbly his mind groped about for a way to begin. Expressions he
+      had caught and noted in her strong serious little face when he had
+      achieved but a mild curiosity concerning her came back to visit his mind
+      and he tried desperately to build an instant idea of her from these. And
+      then turning his face from her he plunged directly into his thoughts of
+      the past months as though she had been sharing talking to the colonel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking we might marry, you and I,&rdquo; he said, and cursed
+      himself for the blundering bluntness of the declaration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do get things done, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; she replied, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should you have been thinking anything of the sort?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I want to live with you,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I have been talking to the
+      colonel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About marrying me?&rdquo; She seemed about to begin laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hurried on. &ldquo;No, not that. We talked about you. I could not let him
+      alone. He might have known. I kept making him talk. I made him tell me
+      about your ideas. I felt I had to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam faced her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He thinks your ideas absurd. I do not. I like them. I like you. I think
+      you are beautiful. I do not know whether I love you or not, but for weeks
+      I have been thinking of you and clinging to you and saying over and over
+      to myself, &lsquo;I want to live my life with Sue Rainey.&rsquo; I did not expect to
+      go at it this way. You know me. What you do not know I will tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sam McPherson, you are a wonder,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and I do not know but that I
+      will marry you in the end, but I can&rsquo;t tell now. I want to know a lot of
+      things. I want to know if you are ready to believe what I believe and to
+      live for what I want to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The horse, growing restless, began tugging at the bridle and she spoke to
+      him sharply. She plunged into a description of a man she had seen on the
+      lecture platform during her visit to the East and Sam looked at her with
+      puzzled eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was beautiful,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He was past sixty but looked like a boy of
+      twenty-five, not in his body, but in an air of youth that hung over him.
+      He stood there before the people talking, quiet, able, efficient. He was
+      clean. He had lived clean, body and mind. He had been companion and
+      co-worker with William Morris, and once he had been a mine boy in Wales,
+      but he had got hold of a vision and lived for it. I did not hear what he
+      said, but I kept thinking, &lsquo;I want a man like that.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you accept my beliefs and live for what I want to live?&rdquo; she
+      persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at the ground. It seemed to him that he was going to lose her,
+      that she would not marry him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not accepting beliefs or ends in life blindly,&rdquo; he said stoutly,
+      &ldquo;but I want them. What are your beliefs? I want to know. I think I haven&rsquo;t
+      any myself. When I reach for them they are gone. My mind shifts and
+      changes. I want something solid. I like solid things. I want you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When can we meet and talk everything over thoroughly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; answered Sam bluntly, some look in her face changing his whole
+      viewpoint. Suddenly it seemed as though a door had been opened, letting in
+      a strong light upon the darkness of his mind. His confidence had come back
+      to him. He wanted to strike and keep on striking. The blood rushed through
+      his body and his brain began working rapidly. He felt sure of ultimate
+      success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking her hand, and leading the horse, he began walking with her along
+      the path. Her hand trembled in his and as though answering a thought in
+      his mind she looked up at him and said,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not different from other women, although I do not accept your offer.
+      This is a big moment for me, perhaps the biggest moment of my life. I want
+      you to know that I feel that, though I do want certain things more than I
+      want you or any other man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a suggestion of tears in her voice and Sam had a feeling that
+      the woman in her wanted him to take her into his arms, but something
+      within him told him to wait and to help her by waiting. Like her he wanted
+      something more than the feel of a woman in his arms. Ideas rushed through
+      his head; he thought that she was going to give him some bigger idea than
+      he had known. The figure she had drawn for him of the old man who stood on
+      the platform, young and beautiful, the old boyish need of a purpose in
+      life, the dreams of the last few weeks&mdash;all of these were a part of
+      the eager curiosity in him. They were like hungry little animals waiting
+      to be fed. &ldquo;We must have it all out here and now,&rdquo; he told himself. &ldquo;I
+      must not let myself be swept away by a rush of feeling and I must not let
+      her be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that I haven&rsquo;t tenderness for you. I am filled
+      with it. But I want to have our talk. I want to know what you expect me to
+      believe and how you want me to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt her hand stiffen in his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whether or not we are worth while to each other,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then she began to talk, telling him in a quiet steady voice that
+      steadied something in him what she wanted to make out of her life. Her
+      idea was one of service to mankind through children. She had seen girl
+      friends of hers, with whom she had gone to school, grow up and marry. They
+      had wealth and education, fine well-trained bodies, and they had been
+      married only to live lives more fully devoted to pleasure. One or two who
+      had married poor men had only done so to satisfy a passion in themselves,
+      and after marriage had joined the others in the hungry pursuit of
+      pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They do nothing at all,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;to repay the world for the things
+      given them, the wealth and well-trained bodies and the disciplined minds.
+      They go through life day after day and year after year wasting themselves
+      and come in the end to nothing but indolent, slovenly vanity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had thought it all out and had tried to plan for herself a life with
+      other ends, and wanted a husband in accord with her ideas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That isn&rsquo;t so difficult,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I can find a man whom I can control
+      and who will believe as I believe. My money gives me that power. But I
+      want him to be a real man, a man of ability, a man who does things for
+      himself, one fitted by his life and his achievements to be the father of
+      children who do things. And so I began thinking about you. I got the men
+      who come to the house to talk of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hung her head and laughed like a bashful boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know much of the story of your early life out in that Iowa town,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;I got the story of your life and your achievements out there from
+      some one who knew you well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea seemed wonderfully simple and beautiful to Sam. It seemed to add
+      tremendously to the dignity and nobility of his feeling for her. He
+      stopped in the path and swung her about facing him. They were alone in
+      that end of the park. The soft darkness of the summer night had settled
+      over them. In the grass at their feet a cricket sang loudly. He made a
+      movement to take her into his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is wonderful,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait,&rdquo; she demanded, putting her hand against his shoulder. &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t so
+      simple. I am wealthy. You are able and you have a kind of undying energy
+      in you. I want to give both my wealth and your ability to children&mdash;our
+      children. That will not be easy for you. It means giving up your dreams of
+      power. Perhaps I shall lose courage. Women do after two or three have
+      come. You will have to furnish that. You will have to make a mother of me
+      and keep making a mother of me. You will have to be a new kind of father
+      with something maternal in you. You will have to be patient and studious
+      and kind. You will have to think of these things at night instead of
+      thinking of your own advancement. You will have to live wholly for me
+      because I am to be their mother, giving me your strength and courage and
+      your good sane outlook on things. And then when they come you will have to
+      give all these things to them day after day in a thousand little ways.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam took her into his arms and for the first time in his memory the hot
+      tears stood in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The horse, unattended, wheeled, threw up his head and trotted off down the
+      path. They let him go, walking along after him hand in hand like two happy
+      children. At the entrance to the park they came up to him, held by a park
+      policeman. She got on the horse and Sam stood beside her looking up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell the colonel in the morning,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What will he say?&rdquo; she murmured, musingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damned ingrate,&rdquo; Sam mimicked the colonel&rsquo;s blustering throat tones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed and picked up the reins. Sam laid his hand on hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How soon?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her head down near his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll waste no time,&rdquo; she said, blushing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then in the presence of a park policeman, in the street by the
+      entrance to the park with the people passing up and down, Sam had his
+      first kiss from Sue Rainey&rsquo;s lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After she rode away Sam walked. He had no sense of the passing of time,
+      wandering through street after street, rearranging and readjusting his
+      outlook on life. What she had said had stirred every vestige of sleeping
+      nobility in him. He thought that he had got hold of the thing he had
+      unconsciously been seeking all his life. His dreams of control of the
+      Rainey Arms Company and the other big things he had planned in business
+      seemed, in the light of their talk, so much nonsense and vanity. &ldquo;I will
+      live for this! I will live for this!&rdquo; he kept saying over and over to
+      himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue&rsquo;s
+      arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish
+      together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting in the
+      darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and thought
+      they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame
+      houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his
+      boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving
+      forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the
+      arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must go to her&mdash;I must go to her at her house&mdash;now&mdash;tonight&mdash;and
+      tell her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It cleanses me! this cleanses me!&rdquo; he said to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He remembered the men who had sat about the stove in Wildman&rsquo;s grocery
+      when he was a boy and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered how
+      he, as a boy in the city, had run through the crowded streets fleeing from
+      the terror of lust. He began to understand how distorted, how strangely
+      perverted, his whole attitude toward women and sex had been. &ldquo;Sex is a
+      solution, not a menace&mdash;it is wonderful,&rdquo; he told himself without
+      knowing fully the meaning of the word that had sprung to his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, at last, he turned into Michigan Avenue and went toward his
+      apartment, the late moon was just mounting the sky and a clock in one of
+      the sleeping houses was striking three.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One evening, six weeks after the talk in the gathering darkness in Jackson
+      Park, Sue Rainey and Sam McPherson sat on the deck of a Lake Michigan
+      steamer watching the lights of Chicago blink out in the distance. They had
+      been married that afternoon in Colonel Tom&rsquo;s big house on the south side;
+      and now they sat on the deck of the boat, being carried out into darkness,
+      vowed to motherhood and to fatherhood, each more or less afraid of the
+      other. They sat in silence, looking at the blinking lights and listening
+      to the low voices of their fellow passengers, also sitting in the chairs
+      along the deck or strolling leisurely about, and to the wash of the water
+      along the sides of the boat, eager to break down a little reserve that the
+      solemnity of the marriage service had built up between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A picture floated in Sam&rsquo;s mind. He saw Sue, all in white, radiant and
+      wonderful, coming toward him down a broad stairway, toward him, the
+      newsboy of Caxton, the smuggler of game, the roisterer, the greedy
+      moneygetter. All during those six weeks he had been waiting for this hour
+      when he should sit beside the little grey-clad figure, getting from her
+      the help he wanted in the reconstruction of his life. Without being able
+      to talk as he had thought of talking, he yet felt assured and easy in his
+      mind. In the moment when she had come down the stairway he had been half
+      overcome by a feeling of intense shame, a return of the shame that had
+      swept over him that night when she had given her word and he had walked
+      hour after hour through the streets. It had seemed to him that from among
+      the guests standing about should arise a voice crying, &ldquo;Stop! Do not go
+      on! Let me tell you of this fellow&mdash;this McPherson!&rdquo; And then he had
+      seen her holding to the arm of swaggering, pretentious Colonel Tom and he
+      had taken her hand to become one with her, two curious, feverish,
+      strangely different human beings, taking a vow in the name of their God,
+      with the flowers banked about them and the eyes of people upon them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam had gone to Colonel Tom the morning after that evening in Jackson
+      Park, there had been a scene. The old gun maker had blustered and roared
+      and forbidden, pounding on his desk with his fist. When Sam remained cool
+      and unimpressed, he had stormed out of the room slamming the door and
+      shouting, &ldquo;Upstart! Damned upstart!&rdquo; and Sam had gone smiling back to his
+      desk, mildly disappointed. &ldquo;I told Sue he would say &lsquo;Ingrate,&rsquo;&rdquo; he
+      thought, &ldquo;I am losing my skill at guessing just what he will do and say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel&rsquo;s rage had been short-lived. Within a week he was boasting of
+      Sam to chance callers as &ldquo;the best business man in America,&rdquo; and in the
+      face of a solemn promise given Sue was telling news of the approaching
+      marriage to every newspaper man he knew. Sam suspected him of secretly
+      calling on the telephone those newspapers whose representatives had not
+      crossed his trail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the six waiting weeks there had been little of love making between
+      Sue and Sam. They had talked instead, or, going into the country or to the
+      parks, had walked under the trees consumed with a curious eager passion of
+      suspense. The idea she had given him in the park grew in Sam&rsquo;s brain. To
+      live for the young things that would presently come to them, to be simple,
+      direct, and natural, like the trees or the beasts of the field, and then
+      to have the native honesty of such a life illuminated and ennobled by a
+      mutual intelligent purpose to make their young something finer and better
+      than the things in Nature by the intelligent use of their own good minds
+      and bodies. In the shops and on the streets the hurrying men and women
+      took on a new significance to him. He wondered what secret mighty purpose
+      might be in their lives, and read a newspaper report of an engagement or a
+      marriage with a little jump of the heart. He looked at the girls and the
+      women at work over the typewriting machines in the office, with
+      questioning eyes, asking himself why they did not seek marriage openly and
+      determinedly, and saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material,
+      as a machine for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in
+      the great workshop of the universe. &ldquo;Marriage is a port, a beginning, a
+      point of departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage
+      of life,&rdquo; he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. &ldquo;All that
+      goes before is but a preparation, a building. The pains and the triumphs
+      of all unmarried people are but the good oak planks being driven into
+      place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage.&rdquo; Or, again, one night
+      when they were in a rowboat on the lagoon in the park and all about them
+      in the darkness was the plash of oars in the water, the screams of excited
+      girls, and the sound of voices calling, he let the boat float in against
+      the shores of a little island and crept along the boat to kneel, with his
+      head in her lap and whisper, &ldquo;It is not the love of a woman that grips me,
+      Sue, but the love of life. I have had a peep into the great mystery. This&mdash;this
+      is why we are here&mdash;this justifies us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that she sat beside him, her shoulder against his own, being carried
+      away with him into darkness and privacy, the personal side of his love for
+      her ran through Sam like a flame and, turning, he drew her head down upon
+      his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet, Sam,&rdquo; she whispered, &ldquo;not with these hundreds of people sleeping
+      and drinking and thinking and going about their affairs almost within
+      touch of our hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They got up and walked along the swaying deck. Out of the north the clean
+      wind called to them, the stars looked down upon them, and in the darkness
+      in the bow of the boat they parted for the night silently, speechless with
+      happiness and with a dear, unmentioned secret between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At dawn they landed at a little lumbering town, where boat, blankets, and
+      camping kit had gone before. A river flowed down out of the woods passing
+      the town, going under a bridge and turning the wheel of a sawmill that
+      stood by the shore of the river facing the lake. The clean sweet smell of
+      the new-cut logs, the song of the saws, the roar of the water tumbling
+      over a dam, the cries of the blue-shirted lumbermen working among the
+      floating logs above the dam, filled the morning air, and above the song of
+      the saws sang another song, a breathless, waiting song, the song of love
+      and of life singing in the hearts of husband and wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a little roughly-built lumberman&rsquo;s hotel they ate breakfast in a room
+      overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced
+      woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the
+      breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing the
+      door behind her. Through the open window they looked at the cold
+      swiftly-flowing river and at a freckled-faced boy who carried packages
+      wrapped in blankets and put them in a long canoe tied to a little wharf
+      beside the hotel. They ate and sat staring at each other like two strange
+      boys, saying nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the river he sank his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the
+      current. During the six weeks&rsquo; waiting in Chicago she had taught him the
+      essentials of the canoeist&rsquo;s art and, now, as he shot the canoe under the
+      bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a
+      superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the prow of
+      the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and
+      straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine
+      trees, and piles of cut logs lay at the foot of the hills along the shore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At sunset they landed in a little cleared space at the foot of a hill and
+      on the top of the hill, with the wind blowing across it, they made their
+      first camp. Sam brought boughs and spread them, lapped like feathers in
+      the wings of a bird, and carried blankets up the hill, while Sue, at the
+      foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared their first
+      cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out her rifle and
+      gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness making the
+      lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the young night,
+      with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold wind blowing
+      into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under the trees to
+      where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the stormy waters of a
+      great sea before their eyes, and lay down together for their first long
+      tender embrace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a special kind of fine pleasure in getting one&rsquo;s first knowledge
+      of the great outdoors in the company of a woman a man loves and to have
+      that woman an expert, with a keen appetite for the life, adds point and
+      flavour to the experience. In his busy striving, nickel-seeking boyhood in
+      the town surrounded by hot cornfields, and in his young manhood of
+      scheming and money hunger in the city, Sam had not thought of vacations
+      and resting places. He had walked on country roads with John Telfer and
+      Mary Underwood, listening to their talk, absorbing their ideas, blind and
+      deaf to the little life in the grass, in the leafy branches of the trees
+      and in the air about him. In clubs, and about hotels and barrooms in the
+      city, he had heard men talk of life in the open, and had said to himself,
+      &ldquo;When my time comes I will taste these things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And now he did taste them, lying on his back on the grass along the river,
+      floating down quiet little side streams in the moonlight, listening to the
+      night call of birds, or watching the flight of frightened wild things as
+      he pushed the canoe into the quiet depths of the great forest about them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At night, under the little tent they had brought, or beneath the blankets
+      under the stars, he slept lightly, awakening often to look at Sue lying
+      beside him. Perhaps the wind had blown a wisp of hair across her face and
+      her breath played with it, tossing it about; perhaps just the quiet of her
+      expressive little face charmed and held him, so that he turned reluctantly
+      to sleep again thinking that he might, with pleasure, go on looking at her
+      all night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Sue the days also passed lightly. She also awoke in the night and lay
+      looking at the man sleeping beside her, and once she told Sam that when he
+      awoke she feigned sleep dreading to rob him of the pleasure that she knew
+      these secret love passages gave to both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were not alone in those northern woods. Everywhere along the rivers
+      and on the shores of little lakes they found people, to Sam a new kind of
+      people, who dropped all the ordinary things of life, and ran away to the
+      woods and the streams to spend long happy months in the open. He
+      discovered with surprise that these adventurers were men of modest
+      fortunes, small manufacturers, skilled workingmen, retail merchants. One
+      with whom he talked was a grocer from a town in Ohio, and when Sam asked
+      him if the coming to the woods with his family for an eight-weeks stay did
+      not endanger the success of his business he agreed with Sam that it did,
+      nodding his head and laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there would be a lot more danger in not leaving it,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the
+      danger of having my boys grow up to be men without my having any real fun
+      with them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Among all of the people they met Sue passed with a sort of happy freedom
+      that confounded Sam, as he had formed a habit of thinking of her always as
+      one shut within herself. Many of the people they saw she knew, and he came
+      to believe that she had chosen the place for their love making because she
+      admired and held in high favour the lives of these people of the
+      out-of-doors and wanted her lover to be in some way like them. Out of the
+      solitude of the woods, along the shores of little lakes, they called to
+      her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show her husband,
+      and among them she sat talking of other seasons and of the inroads of the
+      lumber men upon their paradise. &ldquo;The Burnhams were this year on the shores
+      of Grant Lake, the two school teachers from Pittsburgh would come early in
+      August, the Detroit man with the crippled son was building a cabin on the
+      shores of Bone River.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sat among them in silence, renewing constantly his admiration for the
+      wonder of Sue&rsquo;s past life. She, the daughter of Colonel Tom, the woman
+      rich in her own right, to have made her friends among these people; she,
+      who had been pronounced an enigma by the young men of Chicago, to have
+      been secretly all of these years the companion and fellow spirit of these
+      campers by the lakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For six weeks they led a wandering, nomadic life in that half wild land,
+      for Sue six weeks of tender love making, and of the expression of every
+      thought and impulse of her fine nature, for Sam six weeks of readjustment
+      and freedom, during which he learned to sail a boat, to shoot, and to get
+      the fine taste of that life into his being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then one morning they came again to the little lumber town at the
+      mouth of the river and sat upon the pier waiting for the Chicago boat.
+      They were bound once more into the world, and to that life together that
+      was the foundation of their marriage and that was to be the end and aim of
+      their two lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Sam&rsquo;s life from boyhood had been, on the whole, barren and empty of
+      many of the sweeter things, his life during the next year was strikingly
+      full and complete. In the office he had ceased being the pushing upstart
+      tramping on the toes of tradition and had become the son of Colonel Tom,
+      the voter of Sue&rsquo;s big stock holdings, the practical, directing head and
+      genius of the destinies of the company. Jack Prince&rsquo;s loyalty had been
+      rewarded, and a huge advertising campaign made the name and merits of the
+      Rainey Arms Company&rsquo;s wares known to all reading Americans. The muzzles of
+      Rainey-Whittaker rifles, revolvers, and shotguns looked threateningly out
+      at one from the pages of the great popular magazines, brown fur-clad
+      hunters did brave deeds before one&rsquo;s eyes, kneeling upon snow-topped crags
+      preparing to speed winged death to waiting mountain sheep; huge
+      open-mouthed bears rushed down from among the type at the top of the pages
+      and seemed about to devour cool deliberate sportsmen who stood undaunted,
+      swinging their trusty Rainey-Whittakers into place, and presidents,
+      explorers, and Texas gun fighters loudly proclaimed the merits of
+      Rainey-Whittakers to a gun-buying world. It was for Sam and for Colonel
+      Tom a time of big dividends, mechanical progress, and contentment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stayed diligently at work in the offices and in the shops, but kept
+      within himself a reserve of strength and resolution that might have gone
+      into the work. With Sue he took up golf and morning rides on horseback,
+      and with Sue he sat during the long evenings, reading aloud, absorbing her
+      ideas and her beliefs. Sometimes for days they were like two children,
+      going off together to walk on country roads and to sleep in country
+      hotels. On these walks they went hand in hand or, bantering each other,
+      raced down long hills to lie panting in the grass by the roadside when
+      they were out of breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Near the end of the first year she told him one night of the realisation
+      of their hopes and they sat through the evening alone by the fire in her
+      room, filled with the white wonder of it, renewing to each other all the
+      fine vows of their early love-making days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam never succeeded in recapturing the flavour of those days. Happiness is
+      a thing so vague, so indefinite, so dependent on a thousand little turns
+      of the events of the day, that it only visits the most fortunate and at
+      rare intervals, but Sam thought that he and Sue touched almost ideal
+      happiness constantly during that time. There were weeks and even months of
+      their first year together that later passed out of Sam&rsquo;s memory entirely,
+      leaving only a sense of completeness and well being. He could remember,
+      perhaps, a winter walk in the moonlight by the frozen lake, or a visitor
+      who sat and talked an evening away by their fire. But at the end he had to
+      come back to this: that something sang in his heart all day long and that
+      the air tasted better, the stars shone more brightly, and the wind and the
+      rain and the hail upon the window panes sang more sweetly in his ears. He
+      and the woman who lived with him had wealth, position, and infinite
+      delight in the presence and the persons of each other, and a great idea
+      burned like a lamp in a window at the end of the road they travelled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile, in the world about him events came and went. A president was
+      elected, the grey wolves were being hunted out of the Chicago city
+      council, and a strong rival to his company flourished in his own city. In
+      other days he would have been down upon this rival fighting, planning,
+      working for its destruction. Now he sat at Sue&rsquo;s feet, dreaming and
+      talking to her of the brood that under their care should grow into
+      wonderful reliant men and women. When Lewis, the talented sales manager of
+      the Edwards Arms Company, got the business of a Kansas City jobber, he
+      smiled, wrote a sharp letter to his man in that territory, and went for an
+      afternoon of golf with Sue. He had completely and wholly accepted Sue&rsquo;s
+      conception of life. &ldquo;We have wealth for any emergency,&rdquo; he said to
+      himself, &ldquo;and we will live our lives for service to mankind through the
+      children that will presently come into our house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After their marriage Sam found that Sue, for all her apparent coldness and
+      indifference, had in Chicago, as in the northern woods, her own little
+      circle of men and women. Some of these people Sam had met during the
+      engagement, and now they began gradually coming to the house for an
+      evening with the McPhersons. Sometimes there would be several of them for
+      a quiet dinner at which there was much good talk, and after which Sue and
+      Sam sat for half the night, continuing some vein of thought brought to
+      them. Among the people who came to them, Sam shone resplendent. In some
+      indefinable way he thought they paid court to him and the thought
+      flattered him immensely. The college professor who had talked brilliantly
+      through an evening turned to Sam for approval of his conclusions, a writer
+      of tales of cowboy life asked him to help him over a difficulty in the
+      stock market, and a tall black-haired painter paid him the rare compliment
+      of repeating one of Sam&rsquo;s remarks as his own. It was as though, in spite
+      of their talk, they thought him the most gifted of them all, and for a
+      time he was puzzled by their attitude. Jack Prince came, sat at one of the
+      dinner parties, and explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have got what they want and cannot get&mdash;the money,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the evening when Sue told him the great news they gave a dinner. It
+      was a sort of welcoming party for the coming guest, and, while the people
+      at the table ate and talked, Sue and Sam, from opposite ends of the table,
+      lifted high their glasses and, looking into each other&rsquo;s eyes, drank off
+      the health of him who was to come, the first of the great family, the
+      family that was to have two lives lived for its success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the table sat Colonel Tom with his broad white shirt front, his white,
+      pointed beard, and his grandiloquent flow of talk; at Sue&rsquo;s side sat Jack
+      Prince, pausing in his open admiration of Sue to cast an eye on the
+      handsome New York girl at Sam&rsquo;s end of the table or to puncture, with a
+      flash of his terse common sense, some balloon of theory launched by
+      Williams of the University, who sat on the other side of Sue; the artist,
+      who hoped for a commission to paint Colonel Tom, sat opposite him
+      bewailing the dying out of fine old American families; and a serious-faced
+      little German scientist sat beside Colonel Tom smiling as the artist
+      talked. The man, Sam fancied, was laughing at them both, perhaps at all of
+      them. He did not mind. He looked at the scientist and at the other faces
+      up and down the table and then at Sue. He saw her directing and leading
+      the talk; he saw the play of muscles about her strong neck and the fine
+      firmness of her straight little body, and his eyes grew moist and a lump
+      came into his throat at the thought of the secret that lay between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then his mind ran back to another night in Caxton when first he sat
+      eating among strange people at Freedom Smith&rsquo;s table. He saw again the
+      tomboy girl and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom&rsquo;s hand
+      in the close little stable; he saw the absurd housepainter trying to blow
+      the bugle in the street; and the mother talking to her boy of death
+      through the summer evening; the fat foreman making the record of his loves
+      on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commission man rubbing his
+      hands before a group of Greek hucksters, and then this&mdash;this home
+      with its safety and its secret high aim and him sitting there at the head
+      of it all. Like the novelist, it seemed to him that he should admire and
+      bow his head before the romance of destiny. He thought his station, his
+      wife, his country, his end in life, when rightly seen, the very apex of
+      life on the earth, and to him in his pride it seemed that he was in some
+      way the master and maker of it all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Late one evening, some weeks after the McPhersons had given the dinner
+      party in secret celebration of the future arrival of what was to be the
+      first of the great family, they came together down the steps of a north
+      side house to their waiting carriage. They had spent, Sam thought, a
+      delightful evening. The Grovers were people of whose friendship he was
+      particularly proud and since his marriage with Sue he had taken her often
+      for an evening to the house of the venerable surgeon. Doctor Grover was a
+      scholar, a man of note in the medical world, and a rapid and absorbing
+      talker and thinker on any subject that aroused his interest. A certain
+      youthful enthusiasm in his outlook on life had attracted to him the
+      devotion of Sue, who, since meeting him through Sam, had counted him a
+      marked addition to their little group of friends. His wife, a
+      white-haired, plump little woman, was, though apparently somewhat
+      diffident, in reality his intellectual equal and companion, and Sue in a
+      quiet way had taken her as a model in her own effort toward complete
+      wifehood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the evening, spent in a rapid exchange of opinions and ideas
+      between the two men, Sue had sat in silence. Once when he looked at her
+      Sam thought that he had surprised an annoyed look in her eyes and was
+      puzzled by it. During the remainder of the evening her eyes refused to
+      meet his and she looked instead at the floor, a flush mounting her cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the door of the carriage Frank, Sue&rsquo;s coachman, stepped on the hem of
+      her gown and tore it. The tear was slight, the incident Sam thought
+      entirely unavoidable, and as much due to a momentary clumsiness on the
+      part of Sue as to the awkwardness of Frank. The man had for years been a
+      loyal servant and a devoted admirer of Sue&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and taking Sue by the arm started to help her in at the
+      carriage door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too much gown for an athlete,&rdquo; he said, pointlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a flash Sue turned and faced the coachman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Awkward brute,&rdquo; she said, through her teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stood on the sidewalk dumb with astonishment as Frank turned and
+      climbed to his seat without waiting to close the carriage door. He felt as
+      he might have felt had he, as a boy, heard profanity from the lips of his
+      mother. The look in Sue&rsquo;s eyes as she turned them on Frank struck him like
+      a blow and in a moment his whole carefully built-up conception of her and
+      of her character had been shaken. He had an impulse to slam the carriage
+      door after her and walk home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They drove home in silence, Sam feeling as though he rode beside a new and
+      strange being. In the light of passing street lamps he could see her face
+      held straight ahead and her eyes staring stonily at the curtain in front.
+      He didn&rsquo;t want to reproach her; he wanted to take hold of her arm and
+      shake her. &ldquo;I should like to take the whip from in front of Frank&rsquo;s seat
+      and give her a sound beating,&rdquo; he told himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the house Sue jumped out of the carriage and, running past him in at
+      the door, closed it after her. Frank drove off toward the stables and when
+      Sam went into the house he found Sue standing half way up the stairs
+      leading to her room and waiting for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I presume you do not know that you have been openly insulting me all
+      evening,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Your beastly talk there at the Grovers&mdash;it was
+      unbearable&mdash;who are these women? Why parade your past life before
+      me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam said nothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at her
+      and then, turning, just as she, running up the stairs, slammed the door of
+      her own room, he went into the library. A wood fire burned in the grate
+      and he sat down and lighted his pipe. He did not try to think the thing
+      out. He felt that he was in the presence of a lie and that the Sue who had
+      lived in his mind and in his affections no longer existed, that in her
+      place there was this other woman, this woman who had insulted her own
+      servant and had perverted and distorted the meaning of his talk during the
+      evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting by the fire filling and refilling his pipe, Sam went carefully
+      over every word, gesture, and incident of the evening at the Grovers and
+      could get hold of no part of it that he thought might in fairness serve as
+      an excuse for the outburst. In the upper part of the house he could hear
+      Sue moving restlessly about and he had satisfaction in the thought that
+      her mind was punishing her for so strange a seizure. He and Grover had
+      perhaps been somewhat carried away, he told himself; they had talked of
+      marriage and its meaning and had both declared somewhat hotly against the
+      idea that the loss of virginity in women was in any sense a bar to
+      honourable marriage, but he had said nothing that he thought could have
+      been twisted into an insult to Sue or to Mrs. Grover. He had thought the
+      talk rather good and clearly thought out and had come out of the house
+      exhilarated and secretly preening himself with the thought that he had
+      talked unusually forcefully and well. In any event what had been said had
+      been said before in Sue&rsquo;s presence and he thought that he could remember
+      her having, in the past, expressed similar ideas with enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hour after hour he sat in the chair before the dying fire. He dozed and
+      his pipe dropped from his hand and fell upon the stone hearth. A kind of
+      dumb misery and anger was in him as over and over endlessly his mind kept
+      reviewing the events of the evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What has made her think she can do that to me?&rdquo; he kept asking himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He remembered certain strange silences and hard looks from her eyes during
+      the past weeks, silences and looks that in the light of the events of the
+      evening became pregnant with meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has a temper, a beast of a temper. Why shouldn&rsquo;t she have been square
+      and told me?&rdquo; he asked himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clock had struck three when the library door opened quietly and Sue,
+      clad in a dressing gown through which the new roundness of her lithe
+      little figure was plainly apparent, came into the room. She ran across to
+      him and putting her head down on his knee wept bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Sam!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I think I am going insane. I have been hating you as
+      I have not hated since I was an evil-tempered child. A thing I worked
+      years to suppress in me has come back. I have been hating myself and the
+      baby. For days I have been fighting the feeling in me, and now it has come
+      out and perhaps you have begun hating me. Can you love me again? Will you
+      ever forget the meanness and the cheapness of it? You and poor innocent
+      Frank&mdash;Oh, Sam, the devil was in me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Reaching down, Sam took her into his arms and cuddled her like a child. A
+      story he had heard of the vagaries of women at such times came back to him
+      and was as a light illuminating the darkness of his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand now,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is a part of the burden you carry for us
+      both.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some weeks after the outbreak at the carriage door events ran smoothly
+      in the McPherson house. One day as he stood in the stable door Frank came
+      round the corner of the house and, looking up sheepishly from under his
+      cap, said to Sam: &ldquo;I understand about the missus. It is the baby coming.
+      We have had four of them at our house,&rdquo; and Sam, nodding his head, turned
+      and began talking rapidly of his plans to replace the carriages with
+      automobiles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the house, in spite of the clearing up of the matter of Sue&rsquo;s
+      ugliness at the Grovers, a subtle change had taken place in the
+      relationship of the two. Although they were together facing the first of
+      the events that were to be like ports-of-call in the great voyage of their
+      lives, they were not facing it with the same mutual understanding and
+      kindly tolerance with which they had faced smaller things in the past&mdash;a
+      disagreement over the method of shooting a rapid in a river or the
+      entertainment of an undesirable guest. The inclination to fits of temper
+      loosens and disarranges all the little wires of life. The tune will not
+      get itself played. One stands waiting for the discord, strained, missing
+      the harmony. It was so with Sam. He began feeling that he must keep a
+      check upon his tongue and that things of which they had talked with great
+      freedom six months earlier now annoyed and irritated his wife when brought
+      into an after-dinner discussion. To Sam, who, during his life with Sue,
+      had learned the joy of free, open talk upon any subject that came into his
+      mind and whose native interest in life and in the motives of men and women
+      had blossomed in the large leisure and independence of the last year, this
+      was trying. It was, he thought, like trying to hold free and open
+      communion with the people of an orthodox family, and he fell into a habit
+      of prolonged silences, a habit that later, he found, once formed,
+      unbelievably hard to break.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day in the office a situation arose that seemed to demand Sam&rsquo;s
+      presence in Boston on a certain date. For months he had been carrying on a
+      trade war with some of the eastern manufacturers in his line and an
+      opportunity for the settlement of the trouble in a way advantageous to
+      himself had, he thought, arisen. He wanted to handle the matter himself
+      and went home to explain to Sue. It was at the end of a day when nothing
+      had occurred to irritate her and she agreed with him that he should not be
+      compelled to trust so important a matter to another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am no child, Sam. I will take care of myself,&rdquo; she said, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam wired his New York man asking him to make the arrangements for the
+      meeting in Boston and picked up a book to spend the evening reading aloud
+      to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, coming home the next evening he found her in tears and when he
+      tried to laugh away her fears she flew into a black fit of anger and ran
+      out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam went to the &lsquo;phone and called his New York man, thinking to instruct
+      him in regard to the conference in Boston and to give up his own plans for
+      the trip. When he had got his man on the wire, Sue, who had been standing
+      outside the door, rushed in and put her hand over the mouthpiece of the
+      &lsquo;phone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sam! Sam!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Do not give up the trip! Scold me! Beat me! Do
+      anything, but do not let me go on making a fool of myself and destroying
+      your peace of mind! I shall be miserable if you stay at home because of
+      what I have said!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Over the &lsquo;phone came the insistent voice of Central and putting her hand
+      aside Sam talked to his man, letting the engagement stand and making some
+      detail of the conference answer as his need of calling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Sue was repentant and again after her tears they sat before the fire
+      until his train time, talking like lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Buffalo in the morning came a wire from her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come back. Let business go. Cannot stand it,&rdquo; she had wired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he sat reading the wire the porter brought another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please, Sam, pay no attention to any wire from me. I am all right and
+      only half a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam was irritated. &ldquo;It is deliberate pettiness and weakness,&rdquo; he thought,
+      when an hour later the porter brought another wire demanding his immediate
+      return. &ldquo;The situation calls for drastic action and perhaps one good
+      stinging reproof will stop it for all time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Going into the buffet car he wrote a long letter calling her attention to
+      the fact that a certain amount of freedom of action was due him, and
+      saying that he intended to act upon his own judgment in the future and not
+      upon her impulses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having begun to write Sam went on and on. He was not interrupted, no
+      shadow crossed the face of his beloved to tell him he was hurting and he
+      said all that was in his mind to say. Little sharp reproofs that had come
+      into his mind but that had been left unsaid now got themselves said and
+      when he had dumped his overloaded mind into the letter he sealed and
+      mailed it at a passing station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within an hour after the letter had left his hands Sam regretted it. He
+      thought of the little woman bearing the burden for them both, and things
+      Grover had told him of the unhappiness of women in her condition came back
+      to haunt his mind so that he wrote and sent off to her a wire asking her
+      not to read the letter he had mailed and assuring her that he would hurry
+      through the Boston conference and get back to her at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam returned he knew that in an evil moment Sue had opened and read
+      the letter sent from the train and was surprised and hurt by the
+      knowledge. The act seemed like a betrayal. He said nothing, going about
+      his work with a troubled mind and watching with growing anxiety her
+      alternate fits of white anger and fearful remorse. He thought her growing
+      worse daily and became alarmed for her health.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, then, after a talk with Grover he began to spend more and more time
+      with her, forcing her to take with him daily, long walks in the open air.
+      He tried valiantly to keep her mind fixed on cheerful things and went to
+      bed happy and relieved when a day ended that did not bring a stormy
+      passage between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were days during that period when Sam thought himself near insanity.
+      With a light in her grey eyes that was maddening Sue would take up some
+      minor thing, a remark he had made or a passage he had quoted from some
+      book, and in a dead, level, complaining tone would talk of it until his
+      head reeled and his fingers ached from the gripping of his hands to keep
+      control of himself. After such a day he would steal off by himself and,
+      walking rapidly, would try through pure physical fatigue to force his mind
+      to give up the remembrance of the persistent, complaining voice. At times
+      he would give way to fits of anger and strew impotent oaths along the
+      silent street, or, in another mood, would mumble and talk to himself,
+      praying for strength and courage to keep his own head during the ordeal
+      through which he thought they were passing together. And when he returned
+      from such a walk and from such a struggle with himself it often occurred
+      that he would find her waiting in the arm chair before the fire in her
+      room, her mind clear and her little face wet with the tears of her
+      repentance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then the struggle ended. With Doctor Grover it had been arranged that
+      Sue should be taken to the hospital for the great event, and they drove
+      there hurriedly one night through the quiet streets, the recurring pains
+      gripping Sue and her hands clutching his. An exalted cheerfulness had hold
+      of them. Face to face with the actual struggle for the new life Sue was
+      transfigured. Her voice rang with triumph and her eyes glistened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to do it,&rdquo; she cried; &ldquo;my black fear is gone. I shall give you
+      a child&mdash;a man child. I shall succeed, my man Sam. You shall see. It
+      will be beautiful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the pain gripped she gripped at his hand, and a spasm of physical
+      sympathy ran through him. He felt helpless and ashamed of his
+      helplessness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the entrance to the hospital grounds she put her face down upon his
+      knees so that the hot tears ran through his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor, poor old Sam, it has been horrible for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the hospital Sam walked up and down in the corridor through the
+      swinging doors at the end of which she had been taken. Every vestige of
+      regret for the trying months now lying behind had passed, and he paced up
+      and down the corridor feeling that he had come to one of those huge
+      moments when a man&rsquo;s brain, his grasp of affairs, his hopes and plans for
+      the future, all of the little details and trivialities of his life, halt,
+      and he waits anxious, breathless, expectant. He looked at a little clock
+      on a table at the end of the corridor, half expecting it to stop also and
+      wait with him. His marriage hour that had seemed so big and vital seemed
+      now, in the quiet corridor, with the stone floor and the silent
+      white-clad, rubber-shod nurses passing up and down and in the presence of
+      this greater event, to have shrunk enormously. He walked up and down
+      peering at the clock, looking at the swinging door and biting at the stem
+      of his empty pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then through the swinging door came Grover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can get the child, Sam, but to get it we shall have to take a chance
+      with her. Do you want to do that? Do not wait. Decide.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sprang past him toward the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You bungler,&rdquo; he cried, and his voice rang through the long quiet
+      corridor. &ldquo;You do not know what this means. Let me go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Doctor Grover, catching him by the arm, swung him about. The two men stood
+      facing each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You stay here,&rdquo; said the doctor, his voice remaining quiet and firm; &ldquo;I
+      will attend to things. Your going in there would be pure folly now. Now
+      answer me&mdash;do you want to take the chance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! No!&rdquo; Sam shouted. &ldquo;No! I want her&mdash;Sue&mdash;alive and well,
+      back through that door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A cold gleam came into his eyes and he shook his fist before the doctor&rsquo;s
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not try deceiving me about this. By God, I will&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning, Doctor Grover ran back through the swinging door leaving Sam
+      staring blankly at his back. A nurse, one whom he had seen in Doctor
+      Grover&rsquo;s office, came out of the door and taking his arm, walked beside
+      him up and down the corridor. Sam put his arm around her shoulder and
+      talked. An illusion that it was necessary to comfort her came to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not worry,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;She will be all right. Grover will take care of
+      her. Nothing can happen to little Sue.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The nurse, a small, sweet-faced, Scotch woman, who knew and admired Sue,
+      wept. Some quality in his voice had touched the woman in her and the tears
+      ran in a little stream down her cheeks. Sam continued talking, the woman&rsquo;s
+      tears helping him to regain his grip upon himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mother is dead,&rdquo; he said, an old sorrow revisiting him. &ldquo;I wish that
+      you, like Mary Underwood, would be a new mother to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the time came that he could be taken to the room where Sue lay, his
+      self-possession had returned to him and his mind had begun blaming the
+      little dead stranger for the unhappiness of the past months and for the
+      long separation from what he thought was the real Sue. Outside the door of
+      the room into which she had been taken he stopped, hearing her voice, thin
+      and weak, talking to Grover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unfit&mdash;Sue McPherson unfit,&rdquo; said the voice, and Sam thought it was
+      filled with an infinite weariness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He ran through the door and dropped on his knees by her bed. She turned
+      her eyes to him smiling bravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The next time we&rsquo;ll make it,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second child born to the young McPhersons arrived out of time. Again
+      Sam walked, this time through the corridor of his own house and without
+      the consoling presence of the sweet-faced Scotch woman, and again he shook
+      his head at Doctor Grover who came to him consoling and reassuring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the death of the second child Sue lay for months in bed. In his
+      arms, in her own room, she wept openly in the presence of Grover and the
+      nurses, crying out against her unfitness. For several days she refused to
+      see Colonel Tom, harbouring in her mind the notion that he was in some way
+      responsible for her physical inability to bear living children, and when
+      she got up from her bed, she remained for months white and listless but
+      grimly determined upon another attempt for the little life she so wanted
+      to feel in her arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the days of her carrying the second baby she had again the fierce
+      ugly attacks of temper that had shattered Sam&rsquo;s nerves, but having learned
+      to understand, he went quietly about his work, trying as far as in him lay
+      to close his ears to the stinging, hurtful things she sometimes said; and
+      the third time, it was agreed between them that if they were again
+      unsuccessful they would turn their minds to other things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If we do not succeed this time we might as well count ourselves through
+      with each other for good,&rdquo; she said one day in one of the fits of cold
+      anger that were a part of child bearing with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That second night when Sam walked in the hospital corridor he was beside
+      himself. He felt like a young recruit called to face an unseen enemy and
+      to stand motionless and inactive in the presence of the singing death that
+      ran through the air. He remembered a story, told when he was a child by a
+      fellow soldier who had come to visit his father, of the prisoners at
+      Andersonville creeping in the darkness past armed sentries to a little
+      pool of stagnant water beyond the dead line, and felt that he too was
+      creeping unarmed and helpless in the neighbourhood of death. In a
+      conference at his house between the three some weeks before, it had been
+      decided, after tearful insistence on the part of Sue and a stand on the
+      part of Grover, who declared that he would not remain on the case unless
+      permitted to use his own judgment, that an operation should be performed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take the chances that need be taken,&rdquo; Sam had said to Grover after the
+      conference; &ldquo;she will never stand another defeat. Give her the child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the corridor it seemed to Sam that hours had passed and still he stood
+      motionless waiting. His feet felt cold and he had the impression that they
+      were wet although the night was dry and a moon shone outside. When, from a
+      distant part of the hospital, a groan reached his ears he shook with
+      fright and had an inclination to cry out. Two young interns clad in white
+      passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old Grover is doing a Caesarian section,&rdquo; said one of them; &ldquo;he is
+      getting out of date. Hope he doesn&rsquo;t bungle it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In Sam&rsquo;s ears rang the remembrance of Sue&rsquo;s voice, the Sue who that first
+      time had gone into the room behind the swinging doors with the determined
+      smile on her face. He thought he could see again the white face looking up
+      from the wheeled cot on which they had taken her through the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid, Dr. Grover&mdash;I am afraid I am unfit,&rdquo; he had heard her
+      say as the door closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then Sam did a thing for which he cursed himself the rest of his life.
+      On an impulse, and maddened by the intolerable waiting, he walked to the
+      swinging doors and, pushing them open, stepped into the operating room
+      where Grover was at work upon Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was long and narrow, with floors, walls and ceiling of white
+      cement. A great glaring light, suspended from the ceiling, threw its rays
+      directly down on a white-clad figure lying on a white metal operating
+      table. On the walls of the room were other glaring lights set in shining
+      glass reflectors. And, here and there through an intense, expectant
+      atmosphere, moved and stood silently a group of men and women, faceless,
+      hairless, with only their strangely vivid eyes showing through the white
+      masks that covered their faces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, standing motionless by the door, looked about with wild, half-seeing
+      eyes. Grover worked rapidly and silently, taking from time to time little
+      shining instruments from a swinging table close at his hand. The nurse
+      standing beside him looked up toward the light and began calmly threading
+      a needle. And in a white basin on a little stand at the side of the room
+      lay the last of Sue&rsquo;s tremendous efforts toward new life, the last of
+      their dreams of the great family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam closed his eyes and fell. His head, striking against the wall, aroused
+      him and he struggled to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without stopping his work, Grover began swearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn it, man, get out of here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam groped with his hand for the door. One of the white-clad, ghoulish
+      figures started toward him. And then with his head reeling and his eyes
+      closed he backed through the door and, running along the corridor and down
+      a flight of broad stairs, reached the open air and darkness. He had no
+      doubt of Sue&rsquo;s death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is gone,&rdquo; he muttered, hurrying bareheaded along the deserted
+      streets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through street after street he ran. Twice he came out upon the shores of
+      the lake, and, then turning, went back into the heart of the city through
+      streets bathed in the warm moonlight. Once he turned quickly at a corner
+      and stepping into a vacant lot stood behind a high board fence as a
+      policeman strolled along the street. Into his head came the idea that he
+      had killed Sue and that the blue-clad figure walking with heavy tread on
+      the stone pavement was seeking him to take him back to where she lay white
+      and lifeless. Again he stopped, before a little frame drugstore on a
+      corner, and sitting down on the steps before it cursed God openly and
+      defiantly like an angry boy defying his father. Some instinct led him to
+      look at the sky through the tangle of telegraph wires overhead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on and do what you dare!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I will not follow you now. I
+      shall never try to find you after this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he began laughing at himself for the instinct that had led him
+      to look at the sky and to shout out his defiance and, getting up, wandered
+      on. In his wanderings he came to a railroad track where a freight train
+      groaned and rattled over a crossing. When he came up to it he jumped upon
+      an empty coal car, falling as he climbed, and cutting his face upon the
+      sharp pieces of coal that lay scattered about the bottom of the car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The train ground along slowly, stopping occasionally, the engine shrieking
+      hysterically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time he got out of the car and dropped to the ground. On all sides
+      of him were marshes, the long rank marsh grasses rolling and tossing in
+      the moonlight. When the train had passed he followed it, walking
+      stumblingly along. As he walked, following the blinking lights at the end
+      of the train, he thought of the scene in the hospital and of Sue lying
+      dead for that&mdash;that ping livid and shapeless on the table under the
+      lights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where the solid ground ran up to the tracks Sam sat down under a tree.
+      Peace came over him. &ldquo;This is the end of things,&rdquo; he thought, and was like
+      a tired child comforted by its mother. He thought of the sweet-faced nurse
+      who had walked with him that other time in the corridor of the hospital
+      and who had wept because of his fears, and then of the night when he had
+      felt the throat of his father between his fingers in the squalid little
+      kitchen. He ran his hands along the ground. &ldquo;Good old ground,&rdquo; he said. A
+      sentence came into his mind followed by the figure of John Telfer
+      striding, stick in hand, along a dusty road. &ldquo;Here is spring come and time
+      to plant out flowers in the grass,&rdquo; he said aloud. His face felt swollen
+      and sore from the fall in the freight car and he lay down on the ground
+      under a tree and slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he woke it was morning and grey clouds were drifting across the sky.
+      Within sight, down a road, a trolley car went past into the city. Before
+      him, in the midst of the marsh, lay a low lake, and a raised walk, with
+      boats tied to the posts on which it stood, ran down to the water. He went
+      down the walk, bathed his bruised face in the water, and boarding a car
+      went back into the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the morning air a new thought took possession of him. The wind ran
+      along a dusty road beside the car track, picking up little handfuls of
+      dust and playfully throwing them about. He had a strained, eager feeling
+      like some one listening for a faint call out of the distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;I know what it is, it is my wedding day. I am
+      to marry Sue Rainey to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the house he found Grover and Colonel Tom standing in the breakfast
+      room. Grover looked at his swollen, distorted face. His voice trembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor devil!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You have had a night!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and slapped Colonel Tom on the shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will have to begin getting ready,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The wedding is at ten.
+      Sue will be getting anxious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grover and Colonel Tom took him by the arm and began leading him up the
+      stairs, Colonel Tom weeping like a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Silly old fool,&rdquo; thought Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, two weeks later, he again opened his eyes to consciousness Sue sat
+      beside his bed in a reclining chair, her little thin white hand in his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get the baby!&rdquo; he cried, believing anything possible. &ldquo;I want to see the
+      baby!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laid her head down on the pillow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was gone when you saw it,&rdquo; she said, and put an arm about his neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the nurse came back she found them, their heads together upon the
+      pillow, crying weakly like two tired children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The blow given the plan of life so carefully thought out and so eagerly
+      accepted by the young McPhersons threw them back upon themselves. For
+      several years they had been living upon a hill top, taking themselves very
+      seriously and more than a little preening themselves with the thought that
+      they were two very unusual and thoughtful people engaged upon a worthy and
+      ennobling enterprise. Sitting in their corner immersed in admiration of
+      their own purposes and in the thoughts of the vigorous, disciplined, new
+      life they were to give the world by the combined efficiency of their two
+      bodies and minds they were, at a word and a shake of the head from Doctor
+      Grover, compelled to remake the outline of their future together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All about them the rush of life went on, vast changes were impending in
+      the industrial life of the people, cities were doubling and tripling their
+      population, a war was being fought, and the flag of their country flew in
+      the ports of strange seas, while American boys pushed their way through
+      the tangled jungles of strange lands carrying in their hands
+      Rainey-Whittaker rifles. And in a huge stone house, set in a broad expanse
+      of green lawns near the shores of Lake Michigan, Sam McPherson sat looking
+      at his wife, who in turn looked at him. He was trying, as she also was
+      trying, to adjust himself to the cheerful acceptance of their new prospect
+      of a childless life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking at Sue across the dinner table or seeing her straight, wiry body
+      astride a horse riding beside him through the parks, it seemed to Sam
+      unbelievable that a childless womanhood was ever to be her portion, and
+      more than once he had an inclination to venture again upon an effort for
+      the success of their hopes. But when he remembered her still white face
+      that night in the hospital, her bitter, haunting cry of defeat, he turned
+      with a shudder from the thought, feeling that he could not go with her
+      again through that ordeal; that he could not again allow her to look
+      forward through weeks and months toward the little life that never came to
+      lie upon her breast or to laugh up into her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet Sam, son of that Jane McPherson who had won the admiration of the
+      men of Caxton by her ceaseless efforts to keep her family afloat and clean
+      handed, could not sit idly by, living upon the income of his own and Sue&rsquo;s
+      money. The stirring, forward-moving world called to him; he looked about
+      him at the broad, significant movements in business and finance, at the
+      new men coming into prominence and apparently finding a way for the
+      expression of new big ideas, and felt his youth stirring in him and his
+      mind reaching out to new projects and new ambitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Given the necessity for economy and a hard long-drawn-out struggle for a
+      livelihood and competence, Sam could conceive of living his life with Sue
+      and deriving something like gratification from just her companionship, and
+      her partnership in his efforts&mdash;here and there during the waiting
+      years he had met men who had found such gratification&mdash;a foreman in
+      the shops or a tobacconist from whom he bought his cigars&mdash;but for
+      himself he felt that he had gone with Sue too far upon another road to
+      turn that way now with anything like mutual zeal or interest. At bottom,
+      his mind did not run strongly toward the idea of the love of women as an
+      end in life; he had loved, and did love, Sue with something approaching
+      religious fervour, but the fervour was more than half due to the ideas she
+      had given him and to the fact that with him she was to have been the
+      instrument for the realisation of those ideas. He was a man with children
+      in his loins and he had given up his struggles for business eminence for
+      the sake of preparing himself for a kind of noble fatherhood of children,
+      many children, strong children, fit gifts to the world for two
+      exceptionally favoured lives. In all of his talks with Sue this idea had
+      been present and dominant. He had looked about him and in the arrogance of
+      his youth and in the pride of his good body and mind had condemned all
+      childless marriages as a selfish waste of good lives. With her he had
+      agreed that such lives were without point and purpose. Now he remembered
+      that in the days of her audacity and daring she had more than once
+      expressed the hope that in case of a childless issue to their marriage one
+      or the other of them would have the courage to cut the knot that tied them
+      and venture into another effort at right living at any cost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the months after Sue&rsquo;s last recovery, and during the long evenings, as
+      they sat together or walked under the stars in the park, the thought of
+      these talks was often in Sam&rsquo;s mind and he found himself beginning to
+      speculate on her present attitude and to wonder how bravely she would meet
+      the idea of a separation. In the end he decided that no such thought was
+      in her mind, that face to face with the tremendous actuality she clung to
+      him with a new dependence, and a new need of his companionship. The
+      conviction of the absolute necessity of children as a justification for a
+      man and woman living together had, he thought, burned itself more deeply
+      into his brain than into hers; to him it clung, coming back again and
+      again to his mind, causing him to turn here and there restlessly, making
+      readjustments, seeking new light. The old gods being dead he sought new
+      gods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime he sat in his house facing his wife, losing himself in the
+      books recommended to him years before by Janet, thinking his own thoughts.
+      Often in the evening he would look up from his book or from his
+      preoccupied staring at the fire to find her eyes looking at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talk, Sam; talk,&rdquo; she would say; &ldquo;do not sit there thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Or at another time she would come to his room at night and putting her
+      head down on the pillow beside his would spend hours planning, weeping,
+      begging him to give her again his love, his old fervent, devoted love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Sam tried earnestly and honestly to do, going with her for long walks
+      when the new call, the business had begun to make to him, would have kept
+      him at his desk, reading aloud to her in the evening, urging her to shake
+      off her old dreams and to busy herself with new work and new interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the days in the office he went in a kind of half stupor. An old
+      feeling of his boyhood coming back to him, it seemed to him, as it had
+      seemed when he walked aimlessly through the streets of Caxton after the
+      death of his mother, that there remained something to be done, an
+      accounting to be made. Even at his desk with the clatter of typewriters in
+      his ears and the piles of letters demanding his attention, his mind
+      slipped back to the days of his courtship with Sue and to those days in
+      the north woods when life had beat strong within him, and every young,
+      wild thing, every new growth renewed the dream that filled his being.
+      Sometimes on the street, or walking in the park with Sue, the cries of
+      children at play cut across the sombre dulness of his mind and he shrank
+      from the sound and a kind of bitter resentment took possession of him.
+      When he looked covertly at Sue she talked of other things, apparently
+      unconscious of his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then a new phase of life presented itself. To his surprise he found
+      himself looking with more than passing interest at women in the streets,
+      and an old hunger for the companionship of strange women came back to him,
+      in some way coarsened and materialised. One evening at the theatre a
+      woman, a friend of Sue&rsquo;s and the childless wife of a business friend of
+      his own, sat beside him. In the darkness of the playhouse her shoulder
+      nestled down against his. In the excitement of a crisis on the stage her
+      hand slipped into his and her fingers clutched and held his fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Animal desire seized and shook him, a feeling without sweetness, brutal,
+      making his eyes burn. When between the acts the theatre was again flooded
+      with light he looked up guiltily to meet another pair of eyes equally
+      filled with guilty hunger. A challenge had been given and received.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In their car, homeward bound, Sam put the thoughts of the woman away from
+      him and taking Sue in his arms prayed silently for some help against he
+      knew not what.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I will go to Caxton in the morning and have a talk with Mary
+      Underwood,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After his return from Caxton Sam set about finding some new interest to
+      occupy Sue&rsquo;s mind. He had spent an afternoon talking to Valmore, Freedom
+      Smith, and Telfer and thought there was a kind of flatness in their jokes
+      and in their ageing comments on each other. Then he had gone from them for
+      his talk with Mary. Half through the night they had talked, Sam getting
+      forgiveness for not writing and getting also a long friendly lecture on
+      his duty toward Sue. He thought she had in some way missed the point. She
+      had seemed to suppose that the loss of the children had fallen singly upon
+      Sue. She had not counted upon him, and he had depended upon her doing just
+      that. He had come as a boy to his mother wanting to talk of himself and
+      she had wept at the thought of the childless wife and had told him how to
+      set about making her happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I will set about it,&rdquo; he thought on the train coming home; &ldquo;I will
+      find for her this new interest and make her less dependent upon me. Then I
+      also will take hold anew and work out for myself a programme for a way of
+      life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One afternoon when he came home from the office he found Sue filled indeed
+      with a new idea. With glowing cheeks she sat beside him through the
+      evening and talked of the beauties of a life devoted to social service.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking things out,&rdquo; she said, her eyes shining. &ldquo;We must
+      not allow ourselves to become sordid. We must keep to the vision. We must
+      together give the best in our lives and our fortunes to mankind. We must
+      make ourselves units in the great modern movements for social uplift.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at the fire and a chill feeling of doubt ran through him. He
+      could not see himself as a unit in anything. His mind did not run out
+      toward the thought of being one of the army of philanthropists or rich
+      social uplifters he had met talking and explaining in the reading rooms of
+      clubs. No answering flame burned in his heart as it had burned that
+      evening by the bridle path in Jackson Park when she had expounded another
+      idea. But the thought of a need of new interest for her coming to him, he
+      turned to her smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It sounds all right but I know nothing of such things,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that evening Sue began to get a hold upon herself. The old fire came
+      back into her eyes and she went about the house with a smile upon her face
+      and talked through the evenings to her silent, attentive husband of the
+      life of usefulness, the full life. One day she told him of her election to
+      the presidency of a society for the rescue of fallen women, and he began
+      seeing her name in the newspapers in connection with various charity and
+      civic movements. At the house a new sort of men and women began appearing
+      at the dinner table; a strangely earnest, feverish, half fanatical people,
+      Sam thought, with an inclination toward corsetless dresses and uncut hair,
+      who talked far into the night and worked themselves into a sort of
+      religious zeal over what they called their movement. Sam found them likely
+      to run to startling statements, noticed that they sat on the edges of
+      their chairs when they talked, and was puzzled by their tendency toward
+      making the most revolutionary statements without pausing to back them up.
+      When he questioned a statement made by one of these people, he came down
+      upon him with a rush that quite carried him away and then, turning to the
+      others, looked at them wisely like a cat that has swallowed a mouse. &ldquo;Ask
+      us another question if you dare,&rdquo; their faces seemed to be saying, while
+      their tongues declared that they were but students of the great problem of
+      right living.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With these new people Sam never made any progress toward real
+      understanding and friendship. For a time he tried honestly to get some of
+      their own fervent devotions to their ideas and to be impressed by what
+      they said of their love of man, even going with them to some of their
+      meetings, at one of which he sat among the fallen women gathered in, and
+      listened to a speech by Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The speech did not make much of a hit, the fallen women moving restlessly
+      about. A large woman, with an immense nose, did better. She talked with a
+      swift, contagious zeal that was very stirring, and, listening to her, Sam
+      was reminded of the evening when he sat before another zealous talker in
+      the church at Caxton and Jim Williams, the barber, tried to stampede him
+      into the fold with the lambs. While the woman talked a plump little member
+      of the <i>demi monde</i> who sat beside Sam wept copiously, but at the end
+      of the speech he could remember nothing of what had been said and he
+      wondered if the weeping woman would remember.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To express his determination to continue being Sue&rsquo;s companion and
+      partner, Sam during one winter taught a class of young men at a settlement
+      house in the factory district of the west side. The class in his hands was
+      unsuccessful. He found the young men heavy and stupid with fatigue after
+      the day of labour in the shops and more inclined to fall asleep in their
+      chairs, or wander away, one at a time, to loaf and smoke on a nearby
+      corner, than to stay in the room listening to the man reading or talking
+      before them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When one of the young women workers came into the room, they sat up and
+      seemed for the moment interested. Once Sam heard a group of them talking
+      of these women workers on a landing in a darkened stairway. The experience
+      startled Sam and he dropped the class, admitting to Sue his failure and
+      his lack of interest and bowing his head before her accusation of a lack
+      of the love of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later by the fire in his own room he tried to draw for himself a moral
+      from the experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should I love these men?&rdquo; he asked himself. &ldquo;They are what I might
+      have been. Few of the men I have known have loved me and some of the best
+      and cleanest of them have worked vigorously for my defeat. Life is a
+      battle in which few men win and many are defeated and in which hate and
+      fear play their part with love and generosity. These heavy-featured young
+      men are a part of the world as men have made it. Why this protest against
+      their fate when we are all of us making more and more of them with every
+      turn of the clock?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During the next year, after the fiasco of the settlement house class, Sam
+      found himself drifting more and more rapidly away from Sue and her new
+      viewpoint of life. The growing gulf between them showed itself in a
+      thousand little household acts and impulses, and every time he looked at
+      her he thought her more apart from him and less a part of the real life
+      that went on within him. In the old days there had been something intimate
+      and familiar in her person and in her presence. She had seemed like a part
+      of him, like the room in which he slept or the coat he wore on his back,
+      and he had looked into her eyes as thoughtlessly and with as little fear
+      of what he might find there as he looked at his own hands. Now when his
+      eyes met hers they dropped, and one or the other of them began talking
+      hurriedly like a person who has a consciousness of something he must
+      conceal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down town Sam took up anew his old friendship and intimacy with Jack
+      Prince, going with him to clubs and drinking places and often spending
+      evenings among the clever, money-wasting young men who laughed and made
+      deals and talked their way through life at Jack&rsquo;s side. Among these young
+      men a business associate of Jack&rsquo;s caught his attention and in a few weeks
+      an intimacy had sprung up between Sam and this man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Maurice Morrison, Sam&rsquo;s new friend, had been discovered by Jack Prince
+      working as a sub-editor on a country daily down the state. There was, Sam
+      thought, something of the Caxton dandy, Mike McCarthy, in the man,
+      combined with prolonged and fervent, although somewhat periodic attacks of
+      industry. In his youth he had written poetry and at one time had studied
+      for the ministry, and in Chicago, under Jack Prince, he had developed into
+      a money maker and led the life of a talented, rather unscrupulous man of
+      the world. He kept a mistress, often overdrank, and Sam thought him the
+      most brilliant and convincing talker he had ever heard. As Jack Prince&rsquo;s
+      assistant he had charge of the Rainey Company&rsquo;s large advertising
+      expenditure, and the two men being thrown often together a mutual regard
+      grew up between them. Sam believed him to be without moral sense; he knew
+      him to be able and honest and he found in the association with him a fund
+      of odd little sweetnesses of character and action that lent an
+      inexpressible charm to the person of his friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was through Morrison that Sam had his first serious misunderstanding
+      with Sue. One evening the brilliant young advertising man dined at the
+      McPhersons&rsquo;. The table, as usual, was filled with Sue&rsquo;s new friends, among
+      them a tall, gaunt man who, with the arrival of the coffee, began in a
+      high-pitched, earnest voice to talk of the coming social revolution. Sam
+      looked across the table and saw a light dancing in Morrison&rsquo;s eyes. Like a
+      hound unleashed he sprang among Sue&rsquo;s friends, tearing the rich to pieces,
+      calling for the onward advance of the masses, quoting odds and ends of
+      Shelley and Carlyle, peering earnestly up and down the table, and at the
+      end quite winning the hearts of the women by a defence of fallen women
+      that stirred the blood of even his friend and host.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam was amused and a trifle annoyed. The whole thing was, he knew, no more
+      than a piece of downright acting with just the touch of sincerity in it
+      that was characteristic of the man but that had no depth or real meaning.
+      During the rest of the evening he watched Sue, wondering if she too had
+      fathomed Morrison and what she thought of his having taken the role of
+      star from the long gaunt man, who had evidently been booked for that part
+      and who sat at the table and wandered afterward among the guests, annoyed
+      and disconcerted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late that night Sue came into his room and found him reading and smoking
+      by the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheeky of Morrison, dimming your star,&rdquo; he said, looking at her and
+      laughing apologetically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue looked at him doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came in to thank you for bringing him,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;I thought him
+      splendid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at her and for a moment was tempted to let the matter pass. And
+      then his old inclination to be always open and frank with her asserted
+      itself and he closed the book and rising stood looking down at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The little beast was guying your crowd,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I do not want him
+      to guy you. Not that he wouldn&rsquo;t try. He has the audacity for anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A flush arose to her cheeks and her eyes gleamed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is not true, Sam,&rdquo; she said coldly. &ldquo;You say that because you are
+      becoming hard and cold and cynical. Your friend Morrison talked from his
+      heart. It was beautiful. Men like you, who have a strong influence over
+      him, may lead him away, but in the end a man like that will come to give
+      his life to the service of society. You should help him; not assume an
+      attitude of unbelief and laugh at him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stood upon the hearth smoking his pipe and looking at her. He was
+      thinking how easy it would have been in the first year after their
+      marriage to have explained Morrison. Now he felt that he was but making a
+      bad matter worse, but went on determined to stick to his policy of being
+      entirely honest with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Sue,&rdquo; he began quietly, &ldquo;be a good sport. Morrison was joking.
+      I know the man. He is the friend of men like me because he wants to be and
+      because it pays him to be. He is a talker, a writer, a talented,
+      unscrupulous word-monger. He is making a big salary by taking the ideas of
+      men like me and expressing them better than we can ourselves. He is a good
+      workman and a generous, open-hearted fellow with a lot of nameless charm
+      in him, but a man of convictions he is not. He could talk tears into the
+      eyes of your fallen women, but he would be a lot more likely to talk good
+      women into their state.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam put a hand upon her shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be sensible and do not be offended,&rdquo; he went on: &ldquo;take the fellow for
+      what he is and be glad for him. He hurts little and cheers a lot. He could
+      make a convincing argument in favour of civilisation&rsquo;s return to
+      cannibalism, but really, you know, he spends most of his time thinking and
+      writing of washing machines and ladies&rsquo; hats and liver pills, and most of
+      his eloquence after all only comes down to &lsquo;Send for catalogue, Department
+      K&rsquo; in the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue&rsquo;s voice was colourless with passion when she replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is unbearable. Why did you bring the fellow here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sat down and picked up his book. In his impatience he lied to her for
+      the first time since their marriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First, because I like him and second, because I wanted to see if I
+      couldn&rsquo;t produce a man who could outsentimentalise your socialist
+      friends,&rdquo; he said quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue turned and walked out of the room. In a way the action was final and
+      marked the end of understanding between them. Putting down his book Sam
+      watched her go and some feeling he had kept for her and that had
+      differentiated her from all other women died in him as the door closed
+      between them. Throwing the book aside he sprang to his feet and stood
+      looking at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old goodfellowship appeal is dead,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;From now on we will
+      have to explain and apologise like two strangers. No more taking each
+      other for granted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning out the light he sat again before the fire to think his way
+      through the situation that faced him. He had no thought that she would
+      return. That last shot of his own had crushed the possibility of that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fire was getting low in the grate and he did not renew it. He looked
+      past it toward the darkened windows and heard the hum of motor cars along
+      the boulevard below. Again he was the boy of Caxton hungrily seeking an
+      end in life. The flushed face of the woman in the theatre danced before
+      his eyes. He remembered with shame how he had, a few days before, stood in
+      a doorway and followed with his eyes the figure of a woman who had lifted
+      her eyes to him as they passed in the street. He wished that he might go
+      out of the house for a walk with John Telfer and have his mind filled with
+      eloquence of the standing corn, or sit at the feet of Janet Eberly as she
+      talked of books and of life. He got up and turning on the lights began
+      preparing for bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know what I will do,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I will go to work. I will do some real
+      work and make some more money. That&rsquo;s the place for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And to work he went, real work, the most sustained and clearly thought-out
+      work he had done. For two years he was out of the house at dawn for a long
+      bracing walk in the fresh morning air, to be followed by eight, ten and
+      even fifteen hours in the office and shops; hours in which he drove the
+      Rainey Arms Company&rsquo;s organisation mercilessly and, taking openly every
+      vestige of the management out of the hands of Colonel Tom, began the plans
+      for the consolidation of the American firearms companies that later put
+      his name on the front pages of the newspapers and got him the title of a
+      Captain of Finance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a widespread misunderstanding abroad regarding the motives of
+      many of the American millionaires who sprang into prominence and affluence
+      in the days of change and sudden bewildering growth that followed the
+      close of the Spanish War. They were, many of them, not of the brute trader
+      type, but were, instead, men who thought and acted quickly and with a
+      daring and audacity impossible to the average mind. They wanted power and
+      were, many of them, entirely unscrupulous, but for the most part they were
+      men with a fire burning within them, men who became what they were because
+      the world offered them no better outlet for their vast energies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson had been untiring and without scruples in the first hard,
+      quick struggle to get his head above the great unknown body of men there
+      in the city. He had turned aside from money getting when he heard what he
+      took to be a call to a better way of life. Now with the fires of youth
+      still in him and with the training and discipline that had come from two
+      years of reading, of comparative leisure and of thought, he was prepared
+      to give the Chicago business world a display of that tremendous energy
+      that was to write his name in the industrial history of the city as one of
+      the first of the western giants of finance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Going to Sue, Sam told her frankly of his plans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want a free hand in the handling of your stock in the company,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;I cannot lead this new life of yours. It may help and sustain you
+      but it gets no hold on me. I want to be myself now and lead my own life in
+      my own way. I want to run the company, really run it. I cannot stand idly
+      by and let life go past. I am hurting myself and you standing here looking
+      on. Also I am in a kind of danger of another kind that I want to avoid by
+      throwing myself into hard, constructive work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without question Sue signed the papers he brought her. A flash of her old
+      frankness toward him came back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not blame you, Sam,&rdquo; she said, smiling bravely. &ldquo;Things have not
+      gone right, as we both know, but if we cannot work together at least let
+      us not hurt each other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam returned to give himself again to affairs, the country was just
+      at the beginning of the great wave of consolidation which was finally to
+      sweep all of the financial power of the country into a dozen pairs of
+      competent and entirely efficient hands. With the sure instinct of the born
+      trader Sam had seen this movement coming and had studied it. Now he began
+      to act. Going to that same swarthy-faced lawyer who had drawn the contract
+      for him to secure control of the medical student&rsquo;s twenty thousand dollars
+      and who had jokingly invited him to become one of a band of train robbers,
+      he told him of his plans to begin working toward a consolidation of all
+      the firearms companies of the country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Webster wasted no time in joking now. He laid out the plans, adjusted and
+      readjusted them to suit Sam&rsquo;s shrewd suggestions, and when a fee was
+      mentioned shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want in on this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You will need me. I am made for this game
+      and have been waiting for a chance to get at it. Just count me in as one
+      of the promoters if you will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam nodded his head. Within a week he had formed a pool of his own
+      company&rsquo;s stock controlling, as he thought, a safe majority and had begun
+      working to form a similar pool in the stock of his only big western rival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This last job was not an easy one. Lewis, the Jew, had been making
+      constant headway in that company just as Sam had made headway in the
+      Rainey Company. He was a money maker, a sales manager of rare ability,
+      and, as Sam knew, a planner and executor of business coups of the first
+      class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam did not want to deal with Lewis. He had respect for the man&rsquo;s ability
+      in driving sharp bargains and felt that he would like to have the whip in
+      his own hands when it came to the point of dealing with him. To this end
+      he began visiting bankers and the men who were head of big western trust
+      companies in Chicago and St. Louis. He went about his work slowly, feeling
+      his way and trying to get at each man by some effective appeal, buying the
+      use of vast sums of money by a promise of common stock, the bait of a big
+      active bank account, and, here and there, by the hint of a directorship in
+      the big new consolidated company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time the project moved slowly; indeed there were weeks and months
+      when it did not appear to move at all. Working in secret and with extreme
+      caution Sam encountered many discouragements and went home in the evening
+      day after day to sit among Sue&rsquo;s guests with a mind filled with his own
+      plans and with an indifferent ear turned to the talk of revolution, social
+      unrest, and the new class consciousness of the masses, that rattled and
+      crackled up and down his dinner table. He thought that it must be trying
+      to Sue. He was so evidently not interested in her interests. At the same
+      time he thought that he was working toward what he wanted out of life and
+      went to bed at night believing that he was finding, and would find, a kind
+      of peace in just thinking clearly along one line day after day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day Webster, who had wanted to be in on the deal, came to Sam&rsquo;s office
+      and gave his project its first great boost toward success. He, like Sam,
+      thought he saw clearly the tendencies of the times, and was greedy for the
+      block of common stock that Sam had promised should come to him with the
+      completion of the enterprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not using me,&rdquo; he said, sitting down before Sam&rsquo;s desk. &ldquo;What is
+      blocking the deal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam began to explain and when he had finished Webster laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s get at Tom Edwards of the Edward Arms Company direct,&rdquo; he said, and
+      then, leaning over the desk, &ldquo;Edwards is a vain little peacock and a
+      second rate business man,&rdquo; he declared emphatically. &ldquo;Get him afraid and
+      then flatter his vanity. He has a new wife with blonde hair and big soft
+      blue eyes. He wants prominence. He is afraid to venture upon big things
+      himself but is hungry for the reputation and gain that comes through big
+      deals. Use the method the Jew has used; show him what it means to the
+      yellow-haired woman to be the wife of the president of the big
+      consolidated Arms Company. THE EDWARDS CONSOLIDATED, eh? Get at Edwards.
+      Bluff him and flatter him and he is your man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam wondered. Edwards was a small grey-haired man of sixty with something
+      dry and unresponsive about him. Being a silent man, he had created an
+      impression of remarkable shrewdness and ability. After a lifetime spent in
+      hard labour and in the practice of the most rigid economy he had come up
+      to wealth, and had got into the firearms business through Lewis, and it
+      was counted one of the brightest stars in that brilliant Hebrew&rsquo;s crown
+      that he had been able to lead Edwards with him in his daring and audacious
+      handling of the company&rsquo;s affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at Webster across the desk and thought of Tom Edwards as the
+      figurehead of the firearms trust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was saving the frosting on the cake for my own Tom,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;it was a
+      thing I wanted to hand the colonel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us see Edwards this evening,&rdquo; said Webster dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam nodded, and late that night made the deal that gave him control of the
+      two important western companies and put him in position to move on the
+      eastern companies with every prospect of complete success. To Edwards he
+      went with an exaggerated report of the support he had already got for his
+      project, and having frightened him offered him the presidency of the new
+      company and promised that it should be incorporated under the name of The
+      Edwards Consolidated Firearms Company of America.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The eastern companies fell quickly. With Webster Sam tried on them the old
+      dodge of telling each that the other two had agreed to come in, and it
+      worked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the coming in of Edwards and the options given by the eastern
+      companies Sam began to get also the support of the LaSalle Street bankers.
+      The firearms trust was one of the few big consolidations managed wholly in
+      the west, and after two or three of the bankers had agreed to help finance
+      Sam&rsquo;s plan the others began asking to be taken into the underwriting
+      syndicate he and Webster had formed. Within thirty days after the closing
+      of the deal with Tom Edwards Sam felt that he was ready to act.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For several months Colonel Tom had known something of the plans Sam had on
+      foot, and had made no protest. He had in fact given Sam to understand that
+      his stock would be voted with Sue&rsquo;s, controlled by Sam, and with the stock
+      of the other directors who knew of and hoped to share in the profits of
+      Sam&rsquo;s deal. The old gunmaker had all of his life believed that the other
+      American firearms companies were but shadows destined to disappear before
+      the rising sun of the Rainey Company, and thought of Sam&rsquo;s project as an
+      act of providence to further this desirable end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment of his acquiescence in Webster&rsquo;s plan, for landing Tom
+      Edwards, Sam had a moment of doubt, and now, with the success of his
+      project in sight, he began to wonder how the blustering old man would look
+      upon Edwards as the titular head of the big company and upon the name of
+      Edwards in the title of the company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For two years Sam had seen little of the colonel, who had given up all
+      pretence to an active part in the management of the business and who,
+      finding Sue&rsquo;s new friends disconcerting, seldom appeared at the house,
+      living at the clubs, playing billiards all day long, or sitting in the
+      club windows boasting to chance listeners of his part in the building of
+      the Rainey Arms Company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a mind filled with doubt Sam went home and put the matter before Sue.
+      She was dressed and ready for an evening at the theatre with a party of
+      friends and the talk was brief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will not mind,&rdquo; she said indifferently. &ldquo;Go ahead and do what you want
+      to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam rode back to the office and called his lieutenants about him. He felt
+      that the thing might as well be done and over, and with the options in his
+      hands, and the ability he thought he had to control his own company, he
+      was ready to come out into the open and get the deal cleaned up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The morning papers that carried the story of the proposed big new
+      consolidation of firearms companies carried also an almost life-size
+      halftone of Colonel Tom Rainey, a slightly smaller one of Tom Edwards, and
+      grouped about these, small pictures of Sam, Lewis, Prince, Webster, and
+      several of the eastern men. By the size of the half-tone, Sam, Prince, and
+      Morrison had tried to reconcile Colonel Tom to Edwards&rsquo; name in the title
+      of the new company and to Edwards&rsquo; coming election as president. The story
+      also played up the past glories of the Rainey Company and its directing
+      genius, Colonel Tom. One phrase, written by Morrison, brought a smile to
+      Sam&rsquo;s lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This grand old patriarch of American business, retired now from active
+      service, is like a tired giant, who, having raised a brood of young
+      giants, goes into his castle to rest and reflect and to count the scars
+      won in many a hard-fought battle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Morrison laughed as he read it aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It ought to get the colonel,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but the newspaper man who prints
+      it should be hung.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will print it all right,&rdquo; said Jack Prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And they did print it; going from newspaper office to newspaper office
+      Prince and Morrison saw to that, using their influence as big buyers of
+      advertising space and even insisting upon reading proof on their own
+      masterpiece.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it did not work. Early the next morning Colonel Tom appeared at the
+      offices of the arms company with blood in his eye, and swore that the
+      consolidation should not be put through. For an hour he stormed up and
+      down in Sam&rsquo;s office, his outbursts of wrath varied by periods of
+      childlike pleading for the retention of the name and glory of the Raineys.
+      When Sam shook his head and went with the old man to the meeting that was
+      to pass upon his action and sell the Rainey Company, he knew that he had a
+      fight on his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The meeting was a stormy one. Sam made a talk telling what had been done
+      and Webster, voting some of Sam&rsquo;s proxies, made a motion that Sam&rsquo;s offer
+      for the old company be accepted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then Colonel Tom fired his guns. Walking up and down in the room
+      before the men, sitting at a long table or in chairs tilted against the
+      walls, he began talking with all of his old flamboyant pomposity of the
+      past glories of the Rainey Company. Sam watched him quietly thinking of
+      the exhibition as something detached and apart from the business of the
+      meeting. He remembered a question that had come into his head when he was
+      a schoolboy and had got his first peep into a school history. There had
+      been a picture of Indians at the war dance and he had wondered why they
+      danced before rather than after battle. Now his mind answered the
+      question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If they had not danced before they might never have got the chance,&rdquo; he
+      thought, and smiled to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I call upon you men here to stick to the old colours,&rdquo; roared the
+      colonel, turning and making a direct attack upon Sam. &ldquo;Do not let this
+      ungrateful upstart, this son of a drunken village housepainter, that I
+      picked up from among the cabbages of South Water Street, win you away from
+      your loyalty to the old leader. Do not let him steal by trickery what we
+      have won only by years of effort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel, leaning on the table, glared about the room. Sam felt
+      relieved and glad of the direct attack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It justifies what I am going to do,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Colonel Tom had finished Sam gave a careless glance at the old man&rsquo;s
+      red face and trembling fingers. He had no doubt that the outburst of
+      eloquence had fallen upon deaf ears and without comment put Webster&rsquo;s
+      motion to the vote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To his surprise two of the new employé directors voted their stock with
+      Colonel Tom&rsquo;s, and a third man, voting his own stock as well as that of a
+      wealthy southside real estate man, did not vote. On a count the stock
+      represented stood deadlocked and Sam, looking down the table, raised his
+      eyebrows to Webster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Move we adjourn for twenty-four hours,&rdquo; snapped Webster, and the motion
+      carried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at a paper lying before him on the table. During the count of
+      the vote he had been writing over and over on the sheet of paper this
+      sentence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The best men spend their lives seeking truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Colonel Tom walked out of the room like a conqueror, declining to speak to
+      Sam as he passed, and Sam looked down the table at Webster and made a
+      motion with his head toward the man who had not voted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within an hour Sam&rsquo;s fight was won. Pouncing upon the man representing the
+      stock of the south-side investor, he and Webster did not go out of the
+      room until they had secured absolute control of the Rainey Company and the
+      man who had refused to vote had put twenty-five thousand dollars into his
+      pocket. The two employeé directors Sam marked for slaughter. Then after
+      spending the afternoon and early evening with the representatives of the
+      eastern companies and their attorneys he drove home to Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was past nine o&rsquo;clock when his car stopped before the house and, going
+      at once to his room, he found Sue sitting before his fire, her arms thrown
+      above her head and her eyes staring at the burning coals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Sam stood in the doorway looking at her a wave of resentment swept over
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old coward,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;he has brought our fight here to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hanging up his coat he filled his pipe and drawing up a chair sat beside
+      her. For five minutes Sue sat staring into the fire. When she spoke there
+      was a touch of hardness in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When everything is said, Sam, you do owe a lot to father,&rdquo; she observed,
+      refusing to look at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam said nothing and she went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not that I think we made you, father and I. You are not the kind of man
+      that people make or unmake. But, Sam, Sam, think what you are doing. He
+      has always been a fool in your hands. He used to come home here when you
+      were new with the company and talk of what he was doing. He had a whole
+      new set of ideas and phrases; all that about waste and efficiency and
+      orderly working toward a definite end. It did not fool me. I knew the
+      ideas, and even the phrases he used to express them, were not his and I
+      was not long finding out they were yours, that it was simply you
+      expressing yourself through him. He is a big helpless child, Sam, and he
+      is old. He hasn&rsquo;t much longer to live. Do not be hard, Sam. Be merciful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice did not tremble but tears ran down her rigid face and her
+      expressive hands clutched at her dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can nothing change you? Must you always have your own way?&rdquo; she added,
+      still refusing to look at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not true, Sue, that I always want my own way, and people do change
+      me; you have changed me,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I have not changed you. I found you hungry for something and you
+      thought I could feed it. I gave you an idea that you took hold of and made
+      your own. I do not know where I got it, from some book or hearing some one
+      talk, I suppose. But it belonged to you. You built it and fostered it in
+      me and coloured it with your own personality. It is your idea to-day. It
+      means more to you than all this firearms trust that the papers are full
+      of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned to look at him, and put out her hand and laid it in his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not been brave,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I am standing in your way. I have had
+      a hope that we would get back to each other. I should have freed you but I
+      hadn&rsquo;t the courage, I hadn&rsquo;t the courage. I could not give up the dream
+      that some day you would really take me back to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Getting out of her chair she dropped to her knees and putting her head in
+      his lap, shook with sobs. Sam sat stroking her hair. Her agitation was so
+      great that her muscular little back shook with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked past her at the fire and tried to think clearly. He was not
+      greatly moved by her agitation, but with all his heart he wanted to think
+      things out and get at the right and the honest thing to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a time of big things,&rdquo; he said slowly and with an air of one
+      explaining to a child. &ldquo;As your socialists say, vast changes are going on.
+      I do not believe that your socialists really sense what these changes
+      mean, and I am not sure that I do or that any man does, but I know they
+      mean something big and I want to be in them and a part of them; all big
+      men do; they are struggling like chicks in the shell. Why, look here! What
+      I am doing has to be done and if I do not do it another man will. The
+      colonel has to go. He will be swept aside. He belongs to something old and
+      outworn. Your socialists, I believe, call it the age of competition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But not by us, not by you, Sam,&rdquo; she plead. &ldquo;After all, he is my father.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A stern look came into Sam&rsquo;s eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It does not ring right, Sue,&rdquo; he said coldly; &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sprang to her feet and stood before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not quote that crowd,&rdquo; she burst out. &ldquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s why they talk so bitterly.
+      They are afraid and ashamed that they are afraid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like the workers in the shop?&rdquo; he asked, musingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what do you want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, Sue girl, I will do it,&rdquo; he said, and pushed her through the
+      door. &ldquo;Now let me sit down by myself and think things out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The men who make machines do not hesitate,&rdquo; he said to himself; &ldquo;even
+      though a thousand fat-hearted men stood in their way they would go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A line of Tennyson&rsquo;s came into his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the nation&rsquo;s airy navies grappling in the central blue,&rdquo; he quoted,
+      thinking of an article he had read predicting the coming of airships.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of the lives of the workers in steel and iron and of the things
+      they had done and would do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;freedom. Steel and iron do not run home to carry
+      the struggle to women sitting by the fire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked up and down the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fat old coward. Damned fat old coward,&rdquo; he muttered over and over to
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At his desk he found a message from Webster. &ldquo;The old turkey cock has
+      fled,&rdquo; it said; &ldquo;we should have saved the twenty-five thousand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s lips to tell of his changed plans but he hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will see you at your office in an hour,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was never a part of all this,&rdquo; he said, turning and looking at the
+      towering city before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Love,&rdquo; he said, still looking toward the city, &ldquo;is a matter of truth, not
+      lies and pretence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the meeting that afternoon the project went through without a
+      dissenting voice. Colonel Tom being absent, the two employé 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;At the end I could not be an ass, even for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The story of Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The annual advertising expenditure of the firearms trust ran into millions
+      and Sam&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lewis, the Jew, the only one of Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have the better of it, Lewis,&rdquo; he said one day in a reflective mood;
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might have had the work you are doing. I planned and schemed with that
+      end in view,&rdquo; he added, lighting a cigar and going out at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the money hunger got you,&rdquo; laughed Lewis, looking after him, &ldquo;the
+      hunger that gets Jews and Gentiles and all who feed it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was ill for a year and without an income,&rdquo; wrote Telfer. Sam noticed
+      that the man&rsquo;s hand had begun to tremble. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if Sue is dead, too,&rdquo; he muttered, remembering his dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sat at his desk, fingering the yellow paper lying before him and
+      fighting to get his head clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old coward. The damned old coward,&rdquo; he muttered; &ldquo;any one could have
+      done that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Lewis came into Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, do not blame yourself for that,&rdquo; he said, with quick understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; Sam muttered; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;The best men spend
+      their lives seeking truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &lsquo;phoning wildly about town to find him, and was with the help of
+      another banker supporting the market and taking Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no attempt to answer Sue&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The greatest man is he whose deeds affect the greatest number of lives,&rdquo;
+       the speaker had said, and the thought had stuck in Sam&rsquo;s mind. Now walking
+      along the street carrying his travelling bag, he remembered the sermon and
+      the thought and shook his head in doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I have done here in this city must have affected thousands of
+      lives,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to think of the quest on which he had started and had keen
+      satisfaction in the thought of what he should do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will begin all over and come up to Truth through work,&rdquo; he told
+      himself. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving his bag in the care of the farmer&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These are the Americans,&rdquo; he began telling himself, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the train he sat beside the old man and the two fell into quiet talk&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ed,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have raised seven sons and made them all good workmen and they are all
+      doing well,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the old man Sam talked of God and of a man&rsquo;s effort to get truth out of
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have thought of it a lot,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God is a spirit and lives in the growing corn,&rdquo; said the old man,
+      pointing out the window at the passing fields.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began talking of churches and of ministers, against whom he was filled
+      with bitterness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are dodgers. They do not get at things. They are damned dodgers,
+      pretending to be good,&rdquo; he declared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been drinking,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I want to work hard day after day so
+      that my muscles may become firm and sleep come to me at night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man thought that his son could find Sam a place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s a driver&mdash;Ed is,&rdquo; he said, laughing, &ldquo;and he won&rsquo;t pay you
+      much. Ed don&rsquo;t let go of money. He&rsquo;s a tight one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll let you carry timbers and drive nails,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that will harden
+      you up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way over the bridge he talked of the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a live place,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we are getting people in here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at that!&rdquo; he exclaimed, chewing at the cigar and pointing to the
+      waterfall that foamed and roared almost under the bridge. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a lot
+      of power there and where there&rsquo;s power there will be a city.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At Ed&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is my wife,&rdquo; said Ed, introducing Sam with a wave of his hand and
+      passing around the end of the desk to stand by her side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ed&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Their son,&rdquo; he whispered cautiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Selling something?&rdquo; asked a large red-haired young man, rolling a quid of
+      tobacco in his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; replied Sam shortly, &ldquo;going to work for Ed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a little while the florid-faced man came and put his head through
+      the barroom door into the office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come on, boys,&rdquo; he said, smiling and nodding right and left, &ldquo;the drinks
+      are on me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The men got up and filed into the bar, the old man and Sam remaining
+      seated in their chairs. They began talking in undertones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll start &lsquo;em thinking&mdash;these men,&rdquo; said the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From his pocket he took a pamphlet and gave it to Sam. It was a crudely
+      written attack upon rich men and corporations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some brains in the fellow who wrote that,&rdquo; said the old carpenter,
+      rubbing his hands together and smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We want to make this a live town,&rdquo; said the voice of Ed, earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man, leaning over and putting his hand beside his mouth, began
+      whispering to Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet there is a capitalist deal back of that power scheme,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded his head up and down and smiled knowingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If there is Ed will be in on it,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t lose Ed. He&rsquo;s a
+      slick one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took the pamphlet from Sam&rsquo;s hand and put it in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a socialist,&rdquo; he explained, &ldquo;but don&rsquo;t say anything. Ed&rsquo;s against
+      &lsquo;em.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, so long, boys,&rdquo; he shouted heartily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Bill&rsquo;s sure all right,&rdquo; said the red-haired young man, evidently
+      expressing the opinion of the men in regard to the florid-faced man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A small bent old man with sunken cheeks got up and walking across the room
+      leaned against the cigar case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you ever hear this one?&rdquo; he asked, looking about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was a good one, eh?&rdquo; he commented, turning to Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Truth,&rdquo; he muttered, looking through the window to the dimly-lighted
+      street. &ldquo;Do these men seek truth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day he went to work, wearing a suit of clothes bought from Ed. He
+      worked with Ed&rsquo;s father, carrying timbers and driving nails as directed by
+      him. In the gang with him were four men, boarders at Ed&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I suppose Ed tends to that. He&rsquo;s a slick one, Ed
+      is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They wanted to see if I had juice in me,&rdquo; he explained, strutting beside
+      Sam with an amusing little swagger of his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All during that month and into the next Sam stayed with the old man&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One Sunday one of the men of his gang came to Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought of it,&rdquo; he said over and over again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you?&rdquo; he asked bluntly. &ldquo;We know you are no working man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam told him a half-truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The doctor says it will not do,&rdquo; he explained to the two men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The red-haired man called Jake began talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are going to have a fight with Ed,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what we came up
+      here to talk about. We want to know where you stand. We are going to see
+      if we can&rsquo;t make him pay as well for the work here as men are paid for the
+      same work in Chicago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam lay back upon the grass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Go ahead. If I can help I will. I&rsquo;m not so fond of
+      Ed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a list of the names of men we think will stick together and vote
+      together on the bond issue,&rdquo; he explained, turning to Sam. &ldquo;Ed&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s done a lot of town work here and there&rsquo;s been graft in all of it,&rdquo;
+       explained Jake emphatically. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s time he was being made to do the right
+      thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While they talked Sam sat watching the men&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Getting up, Jake took Sam&rsquo;s arm and they walked down the ravine, Jake
+      explaining the situation in the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The game,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&rsquo;s been up
+      here at the hotel with Bill talking to Ed. I&rsquo;ve figured out what they are
+      up to.&rdquo; Sam sat down upon a log and laughed heartily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Crofts, eh?&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How would you do that?&rdquo; asked Jake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sat down on a log and looked at the river flowing past the mouth of
+      the ravine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just fight,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Let me show you something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This fortune in the river rightly managed will pay the expenses of
+      government and give you control of a great source of revenue forever,&rdquo; he
+      wrote. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Across the head of the pamphlet Sam wrote the
+      caption, &ldquo;A River Paved With Gold,&rdquo; and handed it to Jake, who read it and
+      whistled softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I will take this and have it printed. It will make Bill
+      and Ed sit up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam took a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To pay for the printing,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And when we have them licked I am the
+      man who will take the four per cent bonds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake scratched his head. &ldquo;How much do you suppose the deal is worth to
+      Crofts?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A million, or he would not bother,&rdquo; Sam answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This would make Bill and Ed squirm, eh?&rdquo; he laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps here in this town I shall make a start toward what I am after,&rdquo;
+       he thought, his heart filled with happiness and the songs of the tipsy
+      workmen ringing in his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All through the next few weeks there was an air of something astir among
+      the men of Sam&rsquo;s gang and about Ed&rsquo;s hotel. During the evening Jake went
+      among the men talking in low tones, and once he took a three days&rsquo; 
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the campaign,&rdquo; he said, winking and hurrying away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will come to something&mdash;this will&mdash;you&rsquo;ll see,&rdquo; he declared
+      to Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ed wants you,&rdquo; he said, and Sam noticed that his voice trembled and his
+      hand shook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the buggy Ed and Sam rode in silence. Again Ed chewed at an unlighted
+      cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to talk with you,&rdquo; he had said as Sam climbed into the buggy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam struggled furiously to escape Ed&rsquo;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&rsquo;s vice-like
+      grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Ed turned and, pushing Sam before him, threw him through the
+      office door and into the street. In falling his head struck against a
+      hitching post and he lay stunned. When he partially recovered from the
+      fall Sam got up and walked along the street. His face was swollen and
+      bruised and his nose bled. The street was deserted and the assault upon
+      him had been unnoticed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went to a hotel on Main Street&mdash;a more pretentious place than
+      Ed&rsquo;s, near the bridge leading to the station&mdash;and as he passed in he
+      saw, through an open door, Jake, the red-haired man, leaning against the
+      bar and talking to Bill, the man with the florid face. Sam, paying for a
+      room, went upstairs and to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the bed, with cold bandages on his bruised face, he tried to get the
+      situation in hand. Hatred for Ed ran through his veins. His hands
+      clenched, his brain whirled, and the brutal, passionate faces of the woman
+      and the boy danced before his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll fix them, the brutal bullies,&rdquo; he muttered aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then the thought of his quest came back to his mind and quieted him.
+      Through the window came the roar of the waterfall, broken by noises of the
+      street. As he fell asleep they mingled with his dreams, sounding soft and
+      quiet like the low talk of a family about the fire of an evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was awakened by a noise of pounding on his door. At his call the door
+      opened and the face of the old carpenter appeared. Sam laughed and sat up
+      in bed. Already the cold bandages had soothed the throbbing of his bruised
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go away,&rdquo; begged the old man, rubbing his hands together nervously. &ldquo;Get
+      out of town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his hand to his mouth and talked in a hoarse whisper, looking back
+      over his shoulder through the open door. Sam, getting out of bed, began
+      filling his pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t beat Ed, you fellows,&rdquo; added the old man, backing out at the
+      door. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s a slick one, Ed is. You better get out of town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam called a boy and gave him a note to Ed asking for his clothes and for
+      the bag in his room, and to the boy he gave a large bill, asking him to
+      pay anything due. When the boy came back bringing the clothes and the bag
+      he returned the bill unbroken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They&rsquo;re scared about something up there,&rdquo; he said, looking at Sam&rsquo;s
+      bruised face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam dressed carefully and went down into the street. He remembered that he
+      had never seen a printed copy of the political pamphlet written in the
+      ravine and realised that Jake had used it to make money for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now I shall try something else,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was early evening and crowds of men coming down the railroad track from
+      the plough works turned to right and left as they reached Main Street. Sam
+      walked among them, climbing a little hilly side street to a number he had
+      got from a clerk at the drug store before which the socialist had talked.
+      He stopped at a little frame house and a moment after knocking was in the
+      presence of the man who had talked night after night from the box in the
+      street. Sam had decided to see what could be done through him. The
+      socialist was a short, fat man, with curly grey hair, shiny round cheeks,
+      and black broken teeth. He sat on the edge of his bed and looked as if he
+      had slept in his clothes. A corncob pipe lay smoking among the covers of
+      the bed, and during most of the talk he sat with one shoe held in his hand
+      as though about to put it on. About the room in orderly piles lay stack
+      after stack of paper-covered books. Sam sat down in a chair by the window
+      and told his mission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a big thing, this power steal that is going on here,&rdquo; he explained.
+      &ldquo;I know the man back of it and he would not bother with a small affair. I
+      know they are going to make the city build the millrace and then steal it.
+      It will be a big thing for your party about here if you take hold and stop
+      them. Let me tell you how it can be done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He explained his plan, and told of Crofts and of his wealth and dogged,
+      bullying determination. The socialist seemed beside himself. He pulled on
+      the shoe and began running hurriedly about the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The time for the election,&rdquo; Sam went on, &ldquo;is almost here. I have looked
+      into this thing. We must beat this bond issue and then put through a
+      square one. There is a train out of Chicago at seven o&rsquo;clock, a fast
+      train. You get fifty speakers out here. I will pay for a special train if
+      necessary and I will hire a band and help stir things up. I can give you
+      facts enough to shake this town to the bottom. You come with me and &lsquo;phone
+      to Chicago. I will pay everything. I am McPherson, Sam McPherson of
+      Chicago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The socialist ran to a closet and began pulling on his coat. The name
+      affected him so that his hand trembled and he could scarcely get his arm
+      into the coat sleeve. He began to apologise for the appearance of the room
+      and kept looking at Sam with the air of one not able to believe what he
+      had heard. As the two men walked out of the house he ran ahead holding
+      doors open for Sam&rsquo;s passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you will help us, Mr. McPherson?&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;You, a man of
+      millions, will help us in this fight?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had a feeling that the man was going to kiss his hand or do something
+      equally ridiculous. He had the air of a club door man gone off his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the hotel Sam stood in the lobby while the fat man waited in a
+      telephone booth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will have to &lsquo;phone Chicago, I will simply have to &lsquo;phone Chicago. We
+      socialists don&rsquo;t do anything like this offhand, Mr. McPherson,&rdquo; he had
+      explained as they walked along the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the socialist came out of the booth he stood before Sam shaking his
+      head. His whole attitude had changed, and he looked like a man caught
+      doing a foolish or absurd thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing doing, nothing doing, Mr. McPherson,&rdquo; he said, starting for the
+      hotel door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the door he stopped and shook his finger at Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It won&rsquo;t work,&rdquo; he said, emphatically. &ldquo;Chicago is too wise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam turned and went back to his room. His name had killed his only chance
+      to beat Crofts, Jake, Bill and Ed. In his room he sat looking out of the
+      window into the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where shall I take hold now?&rdquo; he asked himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning out the lights he sat listening to the roar of the waterfall and
+      thinking of the events of the last week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had a time,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;I have tried something and even though
+      it did not work it has been the best fun I have had for years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The hours slipped away and night came on. He could hear men shouting and
+      laughing in the street, and going downstairs he stood in a hallway at the
+      edge of the crowd that gathered about the socialist. The orator shouted
+      and waved his hand. He seemed as proud as a young recruit who has just
+      passed through his first baptism of fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He tried to make a fool of me&mdash;McPherson of Chicago&mdash;the
+      millionaire&mdash;one of the capitalist kings&mdash;he tried to bribe me
+      and my party.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the crowd the old carpenter was dancing in the road and rubbing his
+      hands together. With the feeling of a man who had finished a piece of work
+      or turned the last leaf of a book, Sam went back to his hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the morning I shall be on my way,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A knock came at the door and the red-haired man came in. He closed the
+      door softly and winked at Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ed made a mistake,&rdquo; he said, and laughed. &ldquo;The old man told him you were
+      a socialist and he thought you were trying to spoil the graft. He is
+      scared about that beating you got and mighty sorry. He&rsquo;s all right&mdash;Ed
+      is&mdash;and he and Bill and I have got the votes. What made you stay
+      under cover so long? Why didn&rsquo;t you tell us you were McPherson?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam saw the hopelessness of any attempt to explain. Jake had evidently
+      sold out the men. Sam wondered how.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know you can deliver the votes?&rsquo;&rdquo; he asked, trying to lead
+      Jake on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake rolled the quid in his mouth and winked again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was easy enough to fix the men when Ed, Bill and I got together,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;You know about the other. There&rsquo;s a clause in the act authorising
+      the bond issue, a sleeper, Bill calls it. You know more about that than I
+      do. Anyway the power will be turned over to the man we say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how do I know you can deliver the votes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake threw out his hand impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do they know?&rdquo; he asked sharply. &ldquo;What they want is more wages.
+      There&rsquo;s a million in the power deal and they can&rsquo;t any more realise a
+      million than they can tell what they want to do in Heaven. I promised Ed&rsquo;s
+      fellows the city scale. Ed can&rsquo;t kick. He&rsquo;ll make a hundred thousand as it
+      stands. Then I promised the plough works gang a ten per cent raise. We&rsquo;ll
+      get it for them if we can, but if we can&rsquo;t, they won&rsquo;t know it till the
+      deal is put through.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam walked over and held open the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good night,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake looked annoyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t you even going to make a bid against Crofts?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;We ain&rsquo;t
+      tied to him if you do better by us. I&rsquo;m in this thing because you put me
+      in. That piece you wrote up the river scared &lsquo;em stiff. I want to do the
+      right thing by you. Don&rsquo;t be sore about Ed. He wouldn&rsquo;t a done it if he&rsquo;d
+      known.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head and stood with his hand still on the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good night,&rdquo; he said again. &ldquo;I am not in it. I have dropped it. No use
+      trying to explain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For weeks and months Sam led a wandering vagabond life, and surely a
+      stranger or more restless vagabond never went upon the road. In his pocket
+      he had at almost any time from one to five thousand dollars, his bag went
+      on from place to place ahead of him, and now and then he caught up with
+      it, unpacked it, and wore a suit of his former Chicago clothes upon the
+      streets of some town. For the most part, however, he wore the rough
+      clothes bought from Ed, and, when these were gone, others like them, with
+      a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a pair of heavy boots
+      lacing half way up the legs. Among the people, he passed for a rather
+      well-set-up workman with money in his pocket going his own way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During all those months of wandering, and even when he had returned to
+      something nearer his former way of life, his mind was unsettled and his
+      outlook on life disturbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that he, among all
+      men, was a unique, an innovation. Day after day his mind ground away upon
+      his problem and he was determined to seek and to keep on seeking until he
+      found for himself a way of peace. In the towns and in the country through
+      which he passed he saw the clerks in the stores, the merchants with
+      worried faces hurrying into banks, the farmers, brutalised by toil,
+      dragging their weary bodies homeward at the coming of night, and told
+      himself that all life was abortive, that on all sides of him it wore
+      itself out in little futile efforts or ran away in side currents, that
+      nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward giving point to the
+      tremendous sacrifice involved in just living and working in the world. He
+      thought of Christ going about seeing the world and talking to men, and
+      thought that he too would go and talk to them, not as a teacher, but as
+      one seeking eagerly to be taught. At times he was filled with longing and
+      inexpressible hopes and, like the boy of Caxton, would get out of bed, not
+      now to stand in Miller&rsquo;s pasture watching the rain on the surface of the
+      water, but to walk endless miles through the darkness getting the blessed
+      relief of fatigue into his body and often paying for and occupying two
+      beds in one night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam wanted to go back to Sue; he wanted peace and something like
+      happiness, but most of all he wanted work, real work, work that would
+      demand of him day after day the best and finest in him so that he would be
+      held to the need of renewing constantly the better impulses of his mind.
+      He was at the top of his life, and the few weeks of hard physical exertion
+      as a driver of nails and a bearer of timbers had begun to restore his body
+      to shapeliness and strength, so that he was filled anew with all of his
+      native restlessness and energy; but he was determined that he would not
+      again pour himself out in work that would react upon him as had his money
+      making, his dream of beautiful children, and this last half-formed dream
+      of a kind of financial fatherhood to the Illinois town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The incident with Ed and the red-haired man had been his first serious
+      effort at anything like social service achieved through controlling or
+      attempting to influence the public mind, for his was the type of mind that
+      runs to the concrete, the actual. As he sat in the ravine talking to Jake,
+      and, later, coming home in the boat under the multitude of stars, he had
+      looked up from among the drunken workmen and his mind had seen a city
+      built for a people, a city independent, beautiful, strong, and free, but a
+      glimpse of a red head through a barroom door and a socialist trembling
+      before a name had dispelled the vision. After his return from hearing the
+      socialist, who in his turn was hedged about by complicated influences, and
+      in those November days when he walked south through Illinois, seeing the
+      late glory of the trees and breathing the fine air, he laughed at himself
+      for having had the vision. It was not that the red-haired man had sold him
+      out, it was not the beating given him by Ed&rsquo;s sullen-faced son or the
+      blows across the face at the hands of his vigorous wife&mdash;it was just
+      that at bottom he did not believe the people wanted reform; they wanted a
+      ten per cent raise in wages. The public mind was a thing too big, too
+      complicated and inert for a vision or an ideal to get at and move deeply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, walking on the road and struggling to find truth even within
+      himself, Sam had to come to something else. At bottom he was no leader, no
+      reformer. He had not wanted the free city for a free people, but as a work
+      to be done by his own hand. He was McPherson, the money maker, the man who
+      loved himself. The fact, not the sight of Jake hobnobbing with Bill or the
+      timidity of the socialist, had blocked his way to work as a political
+      reformer and builder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tramping south between the rows of shocked corn he laughed at himself.
+      &ldquo;The experience with Ed and Jake has done something for me,&rdquo; he thought.
+      &ldquo;They bullied me. I have been a kind of bully myself and what has happened
+      has been good medicine for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam walked the roads of Illinois, Ohio, New York, and other states,
+      through hill country and flat country, in the snow drifts of winter and
+      through the storms of spring, talking to people, asking their way of life
+      and the end toward which they worked. At night he dreamed of Sue, of his
+      boyhood struggles in Caxton, of Janet Eberly sitting in her chair and
+      talking of writers of books, or, visualising the stock exchange or some
+      garish drinking place, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster,
+      Morrison, and Prince intent and eager as he laid before them some scheme
+      of money making. Sometimes at night he awoke, seized with horror, seeing
+      Colonel Tom with the revolver pressed against his head; and sitting in his
+      bed, and all through the next day he talked aloud to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The damned old coward,&rdquo; he shouted into the darkness of his room or into
+      the wide peaceful prospect of the countryside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible.
+      It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing
+      to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent, so
+      completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet,&rdquo; thought Sam, &ldquo;he has found strength to whip me, the man of
+      ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight I
+      put upon the little play world in which he had been king.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed beard
+      sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead, and
+      into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance of a
+      thought he had got from a book of Janet&rsquo;s or from some talk he had heard,
+      perhaps at his own dinner table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying
+      dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving
+      past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that issued
+      from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam, hurrying and
+      seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to the old
+      commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his forces to
+      withstand an attack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping
+      night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and
+      daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction from
+      the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed feet on
+      the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon his body and
+      subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind, chilled by the
+      winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun. In the spring he
+      swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the cattle grazing in
+      the fields and the white clouds floating across the sky, and constantly
+      his legs became harder and his body more flat and sinewy. Once he slept
+      for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a woods and in the morning was
+      awakened by a farmer&rsquo;s dog licking his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other
+      roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no
+      incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or on
+      the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he talked
+      and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in life, sought
+      no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the romance went
+      out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and stupid, they were,
+      almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they wanted passionately to
+      get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding life with its problems
+      and responsibilities. They always talked of the big cities, of &ldquo;Chi&rdquo; and
+      &ldquo;Cinci&rdquo; and &ldquo;Frisco,&rdquo; and were bent upon getting to one of these places.
+      They condemned the rich and begged and stole from the poor, talked
+      swaggeringly of their personal courage and ran whimpering and begging
+      before country constables. One of them, a tall, leering youth in a grey
+      cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the edge of a village in Indiana,
+      tried to rob him. Full of his new strength and with the thought of Ed&rsquo;s
+      wife and the sullen-faced son in his mind, Sam sprang upon him and had
+      revenge for the beating received in the office of Ed&rsquo;s hotel by beating
+      this fellow in his turn. When the tall youth had partially recovered from
+      the beating and had staggered to his feet, he ran off into the darkness,
+      stopping when well out of reach to hurl a stone that splashed in the mud
+      of the road at Sam&rsquo;s feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everywhere Sam sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He had a
+      kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of some
+      simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman, with whom he
+      talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana, interested him so
+      that he went into a train with her and travelled all night in the day
+      coach, listening to her talk of her three sons, one of whom had weak lungs
+      and had, with two younger brothers, taken up government land in the west.
+      The woman had been with them for some months, helping them to get a start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was raised on a farm and knew things they could not know,&rdquo; she told
+      Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of
+      fellow passengers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had
+      driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a house,
+      and had grown brown and strong at the work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has
+      gained eleven pounds,&rdquo; she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her
+      heavy, muscular forearms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle factory
+      in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods store, with
+      her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her hearer&rsquo;s
+      interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the west and the
+      loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they sometimes made her
+      heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved success, although he
+      did not see how her experience could serve as a guide to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth,&rdquo; he said, taking
+      her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through southern
+      Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse, asked, &ldquo;Where
+      are you going?&rdquo; adding genially, &ldquo;I may be able to give you a lift.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man&rsquo;s manner or in his
+      dress suggesting the man of God, he assumed a bantering air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am on my way to the New Jerusalem,&rdquo; he said seriously. &ldquo;I am one who
+      seeks God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when he
+      saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam&rsquo;s mouth, he turned the wheels
+      of his buggy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem,&rdquo; he
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road,
+      told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward
+      which he might work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard
+      necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will
+      bring me bread and butter, but because I need to be doing something that
+      will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to
+      serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I got
+      at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me, and I
+      want to find that way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister, who was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary at
+      Springfield, Ohio, and had come out of college with a very serious outlook
+      on life, took Sam to his house and together they sat talking half the
+      night. He had a wife, a country girl with a babe lying at her breast, who
+      got supper for them, and who, after supper, sat in the shadows in a corner
+      of the living-room listening to their talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe and the minister poked at a
+      coal fire that burned in a stove. They talked of God and of what the
+      thought of God meant to men; but the young minister did not try to give
+      Sam an answer to his problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly
+      dissatisfied and unhappy in his way of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no spirit of God here,&rdquo; he said, poking viciously at the coals
+      in the stove. &ldquo;The people here do not want me to talk to them of God. They
+      have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has put them
+      here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind of glorified
+      Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished this life of
+      work and of putting money in the savings bank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the country
+      with him and talking of God. In the evening they sat in the house,
+      continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man preach in
+      his church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked
+      vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and
+      unnatural.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man,&rdquo; thought Sam, &ldquo;has no feeling for public address and is not
+      treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation, the
+      ideas he has expounded to me in his house.&rdquo; He decided there was something
+      to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week after week and
+      who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came to
+      him as he stood on the little porch before the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you would go away,&rdquo; she said, standing with her babe in her arms
+      and looking at the porch floor. &ldquo;You stir him up and make him
+      dissatisfied.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness.
+      There had been tears in the wife&rsquo;s eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and eating
+      with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses where
+      they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked in a new
+      place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and several of
+      his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the men of the
+      threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot of them day
+      after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk, crept into the
+      loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began another day of
+      heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a swim in some creek
+      and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees of an orchard
+      sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of talk, talk that
+      never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they would try to
+      settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at some farm during
+      the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man in the crew never
+      talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long Sunday afternoons and
+      whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The threshing outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe,
+      who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the men
+      all day, drove about the country half the night making deals with farmers
+      for other days of threshing. Sam thought that he looked constantly on the
+      point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one of the men, who had
+      been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that at the end of the
+      season their employer did not have enough money left from his season of
+      work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines and that he
+      continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One has to keep going,&rdquo; said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him
+      on the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When told to keep Sam&rsquo;s wage until the end of the season he looked
+      relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried
+      and said that he had no money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a
+      little time,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him
+      from the shadows at the back of the barn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one else?&rdquo;
+       he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joe looked indignant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man wants independence,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a
+      stream, and tearing up Joe&rsquo;s note watched the torn pieces of it float away
+      upon the brown water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The days
+      on which something happened or on which something outside himself
+      interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours
+      of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in a
+      kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get at
+      people who came into his way and to discover something of their way of
+      life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed,
+      staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the sidewalks
+      of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an idea came
+      into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once the
+      practicability of living by following the idea, and although the practice
+      brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the difficulties of the
+      problem he was striving to work out, it brought him many strange
+      experiences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town in
+      eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a railroad
+      track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the sidewalk. It
+      was a stormy night in September at the end of his first year of wandering
+      and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after buying drinks for the
+      labourer and cigars for himself, several men came in and stood by the bar
+      drinking together. As they drank they became more and more friendly,
+      slapping each other on the back, singing songs and boasting. One of them
+      got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The proprietor, a round-faced man
+      with one dead eye, who had himself been drinking freely, put a bottle upon
+      the bar and coming up to Sam, began complaining that he had no bartender
+      and had to work long hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drink what you want, boys, and then I&rsquo;ll tell you what you owe,&rdquo; he said
+      to the men standing along the bar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room, and
+      looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had for
+      the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen, Sam
+      said to himself, &ldquo;I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At least
+      I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with this
+      tramping on the road and thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an
+      obscure place had made its proprietor what is called &ldquo;well fixed.&rdquo; It had
+      a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the main
+      street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks was
+      but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men from the
+      freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand about drinking
+      beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at the side door was
+      prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door, took drinks and
+      hurried out again, looking up the alley and running quickly when they
+      found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and when Sam had worked
+      for a few days in the place he once made the mistake of reaching for the
+      bottle when he heard the door open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let them ask for it,&rdquo; said the proprietor gruffly. &ldquo;Do you want to insult
+      a man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On Saturday the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and
+      at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks.
+      When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these men
+      and put the bottle before them, saying, &ldquo;Drink all you want of the stuff.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment by
+      the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat pockets
+      and looking at the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bar flies,&rdquo; the proprietor explained laconically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it into
+      stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into bottles
+      as they became empty. He kept on display in glass cases bottles of well
+      known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for one of these
+      brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from beneath the bar, a
+      bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of his own mixture. As Al
+      sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know nothing the bartender&rsquo;s art
+      and stood all day handing out Al&rsquo;s poisonous stuff and the foaming glasses
+      of beer the workingmen drank in the evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the
+      proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam most.
+      Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over their
+      shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at Sam
+      apologetically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold,&rdquo; they would say,
+      as though repeating a formula.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre
+      notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life&rsquo;s
+      unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day&rsquo;s duty, and his
+      curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in at
+      the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked them
+      why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the
+      telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam&rsquo;s question an
+      impertinence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You fool, don&rsquo;t you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?&rdquo;
+       Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in the
+      centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and women going
+      through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to overcome a
+      feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening before. He
+      had come into town over a poorly made clay road running through barren
+      hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores of a river,
+      swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges of the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before him in the distance he had looked into the windows of a huge
+      factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene that
+      lay before him. Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers
+      ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the glare of the furnace
+      fire lighting now one, now another of them, sharply. At his feet the
+      tumbling waters that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated him.
+      Looking closely at the racing waters his head, light from physical
+      weariness, reeled, and in fear of falling he had been compelled to grip
+      firmly the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a house
+      across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens sat on
+      a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly fitting
+      accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard itself two
+      bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they sprang into the
+      fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming exhausted, they fell to
+      picking and scratching among the rubbish in the yard, and when they had a
+      little recovered renewed the struggle. For an hour Sam had looked at the
+      scene, letting his eyes wander from the river to the grey sky and to the
+      factory belching forth its black smoke. He had thought that the two feebly
+      struggling fowls, immersed in their pointless struggle in the midst of
+      such mighty force, epitomised much of man&rsquo;s struggle in the world, and,
+      turning, had gone along the sidewalks and to the village hotel, feeling
+      old and tired. Now on the bench in the little park, with the early morning
+      sun shining down through the glistening rain drops clinging to the red
+      leaves of the trees, he began to lose the sense of depression that had
+      clung to him through the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying
+      workers, and stopped to sit beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the road, brother?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fools and slaves,&rdquo; he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women
+      passing on the sidewalk. &ldquo;See them going like beasts to their bondage?
+      What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of
+      dogs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are all fools and slaves,&rdquo; said Sam, stoutly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There, you talk sense,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Welcome to our town, stranger. We have
+      no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity among
+      them. Come and have breakfast with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a
+      graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he
+      was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of
+      which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud of
+      the fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I refuse to work! I scorn it!&rdquo; he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in
+      the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the socialist
+      party in his native town, and boasted of the leadership he had already
+      achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried because of
+      his connection with the movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She wants me to be respectable,&rdquo; he said sadly, and added, &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the
+      use trying to explain to a woman? I can&rsquo;t get her to see the difference
+      between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I&rsquo;ve given up
+      trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by
+      getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He talked of a strike going on among some girl employés of a Jewish
+      shirtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began
+      asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to
+      the scene of the strike.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shirtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and on
+      the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up and
+      down. A flashily dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his hands
+      in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft and
+      looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came a stream
+      of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the empty air. When
+      Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs, shouting oaths
+      over his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam joined the three girls, and began talking to them, walking up and down
+      with them before the grocery store.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing to win?&rdquo; he asked when they had told him of their
+      grievances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We do what we can!&rdquo; said a Jewish girl with broad hips, great motherly
+      breasts, and fine, soft, brown eyes, who appeared to be a leader and
+      spokesman among the strikers. &ldquo;We walk up and down here and try to get a
+      word with the strikebreakers the boss has brought in from other towns,
+      when they go in and come out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank, the University man, spoke up. &ldquo;We are putting up stickers
+      everywhere,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I myself have put up hundreds of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took from his coat pocket a printed slip, gummed on one side, and told
+      Sam that he had been putting them on walls and telegraph poles about town.
+      The thing was vilely written. &ldquo;Down with the dirty scabs&rdquo; was the heading
+      in bold, black letters across the top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam was shocked at the vileness of the caption and at the crude brutality
+      of the text printed on the slip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you call women workers names like that?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have taken our work from us,&rdquo; the Jewish girl answered simply and
+      began again, telling the story of her sister strikers and of what the low
+      wage had meant to them and to their families. &ldquo;To me it does not so much
+      matter; I have a brother who works in a clothing store and he can support
+      me, but many of the women in our union have only their wage here with
+      which to feed their families.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;s mind began working on the problem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here,&rdquo; he declared, &ldquo;is something definite to do, a battle in which I
+      will pit myself against this employer for the sake of these women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put away from him his experience in the Illinois town, telling himself
+      that the young woman walking beside him would have a sense of honour
+      unknown to the red-haired young workman who had sold him out to Bill and
+      Ed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I failed with my money,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;now I will try to help these girls
+      with my energy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning to the Jewish girl he made a quick decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will help you get your places back,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving the girls he went across the street to a barber shop where he
+      could watch the entrance to the factory. He wanted to think out a method
+      of procedure and wanted also to look at the girl strikebreakers as they
+      came to work. After a time several girls came along the street and turned
+      in at the stairway. The flashily dressed Hebrew with the cigar still in
+      his mouth was again by the stairway entrance. The three pickets running
+      forward accosted the file of girls going up the stairs, one of whom, a
+      young American girl with yellow hair, turned and shouted something over
+      her shoulder. The man called Frank shouted back and the Hebrew took the
+      cigar out of his mouth and laughed heartily. Sam filled and lighted his
+      pipe, a dozen plans for helping the striking girls running through his
+      mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the morning he went into the grocery store on the corner, a saloon
+      in the neighbourhood, and returned to the barber shop talking to men of
+      the strike. He ate his lunch alone, still thinking of the three girls
+      patiently walking up and down before the stairway. Their ceaseless walking
+      seemed to him a useless waste of energy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They should be doing something more definite,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After lunch he joined the soft-eyed Jewish girl and together they walked
+      along the street talking of the strike.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You cannot win this strike by just calling nasty names,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I do
+      not like that &lsquo;dirty scab&rsquo; sticker Frank had in his pocket. It cannot help
+      you and only antagonises the girls who have taken your places. Here in
+      this part of town the people want to see you win. I have talked to the men
+      who come into the saloon and the barber shop across the street and you
+      already have their sympathy. You want to get the sympathy of the girls who
+      have taken your places. Calling them dirty scabs only makes martyrs of
+      them. Did the yellow-haired girl call you a name this morning?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Jewish girl looked at Sam and laughed bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather; she called me a loud-mouthed street walker.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They continued their walk along the street, across the railroad track and
+      a bridge, and into a quiet residence street. Carriages stood at the curb
+      before the houses, and pointing to these and to the well-kept houses Sam
+      said, &ldquo;Men have bought these things for their women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A shadow fell across the girl&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose all of us want what these women have,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;We do not
+      really want to fight and to stand on our own feet, not when we know the
+      world. What a woman really wants is a man,&rdquo; she added shortly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam began talking and told her of a plan that had come into his mind. He
+      had remembered how Jack Prince and Morrison used to talk about the appeal
+      of the direct personal letter and how effectively it was used by mail
+      order houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will have a mail order strike here,&rdquo; he said and went on to lay before
+      her the details of his plan. He proposed that she, Frank, and some others
+      of the striking girls, should go about town getting the names and the mail
+      addresses of the girl strikebreakers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get also the names of the keepers of the boarding houses at which these
+      girls live and the names of the men and women who live in the same
+      houses,&rdquo; he suggested. &ldquo;Then you get the striking girls and women together
+      and have them tell me their stories. We will write letters day after day
+      to the girl strikebreakers, to the women who keep the boarding houses, and
+      to the people who live in the houses and sit at table with them. We won&rsquo;t
+      call names. We will tell the story of what being beaten in this fight
+      means to the women in your union, tell it simply and truthfully as you
+      told it to me this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will cost such a lot,&rdquo; said the Jewish girl, shaking her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam took a roll of bills from his pocket and showed it to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will pay,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; she asked, looking at him sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I am a man wanting work just as you want work,&rdquo; he replied, and
+      then went on hurriedly, &ldquo;It is a long story. I am a rich man wandering
+      about the world seeking Truth. I will not want that known. Take me for
+      granted. You won&rsquo;t be sorry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Within an hour he had engaged a large room, paying a month&rsquo;s rent in
+      advance, and into the room chairs and table and typewriters had been
+      brought. He put an advertisement in the evening paper for girl
+      stenographers, and a printer, hurried by a promise of extra pay, ran out
+      for him several thousand letter heads across the top of which in bold,
+      black type ran the words, &ldquo;The Girl Strikers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That night Sam held, in the room he had engaged, a meeting of the girl
+      strikers, explaining to them his plan and offering to pay all expenses of
+      the fight he proposed to make for them. They clapped their hands and
+      shouted approvingly, and Sam began laying out his campaign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the girls he told off to stand in front of the factory morning and
+      evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will have other help for you there,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Before you go home
+      to-night there will be a printer here with a bundle of pamphlets I am
+      having printed for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Advised by the soft-eyed Jewish girl, he told off others to get additional
+      names for the mailing list he wanted, getting many important ones from
+      girls in the room. Six of the girls he asked to come in the morning to
+      help him with addressing and mailing letters. The Jewish girl he told to
+      take charge of the girls at work in the room&mdash;on the morrow to become
+      also an office&mdash;and to superintend getting the names.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank rose at the back of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you anyway?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man with money and the ability to win this strike,&rdquo; Sam told him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing it for?&rdquo; demanded Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because he believes in these women and wants to help,&rdquo; she explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rot,&rdquo; said Frank, going out at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was snowing when the meeting ended, and Sam and the Jewish girl
+      finished their talk in the hallway leading to her room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what Harrigan, the union leader from Pittsburgh, will say to
+      this,&rdquo; she told him. &ldquo;He appointed Frank to lead and direct the strike
+      here. He doesn&rsquo;t like interference and he may not like your plan. But we
+      working women need men, men like you who can plan and do things. There are
+      too many men living on us. We need men who will work for all of us as the
+      men work for the women in the carriages and automobiles.&rdquo; She laughed and
+      put out a hand to him. &ldquo;See what you have got yourself into? I want you to
+      be a husband to our entire union.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning four girl stenographers went to work in Sam&rsquo;s strike
+      headquarters, and he wrote his first strike letter, a letter telling the
+      story of a striking girl named Hadaway, whose young brother was sick with
+      tuberculosis. Sam did not put any flourishes in the letter; he felt that
+      he did not need to. He thought that with twenty or thirty such letters,
+      each telling briefly and truthfully the story of one of the striking
+      girls, he should be able to show one American town how its other half
+      lived. He gave the letter to the four girl stenographers with the mailing
+      list he already had and started them writing it to each of the names.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At eight o&rsquo;clock a man came in to install a telephone and girl strikers
+      began bringing in new names for the mailing list. At nine o&rsquo;clock three
+      more stenographers appeared and were put to work, and girls who had been
+      in began sending more names over the &lsquo;phone. The Jewish girl walked up and
+      down, giving orders, making suggestions. From time to time she ran to
+      Sam&rsquo;s desk and suggested other sources of names for the mailing list. Sam
+      thought that if the other working girls were timid and embarrassed before
+      him this one was not. She was like a general on the field of battle. Her
+      soft brown eyes glowed, her mind worked rapidly, and her voice had a ring
+      in it. At her suggestion Sam gave the girls at the typewriters lists
+      bearing the names of town officials, bankers and prominent business men,
+      and the wives of all these, also presidents of various women&rsquo;s clubs,
+      society women, and charitable organizations. She called reporters from the
+      town&rsquo;s two daily papers and had them interview Sam, and at her suggestion
+      he gave them copies of the Hadaway girl letter to print.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Print it,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and if you cannot use it as news, make it an
+      advertisement and bring the bill to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At eleven o&rsquo;clock Frank came into the room bringing a tall Irishman, with
+      sunken cheeks, black, unclean teeth, and an overcoat too small for him.
+      Leaving him standing by the door, Frank walked across the room to Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come to lunch with us,&rdquo; he said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder
+      toward the tall Irishman. &ldquo;I picked him up,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Best brain that&rsquo;s
+      been in town for years. He&rsquo;s a wonder. Used to be a Catholic priest. He
+      doesn&rsquo;t believe in God or love or anything. Come on out and hear him talk.
+      He&rsquo;s great.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am too busy. There is work to be done here. We are going to win this
+      strike.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank looked at him doubtfully and then about the room at the busy girls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what Harrigan will think of all this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t
+      like interferences. I never do anything without writing him. I wrote and
+      told him what you were doing here. I had to, you know. I&rsquo;m responsible to
+      headquarters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the afternoon the Hebrew owner of the shirtwaist factory came in to
+      strike headquarters and, walking through the room took off his hat and sat
+      down by Sam&rsquo;s desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want here?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;The newspaper boys told me of what you
+      had planned to do. What&rsquo;s your game?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to whip you,&rdquo; Sam answered quietly, &ldquo;to whip you good. You might
+      as well get into line. You are going to lose this strike.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m only one,&rdquo; said the Hebrew. &ldquo;There is an association of us
+      manufacturers of shirtwaists. We are all in this. We all have a strike on
+      our hands. What will you gain if you do beat me here? I&rsquo;m only a little
+      fellow after all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and picking up his pen began writing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are unlucky,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I just happened to take hold here. When I
+      have you beaten I will go on and beat the others. There is more money back
+      of me than back of you all, and I am going to beat every one of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning a crowd stood before the stairway leading to the factory
+      when the strikebreaking girls came to work. The letters and the newspaper
+      interview had been effective and more than half the strikebreakers did not
+      appear. The others hurried along the street and turned in at the stairway
+      without looking at the crowd. The girl, told off by Sam, stood on the
+      sidewalk passing out pamphlets to the strikebreakers. The pamphlets were
+      headed, &ldquo;The Story of Ten Girls,&rdquo; and told briefly and pointedly the
+      stories of ten striking girls and what the loss of the strike meant to
+      them and to their families.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a while there drove up two carriages and a large automobile, and out
+      of the automobile climbed a well-dressed woman who took a bundle of the
+      pamphlets from the girl picket and began passing them about among the
+      people. Two policemen who stood in front of the crowd took off their
+      helmets and accompanied her. The crowd cheered. Frank came hurrying across
+      the street to where Sam stood in front of the barber shop and slapped him
+      on the back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re a wonder,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam hurried back to the room and prepared the second letter for the
+      mailing list. Two more stenographers had come to work. He had to send out
+      for more machines. A reporter for the town&rsquo;s evening paper ran up the
+      stairway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;The town wants to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From his pocket he took a telegram from a Pittsburgh daily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about mail-order strike plan? Give name and story new strike leader
+      there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At ten o&rsquo;clock Frank returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a wire from Harrigan,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s coming here. He wants a
+      mass meeting of the girls for to-night. I&rsquo;ve got to get them together.
+      We&rsquo;ll meet here in this room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the room the work went on. The list of names for the mailing had
+      doubled. The picket at the shirtwaist factory reported that three more of
+      the strikebreakers had left the plant. The Jewish girl was excited. She
+      went hurrying about the room, her eyes glowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s great,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The plan is working. The whole town is aroused
+      and for us. We&rsquo;ll win in another twenty-four hours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then at seven o&rsquo;clock that night Harrigan came into the room where Sam
+      sat with the assembled girls, bolting the door behind him. He was a short,
+      strongly built man with blue eyes and red hair. He walked about the room
+      in silence, followed by Frank. Suddenly he stopped and, picking up one of
+      the typewriting machines rented by Sam for the letter writing, raised it
+      above his head and sent it smashing to the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A hell of a strike leader,&rdquo; he roared. &ldquo;Look at this. Scab machines!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scab stenographers!&rdquo; he said through his teeth. &ldquo;Scab printing! Scab
+      everything!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Picking up a bundle of the letterheads, he tore them across, and walking
+      to the front of the room, shook his fist before Sam&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scab leader!&rdquo; he shouted, turning and facing the girls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The soft-eyed Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s winning for us,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harrigan walked toward her threateningly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better lose than win a scab victory,&rdquo; he bellowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you anyway? What grafter sent you here?&rdquo; he demanded, turning to
+      Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He launched into a speech. &ldquo;I have been watching this fellow, I know him.
+      He has a scheme to break down the union and is being paid by the
+      capitalists.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam waited to hear no more. Getting up he pulled on his canvas jacket and
+      started for the door. He saw that already he had involved himself in a
+      dozen violations of the unionist code and the idea of trying to convince
+      Harrigan of his disinterestedness did not occur to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not mind me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked between the rows of frightened, white-faced girls and unbolted
+      the door, the Jewish girl following. At the head of the stairway leading
+      to the street he stopped and pointed back into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go back,&rdquo; he said, handing her a roll of bills. &ldquo;Carry on the work if you
+      can. Get other machines and new printing. I will help you in secret.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning he ran down the stairs, hurried through the curious crowd standing
+      at the foot, and walked rapidly along in front of the lighted stores. A
+      cold rain, half snow, was falling. Beside him walked a young man with a
+      brown pointed beard, one of the newspaper reporters who had interviewed
+      him the day before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did Harrigan trim you?&rdquo; asked the young man, and then added, laughing,
+      &ldquo;He told us he intended to throw you down stairs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam walked on in silence, filled with wrath. He turned into a side street
+      and stopped when his companion put a hand upon his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is our dump,&rdquo; said the young man, pointing to a long low frame
+      building facing the side street. &ldquo;Come in and let us have your story. It
+      should be a good one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Inside the newspaper office another young man sat with his head lying on a
+      flat-top desk. He was clad in a strikingly flashy plaid coat, had a little
+      wizened, good-natured face and seemed to have been drinking. The young man
+      with the beard explained Sam&rsquo;s identity, taking the sleeping man by the
+      shoulder and shaking him vigorously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wake up, Skipper! There&rsquo;s a good story here!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;The union has
+      thrown out the mail-order strike leader!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Skipper got to his feet and began shaking his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, of course, Old Top, they would throw you out. You&rsquo;ve got some
+      brains. No man with brains can lead a strike. It&rsquo;s against the laws of
+      Nature. Something was bound to hit you. Did Roughneck come out from
+      Pittsburgh?&rdquo; he asked, turning to the young man of the brown beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then reaching above his head and taking a cap that matched his plaid coat
+      from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. &ldquo;Come on, Old Top. I&rsquo;ve got to
+      get a drink.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men went through a side door and down a dark alley, going in at
+      the back door of a saloon. Mud lay deep in the alley and The Skipper
+      sloshed through it, splattering Sam&rsquo;s clothes and face. In the saloon at a
+      table facing Sam, with a bottle of French wine between them, he began
+      explaining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve a note coming due at the bank in the morning and no money to pay
+      it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;When I have a note coming due I always have no money and I
+      always get drunk. Then next morning I pay the note. I don&rsquo;t know how I do
+      it, but I always come out all right. It&rsquo;s a system&mdash;Now about this
+      strike.&rdquo; He plunged into a discussion of the strike while men came in and
+      out, laughing and drinking. At ten o&rsquo;clock the proprietor locked the front
+      door, drew the curtain, and coming to the back of the room sat down at the
+      table with Sam and The Skipper, bringing another bottle of the French wine
+      from which the two men continued drinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That man from Pittsburgh busted up your place, eh?&rdquo; he said, turning to
+      Sam. &ldquo;A man came in here to-night and told me. He sent for the typewriter
+      people and made them take away the machines.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When they were ready to leave, Sam took money from his pocket and offered
+      to pay for the bottle of French wine ordered by The Skipper, who arose and
+      stood unsteadily on his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean to insult me?&rdquo; he demanded indignantly, throwing a
+      twenty-dollar bill on the table. The proprietor gave him back only
+      fourteen dollars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might as well wipe off the slate while you&rsquo;re flush,&rdquo; he observed,
+      winking at Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Skipper sat down again, taking a pencil and pad of paper from his
+      pocket, and throwing them on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want an editorial on the strike for the Old Rag,&rdquo; he said to Sam. &ldquo;Do
+      one for me. Do something strong. Get a punch into it. I want to talk to my
+      friend here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Putting the pad of paper on the table Sam began writing his newspaper
+      editorial. His head seemed wonderfully clear, his command of words
+      unusually good. He called the attention of the public to the situation,
+      the struggles of the striking girls and the intelligent fight they had
+      been making to win a just cause, following this with paragraphs pointing
+      out how the effectiveness of the work done had been annulled by the
+      position taken by the labour and socialist leaders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These fellows at bottom care nothing for results,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;They are
+      not thinking of the unemployed women with families to support, they are
+      thinking only of themselves and their puny leadership which they fear is
+      threatened. Now we shall have the usual exhibition of all the old things,
+      struggle, and hatred and defeat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had finished The Skipper and Sam went back through the alley to
+      the newspaper office. The Skipper sloshed again through the mud and
+      carried in his hand a bottle of red gin. At his desk he took the editorial
+      from Sam&rsquo;s hands and read it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perfect! Perfect to the thousandth part of an inch, Old Top,&rdquo; he said,
+      pounding Sam on the shoulder. &ldquo;Just what the Old Rag wanted to say about
+      the strike.&rdquo; Then climbing upon the desk and putting the plaid coat under
+      his head he went peacefully to sleep, and Sam, sitting beside the desk in
+      a shaky office chair, slept also. At daybreak a black man with a broom in
+      his hand woke them, and going into a long low room filled with presses The
+      Skipper put his head under a water tap and came back waving a soiled towel
+      and with water dripping from his hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now for the day and the labours thereof,&rdquo; he said, grinning at Sam and
+      taking a long drink out of the gin bottle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After breakfast he and Sam took up their stand in front of the barber shop
+      opposite the stairway leading to the shirtwaist factory. Sam&rsquo;s girl with
+      the pamphlets was gone as was also the soft-eyed Jewish girl, and in their
+      places Frank and the Pittsburgh leader named Harrigan walked up and down.
+      Again carriages and automobiles stood by the curb, and again a
+      well-dressed woman got out of a machine and went toward three striking
+      girls approaching along the sidewalk. The woman was met by Harrigan,
+      shaking his fist and shouting, and getting back into the machine she drove
+      off. From the stairway the flashily-dressed Hebrew looked at the crowd and
+      laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the new strike leader&mdash;the mail-order strike leader?&rdquo; he
+      called to Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the words, a working man with a dinner pail on his arm ran out of the
+      crowd and knocked the Jew back into the stairway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Punch him! Punch the dirty scab leader!&rdquo; yelled Frank, dancing up and
+      down on the sidewalk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two policemen running forward began leading the workingman up the street,
+      his dinner pail still clutched in one hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know something,&rdquo; The Skipper shouted, pounding Sam on the shoulder. &ldquo;I
+      know who will sign that note with me. The woman Harrigan drove back into
+      her machine is the richest woman in town. I will show her your editorial.
+      She will think I wrote it and it will get her. You&rsquo;ll see.&rdquo; He ran off up
+      the street, shouting back over his shoulder, &ldquo;Come over to the dump, I
+      want to see you again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam returned to the newspaper office and sat down waiting for The Skipper
+      who, after a time, came in, took off his coat and began writing furiously.
+      From time to time he took long drinks out of the bottle of red gin, and
+      after silently offering it to Sam, continued reeling off sheet after sheet
+      of loosely-written matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got her to sign the note,&rdquo; he called over his shoulder to Sam. &ldquo;She was
+      furious at Harrigan and when I told her we were going to attack him and
+      defend you she fell for it quick. I won out by following my system. I
+      always get drunk and it always wins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At ten o&rsquo;clock the newspaper office was in a ferment. The little man with
+      the brown pointed beard, and another, kept running to The Skipper asking
+      advice, laying typewritten sheets before him, talking as he wrote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me a lead. I want one more front page lead,&rdquo; The Skipper kept
+      bawling at them, working like mad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At ten thirty the door opened and Harrigan, accompanied by Frank, came in.
+      Seeing Sam they stopped, looking at him uncertainly, and at the man at
+      work at the desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, speak up. This is no ladies&rsquo; reception room. What do you fellows
+      want?&rdquo; snapped The Skipper, glaring at them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank, coming forward, laid a typewritten sheet on the desk, which the
+      newspaper man read hurriedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you use it?&rdquo; asked Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Skipper laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wouldn&rsquo;t change a word of it,&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;Sure I&rsquo;ll use it. It&rsquo;s what I
+      wanted to make my point. You fellows watch me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank and Harrigan went out and The Skipper, rushing to the door, began
+      yelling into the room beyond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hey, you Shorty and Tom, I&rsquo;ve got that last lead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Coming back to his desk he began writing again, grinning as he worked. To
+      Sam he handed the typewritten sheet prepared by Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dastardly attempt to win the cause of the working girls by dirty scab
+      leaders and butter-fingered capitalist class,&rdquo; it began, and after this
+      followed a wild jumble of words, words without meaning, sentences without
+      point in which Sam was called a mealy-mouthed mail-order musser and The
+      Skipper was mentioned incidentally as a pusillanimous ink slinger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll run the stuff and comment on it,&rdquo; declared The Skipper, handing Sam
+      what he had written. It was an editorial inviting the public to read the
+      article prepared for publication by the strike leaders and sympathising
+      with the striking girls that their cause had to be lost because of the
+      incompetence and lack of intelligence of their leaders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hurrah for Roughhouse, the brave man who leads working girls to defeat in
+      order that he may retain leadership and drive intelligent effort out of
+      the cause of labour,&rdquo; wrote The Skipper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at the sheets and out of the window where a snow storm raged.
+      It seemed to him that a crime was being done and he was sick and disgusted
+      at his own inability to stop it. The Skipper lighted a short black pipe
+      and took his cap from a nail on the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m the smoothest little newspaper thing in town and some financier as
+      well,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go have a drink.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After the drink Sam walked through the town toward the country. At the
+      edge of town where the houses became scattered and the road started to
+      drop away into a deep valley some one helloed behind him. Turning, he saw
+      the soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are you going?&rdquo; he asked, stopping to lean against a board fence,
+      the snow falling upon his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going with you,&rdquo; said the girl. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re the best and the strongest
+      man I&rsquo;ve ever seen and I&rsquo;m not going to let you get away. If you&rsquo;ve got a
+      wife it don&rsquo;t matter. She isn&rsquo;t what she should be or you wouldn&rsquo;t be
+      walking about the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you&rsquo;re crazy, but
+      I know better. I am going with you and I&rsquo;m going to help you find what you
+      want.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam wondered. She took a roll of bills from a pocket in her dress and gave
+      it to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood looking at each other. She put out a hand and laid it on his
+      arm. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with eager light looked into his. Her
+      round breasts rose and fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anywhere you say. I&rsquo;ll be your servant if you ask it of me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A wave of hot desire ran through Sam followed by a quick reaction. He
+      thought of his months of weary seeking and his universal failure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going back to town if I have to drive you there with stones,&rdquo; he
+      told her, and turning ran down the valley leaving her standing by the
+      board fence, her head buried in her arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in
+      Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying or
+      loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed to be
+      a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women who met at
+      the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away together. Sam
+      found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings. In the year since he
+      had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had grown more and more
+      reflective. Little things&mdash;a smile on the lips of an ill-clad old man
+      mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the flutter of a child&rsquo;s
+      hand from the doorway of a farmhouse&mdash;had furnished him food for
+      hours of thought. Now he watched with interest the little incidents; the
+      nods, the hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances around of the men and
+      women who met for a moment at the corner. On the sidewalk near his doorway
+      several middle-aged men, evidently from a large hotel around the corner,
+      were eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry, furtive eyes the women in the crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. &ldquo;Waiting for some
+      one?&rdquo; she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with the harried,
+      uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the middle-aged men
+      upon the sidewalk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing here with your husband at work?&rdquo; he ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked startled and then laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?&rdquo;
+       she demanded, adding, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know who you are, but whoever you are I
+      want to tell you that I&rsquo;ve quit my husband.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; asked Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I guess you&rsquo;re bluffing,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe you know Alf at all.
+      And I&rsquo;m glad you don&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;ve quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just the
+      same, if he saw me out here hustling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a
+      lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and
+      beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered, &ldquo;Hello,
+      Sport!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in the
+      eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of the
+      lives of great numbers of people in the cities&mdash;of the men and women
+      on the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe
+      marriage had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together in
+      the theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of all
+      modern city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching hunger
+      stood in the way of men&rsquo;s getting hold of life and living it earnestly and
+      purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all men and women
+      wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in Caxton he was more than
+      once startled by the flashes of brutality and coarseness in the speech and
+      actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now as he walked in the streets of
+      the city he thought that he had got past being startled. &ldquo;It is a quality
+      of our lives,&rdquo; he decided. &ldquo;American men and women have not learned to be
+      clean and noble and natural, like their forests and their wide, clean
+      plains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other
+      cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his
+      lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are no finer nor cleaner than these,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and we sprang from the
+      big clean new land through which I have been walking all these months.
+      Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly expressed hunger
+      in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will it never shrive itself
+      and understand itself, and turn fiercely and energetically toward the
+      building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It won&rsquo;t unless you help,&rdquo; came the answer from some hidden part of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and he
+      wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of vice,
+      and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in futile
+      attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward human
+      betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or stopping the
+      playing of baseball on Sunday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously in
+      league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as
+      something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague
+      charm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For me,&rdquo; he reflected, &ldquo;there have been no François Villons or Sapphos in
+      the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only
+      heart-breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces
+      and torn, greasy finery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how he,
+      as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly&rsquo;s
+      suggestion and had been helped by him&mdash;helped and frightened and made
+      to see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of a
+      second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed
+      across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of &ldquo;Nana&rsquo;s Brother,&rdquo; saying
+      with a smirk, &ldquo;That&rsquo;s some sporty stuff.&rdquo; And he wondered what he should
+      have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the
+      bookseller&rsquo;s comment was intended to arouse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in which
+      he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to sleep
+      sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman&rsquo;s saloon in
+      Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting that
+      it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth,&rdquo; he thought, coming to a
+      street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a dingy
+      poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. &ldquo;It gets into all
+      modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears lewd
+      stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men from the
+      cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the stove in
+      village stores.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things
+      were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and
+      daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of
+      Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could
+      but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the
+      glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in that
+      city and in every city he had known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far gone
+      in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam&rsquo;s mind leaped back to those
+      first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man he had
+      left behind him in Caxton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than
+      that painter&rsquo;s son of Caxton,&rdquo; he reminded himself, &ldquo;and yet he embraced
+      vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading talk
+      and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part with
+      able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was too rare a
+      thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the
+      lips-that-touch-liquor-shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was
+      reserved for the lips that did not invite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business men
+      of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of himself,
+      quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and to shout the
+      innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in Chicago barrooms.
+      Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one to keep himself to
+      himself. But on these carouses he let himself go, and got a reputation for
+      daring audacity by slapping men on the back and singing songs with them. A
+      glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for a time he had really believed
+      there was such a thing as high flying vice that glistens in the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city&rsquo;s streets,
+      he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted
+      questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained
+      unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they
+      walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at the
+      windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams, and
+      cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the place;
+      men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their faces;
+      sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were locked out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from farms
+      and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men believers in the
+      golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and women of the town
+      laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked in that way. He
+      also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible mistress that
+      lurked at the bottom of men&rsquo;s tales of the submerged world. He wanted his
+      golden girl. He was like the naïve German lad in the South Water Street
+      warehouses who had once said to him&mdash;he was a frugal soul&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      would like to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and modest and who
+      will be my mistress and not charge anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He
+      had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and
+      now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not be
+      made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks of
+      vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no
+      housecleaning days in the tenderloin?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this
+      matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the
+      scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary decent
+      social life could not go on without it. Often during the past year Sam had
+      thought of the man&rsquo;s talk and his brain had reeled before the thought. In
+      towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little girls come
+      laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered which of them
+      would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in his hour of
+      depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his dinner table
+      might be made to walk with him and to share with him his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam continued
+      his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and soothed his
+      mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought with gratitude
+      that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of faces rolling up to
+      him under the lights filled him with peace. &ldquo;There is so much of life,&rdquo; he
+      thought, &ldquo;it must come to some end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the
+      faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose, the
+      faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on which
+      the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers ached to get
+      a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas in enduring
+      pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able to say, &ldquo;Here
+      are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves and for your
+      children.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little cigar
+      counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly at a woman
+      clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her machine to
+      wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that
+      had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one
+      woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little
+      Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness&mdash;her
+      quick, deft fingers and her muscular little arms. &ldquo;Another such as she,&rdquo;
+       he muttered, &ldquo;has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman;
+      a hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the
+      warm furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy&mdash;a shot,
+      and red blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little
+      claws in the air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing
+      her white limbs, her cheeks, her hair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like
+      himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit of
+      the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could
+      achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the
+      power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces in
+      the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers the
+      story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer&rsquo;s talk, and in Chicago and
+      New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of the
+      artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the long
+      street he thought that he did understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an
+      affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her
+      face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message of
+      the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong,
+      bullet-like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold. He
+      remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love passage
+      with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How eagerly both
+      man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place. How her strong
+      hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor by the office
+      building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so free from the
+      marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of a cattle raiser
+      had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the beauty of that face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman,
+      standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called
+      softly, and turning he went to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not a customer,&rdquo; he said, looking at her thin face and bony hands,
+      &ldquo;but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am getting
+      hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to me so that
+      I won&rsquo;t get to thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re a queer bird,&rdquo; said the woman, taking his arm. &ldquo;What have you done
+      that you don&rsquo;t want to think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a place over there,&rdquo; she said, pointing to the lighted front of a
+      cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam kept on walking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you do not mind,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I will pick the place. I want to buy a
+      good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good cook
+      in the kitchen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he
+      waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited he
+      went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When she
+      returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam
+      thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work
+      on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still
+      waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought maybe it was a stall,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with clean
+      washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private dining-rooms.
+      Sam had been there several times during the month, and the food had been
+      well cooked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself, and
+      she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not studying
+      her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his loneliness, and
+      because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out from the darkness
+      by the church door, had made an appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not
+      defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy&rsquo;s.
+      Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had
+      the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother&rsquo;s hands. Now that she sat
+      before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman
+      of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to take me anywhere after this&mdash;after we leave here?&rdquo;
+       she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to take you to the door of your room, that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;it&rsquo;s a long time since I&rsquo;ve had an evening like
+      this. It makes me feel clean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home town
+      in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came into his
+      mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she in turn told
+      of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about hearing which
+      made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be repeated to her
+      and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire, letting her talk. Her
+      father had been a captain of a small steamboat plying up and down Long
+      Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd woman and a good
+      housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village and had a garden
+      back of their house. The captain had not married until he was forty-five
+      and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother dying a year later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy
+      and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in the
+      garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with
+      thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had
+      married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the
+      house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her
+      life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills and
+      the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature,
+      undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of her
+      husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by
+      various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a
+      time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that
+      her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the
+      town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There wasn&rsquo;t any use wasting words when I found he didn&rsquo;t care for me or
+      for the baby and wouldn&rsquo;t support us, so I left him,&rdquo; she said in a level,
+      businesslike way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and had
+      taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her
+      savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to
+      work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with her
+      hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with a
+      small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine
+      man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a
+      gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing to
+      be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was
+      seven dollars a week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I began going on the street. I knew no one and there
+      was nothing else to do. I couldn&rsquo;t do that in the town where the boy
+      lived, so I came away. I&rsquo;ve gone from city to city, working mostly for
+      patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in the
+      streets. I&rsquo;m not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many of
+      them care about me. I don&rsquo;t like to have them touch me with their hands. I
+      can&rsquo;t drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to be left
+      alone. Perhaps I shouldn&rsquo;t have married. Not that I minded my husband. We
+      got along very well until I had to stop giving him money. When I found
+      where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to have at least a
+      thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened to me. When I found
+      there wasn&rsquo;t anything to do but just go on the streets, I went. I tried
+      doing other work, but hadn&rsquo;t the strength, and when it came to the test I
+      cared more about the boy than I did about myself&mdash;any woman would. I
+      thought he was of more importance than what I wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It hasn&rsquo;t been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with me
+      I walk along the street praying that I won&rsquo;t shudder and draw away when he
+      touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away and I won&rsquo;t
+      get any money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then they talk and lie about themselves. I&rsquo;ve had them try to work
+      off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make love
+      to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That&rsquo;s the hard
+      part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies over and
+      over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to these
+      others lying to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and
+      sat looking into the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mother,&rdquo; she began again, &ldquo;didn&rsquo;t always wear a clean dress. She
+      couldn&rsquo;t. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor or
+      out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was
+      dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be
+      that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I&rsquo;m losing it all. All
+      evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear isn&rsquo;t
+      clean. Most of the time I don&rsquo;t care. Being clean doesn&rsquo;t go with what I
+      am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men will stop
+      when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done well I don&rsquo;t go
+      on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean up my room and bathe
+      myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the basement at night. I
+      don&rsquo;t seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am on the streets.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German
+      waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He stopped
+      by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From another
+      room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing voices.
+      The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam felt that
+      he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to him he
+      should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly. She had a
+      quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t mind about you,&rdquo; she said, looking at him frankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s been a good evening,&rdquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;we&rsquo;ll go through with it as it stands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks for that,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and there is something else I want to tell
+      you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don&rsquo;t want to
+      go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on
+      gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing
+      as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved
+      her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish. Sam had a
+      feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in
+      the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted
+      street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton. Like Mike, he
+      lifted up his voice in the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth
+      hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,
+      and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt
+      and destroy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out of
+      his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia,
+      looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly
+      lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his bill
+      at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely abandoned
+      the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about the country
+      and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in villages, and
+      had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his income.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the
+      wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood. The
+      spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain spring
+      mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in his
+      experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through
+      the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when the call
+      of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind, filling him
+      with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain, yet
+      at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was, after all, a man
+      of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water Street and LaSalle
+      Street had all left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket
+      into a corner of the room in the West Virginia hotel, he returned to the
+      haunts of his kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and into
+      the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named Jackson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he
+      had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again
+      the quiet elegance of the surroundings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, Moneymaker,&rdquo; said Jackson, heartily. &ldquo;Heard you had gone to a
+      nunnery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson&rsquo;s eyes open
+      with astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man&rsquo;s spending month after
+      month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then
+      suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this,&rdquo; he
+      observed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How little you know me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I would live my life in the open but
+      that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New York
+      run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will you go
+      back to Morrison and Prince and money making?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before him.
+      How satisfied and happy he looked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are a rotten crew,&rdquo; Jackson assured him, &ldquo;and I am taking a night
+      train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old man
+      who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to sail from Seattle,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and go everywhere and hunt
+      everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind of
+      thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there
+      until I die.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will go with you,&rdquo; said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at Detroit
+      and continued westward with his new acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous,
+      big-hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early
+      investment in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to his
+      lusty, primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion
+      hunts, elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of
+      Africa Sam took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the
+      beach smoking black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over and
+      that Sam was a fool to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life of
+      a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He went
+      on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern lakes,
+      canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat about clubs
+      and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and women of that
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on the
+      Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw her.
+      For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure as she
+      walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had come to
+      mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come face to face
+      with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train to the city
+      feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed after the
+      years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily and
+      almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from his
+      hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting with
+      Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant, got
+      into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode about town
+      laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to passers-by in
+      the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place at the edge of town,
+      where the party spent hours around a long table, drinking, and singing
+      songs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the girls sat on Sam&rsquo;s lap and put an arm about his neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me some money, rich man,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at her closely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that she
+      had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes,&rdquo; she said frankly,
+      &ldquo;but if Tim saw me here he would kill me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a
+      taxicab drove back to his hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in a
+      kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which he did
+      not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited, planned a
+      return to business which he did not execute, and month after month
+      continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon and begin
+      drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry and talkative,
+      calling men by their first names, slapping chance acquaintances on the
+      back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young men intent upon gain.
+      In the early summer he got in with a party of young men from New York and
+      with them spent months in sheer idle waste of time. Together they drove
+      high-powered automobiles on long trips, drank, quarrelled, and went on
+      board a yacht to carouse, alone or with women. At times Sam would leave
+      his companions and spend days riding through the country on fast trains,
+      sitting for hours in silence looking out of the window at the passing
+      country and wondering at his endurance of the life he led. For some months
+      he carried with him a young man whom he called a secretary and paid a
+      large salary for his ability to tell stories and sing clever songs, only
+      to discharge him suddenly for telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of
+      another tale told by the stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed&rsquo;s
+      hotel in the Illinois town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings,
+      Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless
+      way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right way
+      of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He lost his
+      native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for hours by
+      little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and talking
+      nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew
+      habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and
+      more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about
+      hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to
+      sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor&rsquo;s head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train
+      intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had
+      heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he
+      thought he would do something for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them my
+      money,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by setting
+      them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see an
+      attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days stayed
+      about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had picked
+      up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and
+      gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men
+      and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of
+      enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that
+      shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he
+      came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the
+      river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the
+      river,&rdquo; he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. &ldquo;Take
+      us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it
+      costs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he went
+      among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to
+      continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him on
+      the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sing louder,&rdquo; he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his
+      companions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to
+      perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the deck
+      before the shouting crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now dance!&rdquo; he growled, &ldquo;or I will throw you into the river.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked at
+      him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along the deck
+      or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take effect, a
+      queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction came to him
+      and he raised his hand for silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to see a woman who is a mother,&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;I want to see a
+      woman who has borne children.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the group
+      gathered about the dancer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have borne children&mdash;three of them,&rdquo; she said, laughing up into
+      his face. &ldquo;I can bear more of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair on
+      the deck. The crowd laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Belle is after his roll,&rdquo; whispered a short, fat man to his companion, a
+      tall woman with blue eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing songs,
+      went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman beside Sam
+      pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My children are there. They are getting supper now,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting
+      along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang a
+      song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam&rsquo;s companion kept time
+      with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain stood
+      looking up the river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Turn back,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am tired of this crew.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will go to my house,&rdquo; she said quietly, &ldquo;just you and me. I will show
+      you the kids.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the
+      distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had
+      grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small
+      groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell Sam
+      her story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I drove him crazy,&rdquo; she said, laughing quietly. &ldquo;He wanted me to stay at
+      home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me down
+      town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn&rsquo;t come he would go
+      away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn&rsquo;t a man. He would
+      do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and left the kids on
+      my hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in an
+      open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place,
+      eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but
+      grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will go to my house. I want to have you alone,&rdquo; said the woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They drove through street after street of workingmen&rsquo;s houses, where
+      children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their
+      bare legs flashing in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after them,
+      holding to the back of the carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up
+      and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of
+      the running boys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Run, you little devils,&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under the
+      lights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me a silver dollar,&rdquo; she said, turning to Sam, and when he had given
+      it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp. The two
+      boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps, striking
+      Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black crawling thing,
+      alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she crept forward and
+      dropped it down the neck of the driver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam&rsquo;s head
+      was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran back over
+      the years he had passed since breaking his word to Sue, and a scorn of all
+      effort burned in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;He comes to a
+      fine end in life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the
+      air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night
+      there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the
+      carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood climbed
+      through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half hope awoke
+      in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing, intoxicated
+      woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot through him. He
+      began thinking of what she had said before the laughing crowd on the
+      steamer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have borne three children and can bear more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain,
+      and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him. He
+      thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of life
+      unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command and
+      direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Else why am I here?&rdquo; he muttered, looking away from the vacant, laughing
+      face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver on the
+      seat in front. &ldquo;Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why went I about
+      seeking Truth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles
+      and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her
+      black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling
+      beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have
+      been,&rdquo; he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he
+      thought, was being tossed about by life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped. Through
+      the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before a bar
+      drinking foaming glasses of beer, the hanging lamps above their heads
+      throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell came
+      out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and
+      shouted. &ldquo;O Will, come out here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A man clad in a long white apron and with his shirt sleeves rolled to his
+      elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had
+      started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you run it?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The kids can take care of themselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got out
+      of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk skirting
+      a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a tangled mass of
+      bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and in the distance the
+      grey body of the river showed faint and far away. The undergrowth was so
+      thick that, looking down, one saw only the tops of the growth, with here
+      and there a grey outcrop of rocks that glistened in the moonlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the houses
+      facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily on Sam&rsquo;s
+      arm, her feet groping for the steps. They passed through a door and into a
+      long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the room went up
+      to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the end one looked
+      into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor and about a table,
+      under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three children. Sam looked at them
+      closely. His head reeled and he clutched at the knob of the door. A boy of
+      perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his face and on the backs of his hands
+      and with reddish-brown hair and brown eyes, was reading aloud. Beside him
+      a younger boy with black hair and black eyes, and with his knees doubled
+      up on the chair in front of him so that his chin rested on them, sat
+      listening. A tiny girl, pale and with yellow hair and dark circles under
+      her eyes, slept in another chair, her head hanging uncomfortably to one
+      side. She was, one would have said, seven, the black-haired boy ten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman; the
+      sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired boy
+      straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, Mother,&rdquo; he said heartily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the
+      dining-room and pulled aside the curtains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come here, Joe,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside,
+      supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he passed she
+      struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him reeling
+      into the dining-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you, Tom,&rdquo; she called to the black-haired boy. &ldquo;I told you kids to
+      wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten
+      and nothing done and you two reading books again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam
+      walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she
+      winced and twisted in his grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You come with me,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned heavily
+      on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the top of the stairway he stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We go in here,&rdquo; she said, pointing to a door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took her into the room. &ldquo;You get to sleep,&rdquo; he said, and going out
+      closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off
+      the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by the
+      table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back at
+      him self-consciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which of you two puts Mary to bed?&rdquo; he asked, and then, without waiting
+      for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. &ldquo;Let Tom do it,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;I will help you here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going
+      busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him
+      dry wiping towels. Sam&rsquo;s coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within Sam&rsquo;s
+      breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though the lash
+      of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old memories
+      began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood, his mother
+      at work among other people&rsquo;s soiled clothes, his father Windy coming home
+      drunk, and the chill in his mother&rsquo;s heart and in his own. There was
+      something men and women owed to childhood, not because it was childhood
+      but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any question of
+      fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house
+      there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam&rsquo;s spirit. The boy Joe went
+      quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves. Somewhere
+      on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The backs of the
+      hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and competent the
+      hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled, unshaken by life.
+      Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He had always wanted
+      quickness and firmness within his own body, the health of the body that is
+      a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an American and down deep
+      within himself was the moral fervor that is American and that had become
+      so strangely perverted in himself and others. As so often happened with
+      him, when he was deeply stirred, an army of vagrant thoughts ran through
+      his head. The thoughts had taken the place of the perpetual scheming and
+      planning of his days as a man of affairs, but as yet all his thinking had
+      brought him to nothing and had only left him more shaken and uncertain
+      then ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to
+      escape the shy silent presence of the boy. &ldquo;Has life quite gone from me?
+      Am I but a dead thing walking about?&rdquo; he asked himself. The presence of
+      the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown
+      tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad.
+      Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two boys
+      said good night to the strange man in their mother&rsquo;s house. Joe, the
+      bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook it
+      solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be around here to-morrow I think,&rdquo; Sam said huskily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boys were gone, into the silence of the house, and Sam walked up and
+      down in the little room. He was restless as though about to start on a new
+      journey and half unconsciously began running his hands over his body
+      wishing it strong and hard as when he tramped the road. As on the day when
+      he had walked out of the Chicago Club bound on his hunt for Truth, he let
+      his mind go so that it played freely over his past life, reviewing and
+      analysing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For hours he sat on the porch or walked up and down in the room where the
+      lamp still burned brightly. Again the smoke from his pipe tasted good on
+      his tongue and all the night air had a sweetness that brought back to him
+      the walk beside the bridle path in Jackson Park when Sue had given him
+      herself, and with herself a new impulse in life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was two o&rsquo;clock when he lay down upon a couch in the living-room and
+      blew out the light. He did not undress, but threw his shoes on the floor
+      and lay looking at a wide path of moonlight that came through the open
+      door. In the darkness it seemed that his mind worked more rapidly and that
+      the events and motives of his restless years went streaming past like
+      living things upon the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy with
+      sleep, ran through the upper part of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother! O Mother!&rdquo; called the sleepy voice, and Sam thought he could hear
+      the little body moving restlessly in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence followed. He sat upon the edge of the couch, waiting. It seemed to
+      him that he was coming to something; that his brain that had for hours
+      been working more and more rapidly was about to produce the thing for
+      which he waited. He felt as he had felt that night as he waited in the
+      corridor of the hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the morning the three children came down the stairs and finished
+      dressing in the long room, the little girl coming last, carrying her shoes
+      and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A cool
+      morning wind blew up from the river and through the open screened doors as
+      he and Joe cooked breakfast, and later as the four of them sat at the
+      table Sam tried to talk but did not make much progress. His tongue was
+      heavy and the children seemed looking at him with strange questioning
+      eyes. &ldquo;Why are you here?&rdquo; their eyes asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a week Sam stayed in the city, coming daily to the house. With the
+      children he talked a little, and in the evening, when the mother had gone
+      away, the little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the porch
+      outside and while the boys sat reading under the lamp inside she went to
+      sleep in his arms. Her body was warm and the breath came softly and
+      sweetly from between her lips. Sam looked down the bluffside and saw the
+      country and the river far below, sweet in the moonlight. Tears came into
+      his eyes. Was a new sweet purpose growing within him or were the tears but
+      evidence of self pity? He wondered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One night the black-haired woman again came home far gone in drink, and
+      again Sam led her up the stairs to see her fall muttering and babbling
+      upon the bed. Her companion, a little flashily dressed man with a beard,
+      had run off at the sight of Sam standing in the living-room under the
+      lamp. The two boys, to whom he had been reading, said nothing, looking
+      self-consciously at the book upon the table and occasionally out of the
+      corner of their eyes at their new friend. In a few minutes they too went
+      up the stairs, and as on that first night, they put out their hands
+      awkwardly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the night Sam again sat in the darkness outside or lay awake on
+      the couch. &ldquo;I will make a new try, adopt a new purpose in life now,&rdquo; he
+      said to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the children had gone to school the next morning, Sam took a car and
+      went into the city, going first to a bank to have a large draft cashed.
+      Then he spent many busy hours going from store to store and buying
+      clothes, caps, soft underwear, suit cases, dresses, night clothes, and
+      books. Last of all he bought a large dressed doll. All these things he had
+      sent to his room at the hotel, leaving a man there to pack the trunks and
+      suit cases, and get them to the station. A large, motherly-looking woman,
+      an employé of the hotel, who passed through the hall, offered to help with
+      the packing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After another visit or two Sam got back upon the car and went again to the
+      house. In his pockets he had several thousands of dollars in large bills.
+      He had remembered the power of cash in deals he had made in the past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will see what it will do here,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the house Sam found the black-haired woman lying on a couch in the
+      living-room. As he came in at the door she arose unsteadily and looked at
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a bottle in the cupboard in the kitchen,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Get me a
+      drink. Why do you hang about here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with
+      her by putting the bottle to his lips and throwing back his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was your husband like?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who? Jack?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Oh, he was all right. He was stuck on me. He stood
+      for anything until I brought men home here. Then he got crazy and went
+      away.&rdquo; She looked at Sam and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t care much for him,&rdquo; she added. &ldquo;He couldn&rsquo;t make money enough
+      for a live woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam began talking of the saloon she intended buying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The children will be a bother, eh?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have an offer for the house,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I wish I didn&rsquo;t have the kids.
+      They are a nuisance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been figuring that out,&rdquo; Sam told her. &ldquo;I know a woman in the East
+      who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I should like
+      to do something to help you. I might take them to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away,&rdquo; she laughed, and took
+      another drink from the bottle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown attorney.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get a neighbour in here to witness this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The woman will want
+      things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and
+      puts it on her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him suspiciously. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the graft? Who gets stuck for the
+      fares down east?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a
+      tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sign here,&rdquo; he said, putting the paper before her. &ldquo;Here is your
+      neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at
+      Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle
+      lay down again on the couch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed,&rdquo; she
+      declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but at the
+      moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take an
+      advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in life,
+      for purpose to come into his own life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at the
+      brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an
+      automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children
+      accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found
+      the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit
+      cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an
+      envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked
+      up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride of
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At two o&rsquo;clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of the
+      boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York flyer&mdash;bound
+      for Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money, that
+      he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does not mean
+      much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy Americans than is
+      commonly believed. Something has happened to him that has happened to the
+      others also, to how many of the others? Men of courage, with strong bodies
+      and quick brains, men who have come of a strong race, have taken up what
+      they had thought to be the banner of life and carried it forward. Growing
+      weary they have stopped in a road that climbs a long hill and have leaned
+      the banner against a tree. Tight brains have loosened a little. Strong
+      convictions have become weak. Old gods are dying.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;It is only when you are torn from your mooring and
+    drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come
+    near to you.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with
+      determination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is inscribed on it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have
+      believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves
+      Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been unknown
+      among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life and
+      courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads had
+      to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What in Europe
+      has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the generations we
+      must build now, in a lifetime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In our father&rsquo;s day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky,
+      and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in our fathers and
+      mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land. When the land was
+      conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in our American souls
+      the wolves still howl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three
+      children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws of
+      failure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still there.
+      It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New England
+      roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it looked down at
+      him from the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept. Perhaps
+      his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it began then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was a
+      house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam&rsquo;s breast
+      there was a feeling of something alive, growing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in
+      Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by
+      raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night,
+      coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children&mdash;a
+      little inclined toward tears and homesickness&mdash;she was flustered and
+      nervous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate to
+      the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe and
+      Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come out at the
+      front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little frightened. Her
+      hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam thought her figure
+      almost boyish in its slenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask
+      many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question she
+      did ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?&rdquo; she
+      asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the
+      children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a help.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep,&rdquo; he said,
+      as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with him
+      three strange children were an everyday affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the
+      house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought
+      together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other
+      and little Mary put her arms about Sam&rsquo;s neck and hid her face on his
+      shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue&rsquo;s
+      arms. &ldquo;She will be your mother now,&rdquo; he said defiantly, not looking at
+      Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and
+      very nobly by Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted on
+      that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come into
+      her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly romantic
+      act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening, both Sam and
+      the children had been installed in the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions
+      regarding food for the children. &ldquo;They will want bread and milk, and beds
+      must be found for them,&rdquo; she said, and then, although her mind was still
+      filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam&rsquo;s children by some
+      other woman, she took her plunge. &ldquo;This is Mr. McPherson, my husband, and
+      these are our three children,&rdquo; she announced to the puzzled and smiling
+      servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden. In
+      the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A
+      little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more.
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t bring lamps, a candle will do,&rdquo; Sue said, and she went to stand
+      near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point of
+      breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive sense
+      of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children feel at
+      home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys. &ldquo;There is a
+      barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you everything,&rdquo;
+       she said, smiling at them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue&rsquo;s house and a road
+      that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and the
+      Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In the feeble
+      light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick branches
+      overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into the
+      darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before the
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling for
+      possession of his person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring always
+      to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way, trampled
+      people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped forward, the man
+      of achievement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then there was another personality, a quite different being
+      altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a
+      timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or
+      walked before men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive thing
+      within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him out of his
+      place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many times it had
+      tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against
+      it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into
+      darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept whispering to himself. Perhaps now the test of his life had come.
+      There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. A basis for love
+      and understanding might be found with her. Later the impulse could be
+      carried on and into the lives of the children he had found and brought to
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life, kneeling
+      before the intricate wonder of life, came to him, but he was again afraid.
+      When he saw Sue&rsquo;s figure, dressed in white, a dim, pale, flashing thing,
+      coming down steps toward him, he wanted to run away, to hide himself in
+      the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because
+      she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human
+      perplexities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive within
+      him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her. &ldquo;Nothing but
+      boldness will answer now,&rdquo; he kept saying to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to
+      tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he came
+      to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path and
+      stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically. &ldquo;I
+      have taken them and you, of course,&rdquo; she said, after he had stepped to her
+      and had put his arm about her waist. &ldquo;My life alone hasn&rsquo;t turned out to
+      be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them and you, in
+      the house there. The two years you have been gone have seemed like an age.
+      What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought they must be your own
+      children by some other woman, some woman you had found to take my place.
+      It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two must be nearly fourteen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue&rsquo;s command,
+      found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped and
+      excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue&rsquo;s figure going
+      through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room. Presently
+      she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A place was being
+      prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which he was to live
+      what was left of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure of
+      the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped down
+      over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more intense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house darkly
+      seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman, Sue,
+      ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives together.
+      Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three children who must
+      begin life as he had once done, who must listen to his voice, the voice of
+      Sue and all the other voices they would hear speaking words in the world.
+      They would grow up and thrust out into a world of people as he had done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To what end?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an end. Sam believed that stoutly. &ldquo;To shift the load to the
+      shoulders of children is cowardice,&rdquo; he whispered to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An almost overpowering desire to turn and run away from the house, from
+      Sue who had so generously received him and from the three new lives into
+      which he had thrust himself and in which in the future he would have to be
+      concerned, took hold of him. His body shook with the strength of it, but
+      he stood still under the trees. &ldquo;I cannot run away from life. I must face
+      it. I must begin to try to understand these other lives, to love,&rdquo; he told
+      himself. The buried inner thing in him thrust itself up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How still the night had become. In the tree beneath which he stood a bird
+      moved on some slender branch and there was a faint rustling of leaves. The
+      darkness before and behind was a wall through which he must in some way
+      manage to thrust himself into the light. With his hand before him, as
+      though trying to push aside some dark blinding mass, he moved out of the
+      grove and thus moving stumbled up the steps and into the house.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE END
+    </h3>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg&rsquo;s Windy McPherson&rsquo;s Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+
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+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windy McPherson's Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Windy McPherson's Son
+
+Author: Sherwood Anderson
+
+
+Release Date: February, 2005  [EBook #7443]
+This file was first posted on April 30, 2003
+Last Updated: May 31, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anne Soulard, Eric Eldred, John R. Bilderback,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON
+
+By Sherwood Anderson
+
+
+
+To The Living Men And Women Of My Own Middle Western Home Town This Book
+Is Dedicated
+
+
+
+
+WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam
+McPherson, a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black
+eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he
+walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping
+town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked
+cautiously, lifting his bare feet and putting them down with extreme
+deliberateness on the hot, dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried
+a bundle of newspapers. A long black cigar was in his hand.
+
+In front of the station he stopped; and Jerry Donlin, the baggage-man,
+seeing the cigar in his hand, laughed, and slowly drew the side of his
+face up into a laboured wink.
+
+"What is the game to-night, Sam?" he asked.
+
+Sam stepped to the baggage-room door, handed him the cigar, and
+began giving directions, pointing into the baggage-room, intent and
+business-like in the face of the Irishman's laughter. Then, turning, he
+walked across the station platform to the main street of the town, his
+eyes bent on the ends of his fingers on which he was making computations
+with his thumb. Jerry looked after him, grinning so that his red gums
+made a splash of colour on his bearded face. A gleam of paternal pride
+lit his eyes and he shook his head and muttered admiringly. Then,
+lighting the cigar, he went down the platform to where a wrapped
+bundle of newspapers lay against the building, under the window of the
+telegraph office, and taking it in his arm disappeared, still grinning,
+into the baggage-room.
+
+Sam McPherson walked down Main Street, past the shoe store, the bakery,
+and the candy store kept by Penny Hughes, toward a group lounging at
+the front of Geiger's drug store. Before the door of the shoe store he
+paused a moment, and taking a small note-book from his pocket ran his
+finger down the pages, then shaking his head continued on his way, again
+absorbed in doing sums on his fingers.
+
+Suddenly, from among the men by the drug store, a roaring song broke the
+evening quiet of the street, and a voice, huge and guttural, brought a
+smile to the boy's lips:
+
+  "He washed the windows and he swept the floor,
+  And he polished up the handle of the big front door.
+  He polished that handle so carefullee,
+  That now he's the ruler of the queen's navee."
+
+The singer, a short man with grotesquely wide shoulders, wore a long
+flowing moustache, and a black coat, covered with dust, that reached to
+his knees. He held a smoking briar pipe in his hand, and with it beat
+time for a row of men sitting on a long stone under the store window and
+pounding on the sidewalk with their heels to make a chorus for the song.
+Sam's smile broadened into a grin as he looked at the singer, Freedom
+Smith, a buyer of butter and eggs, and past him at John Telfer, the
+orator, the dandy, the only man in town, except Mike McCarthy, who kept
+his trousers creased. Among all the men of Caxton, Sam most admired
+John Telfer and in his admiration had struck upon the town's high light.
+Telfer loved good clothes and wore them with an air, and never allowed
+Caxton to see him shabbily or indifferently dressed, laughingly
+declaring that it was his mission in life to give tone to the town.
+
+John Telfer had a small income left him by his father, once a banker
+in the town, and in his youth he had gone to New York to study art, and
+later to Paris; but lacking ability or industry to get on had come back
+to Caxton where he had married Eleanor Millis, a prosperous milliner.
+They were the most successful married pair in Caxton, and after years
+of life together they were still in love; were never indifferent to
+each other, and never quarrelled; Telfer treated his wife with as much
+consideration and respect as though she were a sweetheart, or a guest in
+his house, and she, unlike most of the wives in Caxton, never ventured
+to question his goings and comings, but left him free to live his own
+life in his own way while she attended to the millinery business.
+
+At the age of forty-five John Telfer was a tall, slender, fine looking
+man, with black hair and a little black pointed beard, and with
+something lazy and care-free in his every movement and impulse. Dressed
+in white flannels, with white shoes, a jaunty cap upon his head,
+eyeglasses hanging from a gold chain, and a cane lightly swinging from
+his hand, he made a figure that might have passed unnoticed on the
+promenade before some fashionable summer hotel, but that seemed a breach
+of the laws of nature when seen on the streets of a corn-shipping town
+in Iowa. And Telfer was aware of the extraordinary figure he cut; it was
+a part of his programme of life. Now as Sam approached he laid a hand on
+Freedom Smith's shoulder to check the song, and, with his eyes twinkling
+with good-humour, began thrusting with his cane at the boy's feet.
+
+"He will never be ruler of the queen's navee," he declared, laughing and
+following the dancing boy about in a wide circle. "He is a little mole
+that works underground intent upon worms. The trick he has of tilting up
+his nose is only his way of smelling out stray pennies. I have it from
+Banker Walker that he brings a basket of them into the bank every day.
+One of these days he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket."
+
+Circling about on the stone sidewalk and dancing to escape the flying
+cane, Sam dodged under the arm of Valmore, a huge old blacksmith with
+shaggy clumps of hair on the back of his hands, and sought refuge
+between him and Freedom Smith. The blacksmith's hand stole out and lay
+upon the boy's shoulder. Telfer, his legs spread apart and the cane
+hooked upon his arm, began rolling a cigarette; Geiger, a yellow skinned
+man with fat cheeks and with hands clasped over his round paunch, smoked
+a black cigar, and as he sent each puff into the air, grunted forth his
+satisfaction with life. He was wishing that Telfer, Freedom Smith,
+and Valmore, instead of moving on to their nightly nest at the back of
+Wildman's grocery, would come into his place for the evening. He
+thought he would like to have the three of them there night after night
+discussing the doings of the world.
+
+Quiet once more settled down upon the sleepy street. Over Sam's
+shoulder, Valmore and Freedom Smith talked of the coming corn crop and
+the growth and prosperity of the country.
+
+"Times are getting better about here, but the wild things are almost
+gone," said Freedom, who in the winter bought hides and pelts.
+
+The men sitting on the stone beneath the window watched with idle
+interest Telfer's labours with paper and tobacco. "Young Henry Kerns
+has got married," observed one of them, striving to make talk. "He
+has married a girl from over Parkertown way. She gives lessons in
+painting--china painting--kind of an artist, you know."
+
+An ejaculation of disgust broke from Telfer: his fingers trembled and
+the tobacco that was to have been the foundation of his evening smoke
+rained on the sidewalk.
+
+"An artist!" he exclaimed, his voice tense with excitement. "Who said
+artist? Who called her that?" He glared fiercely about. "Let us have an
+end to this blatant misuse of fine old words. To say of one that he is
+an artist is to touch the peak of praise."
+
+Throwing his cigarette paper after the scattered tobacco he thrust
+one hand into his trouser pocket. With the other he held the cane,
+emphasising his points by ringing taps upon the pavement. Geiger, taking
+the cigar between his fingers, listened with open mouth to the outburst
+that followed. Valmore and Freedom Smith dropped their conversation and
+with broad smiles upon their faces gave attention, and Sam McPherson,
+his eyes round with wonder and admiration, felt again the thrill that
+always ran through him under the drum beats of Telfer's eloquence.
+
+"An artist is one who hungers and thirsts after perfection, not one
+who dabs flowers upon plates to choke the gullets of diners," declared
+Telfer, setting himself for one of the long speeches with which he loved
+to astonish the men of Caxton, and glaring down at those seated upon the
+stone. "It is the artist who, among all men, has the divine audacity.
+Does he not hurl himself into a battle in which is engaged against him
+all of the accumulative genius of the world?"
+
+Pausing, he looked about for an opponent upon whom he might pour the
+flood of his eloquence, but on all sides smiles greeted him. Undaunted,
+he rushed again to the charge.
+
+"A business man--what is he?" he demanded. "He succeeds by outwitting
+the little minds with which he comes in contact. A scientist is of
+more account--he pits his brains against the dull unresponsiveness of
+inanimate matter and a hundredweight of black iron he makes do the work
+of a hundred housewives. But an artist tests his brains against the
+greatest brains of all times; he stands upon the peak of life and hurls
+himself against the world. A girl from Parkertown who paints flowers
+upon dishes to be called an artist--ugh! Let me spew forth the thought!
+Let me cleanse my mouth! A man should have a prayer upon his lips who
+utters the word artist!"
+
+"Well, we can't all be artists and the woman can paint flowers upon
+dishes for all I care," spoke up Valmore, laughing good naturedly. "We
+can't all paint pictures and write books."
+
+"We do not want to be artists--we do not dare to be," shouted Telfer,
+whirling and shaking his cane at Valmore. "You have a misunderstanding
+of the word."
+
+He straightened his shoulders and threw out his chest and the boy
+standing beside the blacksmith threw up his chin, unconsciously
+imitating the swagger of the man.
+
+"I do not paint pictures; I do not write books; yet am I an artist,"
+declared Telfer, proudly. "I am an artist practising the most difficult
+of all arts--the art of living. Here in this western village I stand
+and fling my challenge to the world. 'On the lip of not the greatest of
+you,' I cry, 'has life been more sweet.'"
+
+He turned from Valmore to the men upon the stone.
+
+"Make a study of my life," he commanded. "It will be a revelation to
+you. With a smile I greet the morning; I swagger in the noontime; and
+in the evening, like Socrates of old, I gather a little group of you
+benighted villagers about me and toss wisdom into your teeth, striving
+to teach you judgment in the use of great words."
+
+"You talk an almighty lot about yourself, John," grumbled Freedom Smith,
+taking his pipe from his mouth.
+
+"The subject is complex, it is varied, it is full of charm," Telfer
+answered, laughing.
+
+Taking a fresh supply of tobacco and paper from his pocket, he rolled
+and lighted a cigarette. His fingers no longer trembled. Flourishing his
+cane he threw back his head and blew smoke into the air. He thought
+that in spite of the roar of laughter that had greeted Freedom Smith's
+comment, he had vindicated the honour of art and the thought made him
+happy.
+
+To the newsboy, who had been leaning against the storefront lost in
+admiration, it seemed that he had caught in Telfer's talk an echo of the
+kind of talk that must go on among men in the big outside world. Had
+not this Telfer travelled far? Had he not lived in New York and Paris?
+Without understanding the sense of what had been said, Sam felt that it
+must be something big and conclusive. When from the distance there came
+the shriek of a locomotive, he stood unmoved, trying to comprehend the
+meaning of Telfer's outburst over the lounger's simple statement.
+
+"There's the seven forty-five," cried Telfer, sharply. "Is the war
+between you and Fatty at an end? Are we going to lose our evening's
+diversion? Has Fatty bluffed you out or are you growing rich and lazy
+like Papa Geiger here?"
+
+Springing from his place beside the blacksmith and grasping the bundle
+of newspapers, Sam ran down the street, Telfer, Valmore, Freedom Smith
+and the loungers following more slowly.
+
+When the evening train from Des Moines stopped at Caxton, a blue-coated
+train news merchant leaped hurriedly to the platform and began looking
+anxiously about.
+
+"Hurry, Fatty," rang out Freedom Smith's huge voice, "Sam's already half
+through one car."
+
+The young man called "Fatty" ran up and down the station platform.
+"Where is that bundle of Omaha papers, you Irish loafer?" he shouted,
+shaking his fist at Jerry Donlin who stood upon a truck at the front of
+the train, up-ending trunks into the baggage car.
+
+Jerry paused with a trunk dangling in mid-air. "In the baggage-room, of
+course. Hurry, man. Do you want the kid to work the whole train?"
+
+An air of something impending hung over the idlers upon the platform,
+the train crew, and even the travelling men who began climbing off the
+train. The engineer thrust his head out of the cab; the conductor, a
+dignified looking man with a grey moustache, threw back his head and
+shook with mirth; a young man with a suit-case in his hand and a long
+pipe in his mouth ran to the door of the baggage-room, calling, "Hurry!
+Hurry, Fatty! The kid is working the entire train. You won't be able to
+sell a paper."
+
+The fat young man ran from the baggage-room to the platform and shouted
+again to Jerry Donlin, who was now slowly pushing the empty truck along
+the platform. From the train came a clear voice calling, "Latest Omaha
+papers! Have your change ready! Fatty, the train newsboy, has fallen
+down a well! Have your change ready, gentlemen!"
+
+Jerry Donlin, followed by Fatty, again disappeared from sight. The
+conductor, waving his hand, jumped upon the steps of the train. The
+engineer pulled in his head and the train began to move.
+
+The fat young man emerged from the baggage-room, swearing revenge upon
+the head of Jerry Donlin. "There was no need to put it under a mail
+sack!" he shouted, shaking his fist. "I'll be even with you for this."
+
+Followed by the shouts of the travelling men and the laughter of the
+idlers upon the platform he climbed upon the moving train and began
+running from car to car. Off the last car dropped Sam McPherson, a smile
+upon his lips, the bundle of newspapers gone, his pocket jingling with
+coins. The evening's entertainment for the town of Caxton was at an end.
+
+John Telfer, standing by the side of Valmore, waved his cane in the air
+and began talking.
+
+"Beat him again, by Gad!" he exclaimed. "Bully for Sam! Who says the
+spirit of the old buccaneers is dead? That boy didn't understand what I
+said about art, but he is an artist just the same!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Windy McPherson, the father of the Caxton newsboy, Sam McPherson, had
+been war touched. The civilian clothes that he wore caused an itching
+of the skin. He could not forget that he had once been a sergeant in a
+regiment of infantry and had commanded a company through a battle fought
+in ditches along a Virginia country road. He chafed under the fact of
+his present obscure position in life. Had he been able to replace his
+regimentals with the robes of a judge, the felt hat of a statesman, or
+even with the night stick of a village marshal life might have retained
+something of its sweetness, but to have ended by becoming an obscure
+housepainter in a village that lived by raising corn and by feeding that
+corn to red steers--ugh!--the thought made him shudder. He looked with
+envy at the blue coat and the brass buttons of the railroad agent; he
+tried vainly to get into the Caxton Cornet Band; he got drunk to forget
+his humiliation and in the end he fell to loud boasting and to the
+nursing of a belief within himself that in truth not Lincoln nor Grant
+but he himself had thrown the winning die in the great struggle. In his
+cups he said as much and the Caxton corn grower, punching his neighbour
+in the ribs, shook with delight over the statement.
+
+When Sam was a twelve year old, barefooted boy upon the streets a kind
+of backwash of the wave of glory that had swept over Windy McPherson in
+the days of '61 lapped upon the shores of the Iowa village. That strange
+manifestation called the A. P. A. movement brought the old soldier to
+a position of prominence in the community. He founded a local branch
+of the organisation; he marched at the head of a procession through the
+streets; he stood on a corner and pointing a trembling forefinger
+to where the flag on the schoolhouse waved beside the cross of Rome,
+shouted hoarsely, "See, the cross rears itself above the flag! We shall
+end by being murdered in our beds!"
+
+But although some of the hard-headed, money-making men of Caxton joined
+the movement started by the boasting old soldier and although for the
+moment they vied with him in stealthy creepings through the streets to
+secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands the movement
+subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its leader more
+desolate.
+
+In the little house at the end of the street by the shores of Squirrel
+Creek, Sam and his sister Kate regarded their father's warlike
+pretensions with scorn. "The butter is low, father's army leg will ache
+to-night," they whispered to each other across the kitchen table.
+
+Following her mother's example, Kate, a tall slender girl of sixteen
+and already a bread winner with a clerkship in Winney's drygoods store,
+remained silent under Windy's boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate
+them, did not always succeed. There was now and then a rebellious
+muttering that should have warned Windy. It had once burst into an open
+quarrel in which the victor of a hundred battles withdrew defeated from
+the field. Windy, half-drunk, had taken an old account book from a shelf
+in the kitchen, a relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when he had
+first come to Caxton, and had begun reading to the little family a list
+of names of men who, he claimed, had been the cause of his ruin.
+
+"There is Tom Newman, now," he exclaimed excitedly. "Owns a hundred
+acres of good corn-growing land and won't pay for the harness on the
+backs of his horses or for the ploughs in his barn. The receipt he has
+from me is forged. I could put him in prison if I chose. To beat an old
+soldier!--to beat one of the boys of '61!--it is shameful!"
+
+"I have heard of what you owed and what men owed you; you had none the
+worst of it," Sam protested coldly, while Kate held her breath and Jane
+McPherson, at work over the ironing board in the corner, half turned and
+looked silently at the man and the boy, the slightly increased pallor of
+her long face the only sign that she had heard.
+
+Windy had not pressed the quarrel. Standing for a moment in the middle
+of the kitchen, holding the book in his hand, he looked from the pale
+silent mother by the ironing board to the son now standing and staring
+at him, and, throwing the book upon the table with a bang, fled the
+house. "You don't understand," he had cried, "you don't understand the
+heart of a soldier."
+
+In a way the man was right. The two children did not understand the
+blustering, pretending, inefficient old man. Having moved shoulder to
+shoulder with grim, silent men to the consummation of great deeds Windy
+could not get the flavour of those days out of his outlook upon life.
+Walking half drunk in the darkness along the sidewalks of Caxton on
+the evening of the quarrel the man became inspired. He threw back his
+shoulders and walked with martial tread; he drew an imaginary sword from
+its scabbard and waved it aloft; stopping, he aimed carefully at a body
+of imaginary men who advanced yelling toward him across a wheatfield; he
+felt that life in making him a housepainter in a farming village in Iowa
+and in giving him an unappreciative son had been cruelly unfair; he wept
+at the injustice of it.
+
+The American Civil War was a thing so passionate, so inflaming, so vast,
+so absorbing, it so touched to the quick the men and women of those
+pregnant days that but a faint echo of it has been able to penetrate
+down to our days and to our minds; no real sense of it has as yet crept
+into the pages of a printed book; it yet wants its Thomas Carlyle; and
+in the end we are put to the need of listening to old fellows boasting
+on our village streets to get upon our cheeks the living breath of it.
+For four years the men of American cities, villages and farms walked
+across the smoking embers of a burning land, advancing and receding as
+the flame of that universal, passionate, death-spitting thing swept down
+upon them or receded toward the smoking sky-line. Is it so strange that
+they could not come home and begin again peacefully painting houses or
+mending broken shoes? A something in them cried out. It sent them to
+bluster and boast upon the street corners. When people passing continued
+to think only of their brick laying and of their shovelling of corn
+into cars, when the sons of these war gods walking home at evening and
+hearing the vain boastings of the fathers began to doubt even the facts
+of the great struggle, a something snapped in their brains and they fell
+to chattering and shouting their vain boastings to all as they looked
+hungrily about for believing eyes.
+
+When our own Thomas Carlyle comes to write of our Civil War he will make
+much of our Windy McPhersons. He will see something big and pathetic in
+their hungry search for auditors and in their endless war talk. He
+will go filled with eager curiosity into little G. A. R. halls in the
+villages and think of the men who coming there night after night, year
+after year, told and re-told endlessly, monotonously, their story of
+battle.
+
+Let us hope that in his fervour for the old fellows he will not fail to
+treat tenderly the families of those veteran talkers; the families that
+with their breakfasts and their dinners, by the fire at evening, through
+fast day and feast day, at weddings and at funerals got again and again
+endlessly, everlastingly this flow of war words. Let him reflect that
+peaceful men in corn-growing counties do not by choice sleep among the
+dogs of war nor wash their linen in the blood of their country's foe.
+Let him, in his sympathy with the talkers, remember with kindness the
+heroism of the listeners.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On a summer day Sam McPherson sat on a box before Wildman's grocery lost
+in thought. In his hand he held the little yellow account book and in
+this he buried himself, striving to wipe from his consciousness a scene
+being enacted before his eyes upon the street.
+
+The realisation of the fact that his father was a confirmed liar and
+braggart had for years cast a shadow over his days and the shadow had
+been made blacker by the fact that in a land where the least fortunate
+can laugh in the face of want he had more than once stood face to face
+with poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation was
+money in the bank and with all the ardour of his boy's heart he strove
+to realise that answer. He wanted to be a money-maker and the totals at
+the foot of the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones
+that marked the progress he had already made. They told him that the
+daily struggles with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton's streets on
+bleak winter evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when crowds
+filled the stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he worked
+among them tirelessly and persistently were not without fruit.
+
+Suddenly, above the murmur of men's voices on the street, his father's
+voice rose loud and insistent. A block further down the street, leaning
+against the door of Hunter's jewelry store, Windy talked at the top of
+his lungs, pumping his arms up and down with the air of a man making a
+stump speech.
+
+"He is making a fool of himself," thought Sam, and returned to his
+bankbook, striving in the contemplation of the totals at the foot of the
+pages to shake off the dull anger that had begun to burn in his brain.
+Glancing up again, he saw that Joe Wildman, son of the grocer and a
+boy of his own age, had joined the group of men laughing and jeering at
+Windy. The shadow on Sam's face grew heavier.
+
+Sam had been at Joe Wildman's house; he knew the air of plenty and of
+comfort that hung over it; the table piled high with meat and potatoes;
+the group of children laughing and eating to the edge of gluttony; the
+quiet, gentle father who amid the clamour and the noise did not raise
+his voice, and the well-dressed, bustling, rosy-cheeked mother. As a
+contrast to this scene he began to call up in his mind a picture of
+life in his own home, getting a kind of perverted pleasure out of his
+dissatisfaction with it. He saw the boasting, incompetent father telling
+his endless tales of the Civil War and complaining of his wounds; the
+tall, stoop-shouldered, silent mother with the deep lines in her long
+face, everlastingly at work over her washtub among the soiled clothes;
+the silent, hurriedly-eaten meals snatched from the kitchen table; and
+the long winter days when ice formed upon his mother's skirts and
+Windy idled about town while the little family subsisted upon bowls of
+cornmeal mush everlastingly repeated.
+
+Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half gone
+in drink, and knew that he was boasting of his part in the Civil War.
+"He is either doing that or telling of his aristocratic family or lying
+about his birthplace," he thought resentfully, and unable any longer to
+endure the sight of what seemed to him his own degradation, he got up
+and went into the grocery where a group of Caxton citizens stood talking
+to Wildman of a meeting to be held that morning at the town hall.
+
+Caxton was to have a Fourth of July celebration. The idea, born in the
+heads of the few, had been taken up by the many. Rumours of it had run
+through the streets late in May. It had been talked of in Geiger's drug
+store, at the back of Wildman's grocery, and in the street before the
+New Leland House. John Telfer, the town's one man of leisure, had
+for weeks been going from place to place discussing the details with
+prominent men. Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall over
+Geiger's drug store and to a man the citizens of Caxton had turned out
+for the meeting. The housepainter had come down off his ladder, the
+clerks were locking the doors of the stores, men went along the streets
+in groups bound for the hall. As they went they shouted to each other.
+"The old town has woke up," they called.
+
+On a corner by Hunter's jewelry store Windy McPherson leaned against a
+building and harangued the passing crowd.
+
+"Let the old flag wave," he shouted excitedly, "let the men of Caxton
+show the true blue and rally to the old standards."
+
+"That's right, Windy, expostulate with them," shouted a wit, and a roar
+of laughter drowned Windy's reply.
+
+Sam McPherson also went to the meeting in the hall. He came out of the
+grocery store with Wildman and went along the street looking at the
+sidewalk and trying not to see the drunken man talking in front of the
+jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up
+and down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the
+town's life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned.
+He squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window
+ledge where he could watch the men come in and find seats.
+
+As Caxton's one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a
+living and a kind of standing in the town's life. To be a newsboy or a
+bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in
+the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great
+men and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day
+likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town owe to
+future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the men of Caxton
+and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the window ledge of the
+hall while the other boys of the town waited on the sidewalk below.
+
+John Telfer was chairman of the mass meeting. He was always chairman of
+public meetings in Caxton. The industrious silent men of position in
+the town envied his easy, bantering style of public address, while
+pretending to treat it with scorn. "He talks too much," they said,
+making a virtue of their own inability with apt and clever words.
+
+Telfer did not wait to be appointed chairman of the meeting, but went
+forward, climbed the little raised platform at the end of the hall,
+and usurped the chairmanship. He walked up and down on the platform
+bantering with the crowd, answering gibes, calling to well-known men,
+getting and giving keen satisfaction with his talent. When the hall was
+filled with men he called the meeting to order, appointed committees and
+launched into a harangue. He told of plans made to advertise the big
+day in other towns and to get low railroad rates arranged for excursion
+parties. The programme, he said, included a musical carnival with brass
+bands from other towns, a sham battle by the military company at the
+fairgrounds, horse races, speeches from the steps of the town hall,
+and fireworks in the evening. "We'll show them a live town here," he
+declared, walking up and down the platform and swinging his cane, while
+the crowd applauded and shouted its approval.
+
+When a call came for voluntary subscriptions to pay for the fun, the
+audience quieted down. One or two men got up and started to go out,
+grumbling that it was a waste of money. The fate of the celebration was
+on the knees of the gods.
+
+Telfer arose to the occasion. He called out the names of the departing,
+and made jests at their expense so that they dropped back into their
+chairs unable to face the roaring laughter of the crowd, and shouted
+to a man at the back of the hall to close and bolt the door. Men began
+getting up in various parts of the hall and calling out sums, Telfer
+repeating the name and the amount in a loud voice to young Tom Jedrow,
+clerk in the bank, who wrote them down in a book. When the amount
+subscribed did not meet with his approval, he protested and the crowd
+backing him up forced the increase he demanded. When a man did not rise,
+he shouted at him and the man answered back an amount.
+
+Suddenly in the hall a diversion arose. Windy McPherson emerged from the
+crowd at the back of the hall and walked down the centre aisle to the
+platform. He walked unsteadily straightening his shoulders and thrusting
+out his chin. When he got to the front of the hall he took a roll of
+bills from his pocket and threw it on the platform at the chairman's
+feet. "From one of the boys of '61," he announced in a loud voice.
+
+The crowd shouted and clapped its hands with delight as Telfer picked
+up the bills and ran his finger over them. "Seventeen dollars from our
+hero, the mighty McPherson," he shouted while the bank clerk wrote the
+name and the amount in the book and the crowd continued to make merry
+over the title given the drunken soldier by the chairman.
+
+The boy on the window ledge slipped to the floor and stood with burning
+cheeks behind the mass of men. He knew that at home his mother was
+doing a family washing for Lesley, the shoe merchant, who had given five
+dollars to the Fourth-of-July fund, and the resentment he had felt on
+seeing his father talking to the crowd before the jewelry store blazed
+up anew.
+
+After the taking of subscriptions, men in various parts of the hall
+began making suggestions for added features for the great day. To some
+of the speakers the crowd listened respectfully, at others they
+hooted. An old man with a grey beard told a long rambling story of a
+Fourth-of-July celebration of his boyhood. When voices interrupted he
+protested and shook his fist in the air, pale with indignation.
+
+"Oh, sit down, old daddy," shouted Freedom Smith and a murmur of
+applause greeted this sensible suggestion.
+
+Another man got up and began to talk. He had an idea. "We will have," he
+said, "a bugler mounted on a white horse who will ride through the town
+at dawn blowing the reveille. At midnight he will stand on the steps of
+the town hall and blow taps to end the day."
+
+The crowd applauded. The idea had caught their fancy and had instantly
+taken a place in their minds as one of the real events of the day.
+
+Again Windy McPherson emerged from the crowd at the back of the hall.
+Raising his hand for silence he told the crowd that he was a bugler,
+that he had been a regimental bugler for two years during the Civil War.
+He said that he would gladly volunteer for the place.
+
+The crowd shouted and John Telfer waved his hand. "The white horse for
+you, McPherson," he said.
+
+Sam McPherson wriggled along the wall and out at the now unbolted door.
+He was filled with astonishment at his father's folly, and was still
+more astonished at the folly of these other men in accepting his
+statement and handing over the important place for the big day. He knew
+that his father must have had some part in the war as he was a member of
+the G. A. R., but he had no faith at all in the stories he had heard
+him relate of his experiences in the war. Sometimes he caught himself
+wondering if there ever had been such a war and thought that it must be
+a lie like everything else in the life of Windy McPherson. For years he
+had wondered why some sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did
+not rise, and in a matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing
+as the Civil War had ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in
+the minds of pompous old men demanding unearned glory of their fellows.
+Now hurrying along the street with burning cheeks, he decided that after
+all there must have been such a war. He had had the same feeling about
+birthplaces and there could be no doubt that people were born. He
+had heard his father claim as his birthplace Kentucky, Texas, North
+Carolina, Louisiana and Scotland. The thing had left a kind of defect in
+his mind. To the end of his life when he heard a man tell the place of
+his birth he looked up suspiciously, and a shadow of doubt crossed his
+mind.
+
+From the mass meeting Sam went home to his mother and presented the case
+bluntly. "The thing will have to be stopped," he declared, standing
+with blazing eyes before her washtub. "It is too public. He can't blow
+a bugle; I know he can't. The whole town will have another laugh at our
+expense."
+
+Jane McPherson listened in silence to the boy's outburst, then, turning,
+went back to rubbing clothes, avoiding his eyes.
+
+With his hands thrust into his trousers pocket Sam stared sullenly at
+the ground. A sense of justice told him not to press the matter, but as
+he walked away from the washtub and out at the kitchen door, he hoped
+there would be plain talk of the matter at supper time. "The old fool!"
+he protested, addressing the empty street. "He is going to make a show
+of himself again."
+
+When Windy McPherson came home that evening, something in the eyes of
+the silent wife, and the sullen face of the boy, startled him. He passed
+over lightly his wife's silence but looked closely at his son. He felt
+that he faced a crisis. In the emergency he was magnificent. With a
+flourish, he told of the mass meeting, and declared that the citizens
+of Caxton had arisen as one man to demand that he take the responsible
+place as official bugler. Then, turning, he glared across the table at
+his son.
+
+Sam, openly defiant, announced that he did not believe his father
+capable of blowing a bugle.
+
+Windy roared with amazement. He rose from the table declaring in a loud
+voice that the boy had wronged him; he swore that he had been for two
+years bugler on the staff of a colonel, and launched into a long story
+of a surprise by the enemy while his regiment lay asleep in their tents,
+and of his standing in the face of a storm of bullets and blowing his
+comrades to action. Putting one hand on his forehead he rocked back and
+forth as though about to fall, declaring that he was striving to
+keep back the tears wrenched from him by the injustice of his son's
+insinuation and, shouting so that his voice carried far down the street,
+he declared with an oath that the town of Caxton should ring and echo
+with his bugling as the sleeping camp had echoed with it that night in
+the Virginia wood. Then dropping again into his chair, and resting his
+head upon his hand, he assumed a look of patient resignation.
+
+Windy McPherson was victorious. In the little house a great stir
+and bustle of preparation arose. Putting on his white overalls and
+forgetting for the time his honourable wounds the father went day after
+day to his work as a housepainter. He dreamed of a new blue uniform for
+the great day and in the end achieved the realisation of his dreams, not
+however without material assistance from what was known in the house
+as "Mother's Wash Money." And the boy, convinced by the story of the
+midnight attack in the woods of Virginia, began against his judgment to
+build once more an old dream of his father's reformation. Boylike, the
+scepticism was thrown to the winds and he entered with zeal into the
+plans for the great day. As he went through the quiet residence streets
+delivering the late evening papers, he threw back his head and revelled
+in the thought of a tall blue-clad figure on a great white horse passing
+like a knight before the gaping people. In a fervent moment he even drew
+money from his carefully built-up bank account and sent it to a firm in
+Chicago to pay for a shining new bugle that would complete the picture
+he had in his mind. And when the evening papers were distributed he
+hurried home to sit on the porch before the house discussing with his
+sister Kate the honours that had alighted upon their family.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With the coming of dawn on the great day the three McPhersons hurried
+hand in hand toward Main Street. In the street, on all sides of them,
+they saw people coming out of houses rubbing their eyes and buttoning
+their coats as they went along the sidewalk. All of Caxton seemed
+abroad.
+
+In Main Street the people were packed on the sidewalk, and massed on the
+curb and in the doorways of the stores. Heads appeared at windows, flags
+waved from roofs or hung from ropes stretched across the street, and a
+great murmur of voices broke the silence of the dawn.
+
+Sam's heart beat so that he was hard put to it to keep back the tears
+from his eyes. He thought with a gasp of the days of anxiety that had
+passed when the new bugle had not come from the Chicago company, and in
+retrospect he suffered again the horror of the days of waiting. It
+had been all important. He could not blame his father for raving and
+shouting about the house, he himself had felt like raving, and had put
+another dollar of his savings into telegrams before the treasure was
+finally in his hands. Now, the thought that it might not have come
+sickened him, and a little prayer of thankfulness rose from his lips.
+To be sure one might have been secured from a nearby town, but not a new
+shining one to go with his father's new blue uniform.
+
+A cheer broke from the crowd massed along the street. Into the street
+rode a tall figure seated upon a white horse. The horse was from
+Culvert's livery and the boys there had woven ribbons into its mane and
+tail. Windy McPherson, sitting very straight in the saddle and looking
+wonderfully striking in the new blue uniform and the broad-brimmed
+campaign hat, had the air of a conqueror come to receive the homage of
+the town. He wore a gold band across his chest and against his hip
+rested the shining bugle. With stern eyes he looked down upon the
+people.
+
+The lump in the throat of the boy hurt more and more. A great wave of
+pride ran over him, submerging him. In a moment he forgot all the past
+humiliations the father had brought upon his family, and understood
+why his mother remained silent when he, in his blindness, had wanted to
+protest against her seeming indifference. Glancing furtively up he saw
+a tear lying upon her cheek and felt that he too would like to sob aloud
+his pride and happiness.
+
+Slowly and with stately stride the horse walked up the street between
+the rows of silent waiting people. In front of the town hall the tall
+military figure, rising in the saddle, took one haughty look at the
+multitude, and then, putting the bugle to his lips, blew.
+
+Out of the bugle came only a thin piercing shriek followed by a squawk.
+Again Windy put the bugle to his lips and again the same dismal
+squawk was his only reward. On his face was a look of helpless boyish
+astonishment.
+
+And in a moment the people knew. It was only another of Windy
+McPherson's pretensions. He couldn't blow a bugle at all.
+
+A great shout of laughter rolled down the street. Men and women sat on
+the curbstones and laughed until they were tired. Then, looking at the
+figure upon the motionless horse, they laughed again.
+
+Windy looked about him with troubled eyes. It is doubtful if he had ever
+had a bugle to his lips until that moment, but he was filled with wonder
+and astonishment that the reveille did not roll forth. He had heard
+the thing a thousand times and had it clearly in his mind; with all his
+heart he wanted it to roll forth, and could picture the street ringing
+with it and the applause of the people; the thing, he felt, was in him,
+and it was only a fatal blunder in nature that it did not come out at
+the flaring end of the bugle. He was amazed at this dismal end of his
+great moment--he was always amazed and helpless before facts.
+
+The crowd began gathering about the motionless, astonished figure,
+laughter continuing to send them off into something near convulsions.
+Grasping the bridle of the horse, John Telfer began leading it off up
+the street. Boys whooped and shouted at the rider, "Blow! Blow!"
+
+The three McPhersons stood in a doorway leading into a shoe store. The
+boy and the mother, white and speechless with humiliation, dared not
+look at each other. In the flood of shame sweeping over them they stared
+straight before them with hard, stony eyes.
+
+The procession led by John Telfer at the bridle of the white horse
+marched down the street. Looking up, the eyes of the laughing, shouting
+man met those of the boy and a look of pain shot across his face.
+Dropping the bridle he hurried away through the crowd. The procession
+moved on, and watching their chance the mother and the two children
+crept home along side streets, Kate weeping bitterly. Leaving them at
+the door Sam went straight on down a sandy road toward a small wood.
+"I've got my lesson. I've got my lesson," he muttered over and over as
+he went.
+
+At the edge of the wood he stopped and leaning on a rail fence watched
+until he saw his mother come out to the pump in the back yard. She had
+begun to draw water for the day's washing. For her also the holiday was
+at an end. A flood of tears ran down the boy's cheeks, and he shook his
+fist in the direction of the town. "You may laugh at that fool Windy,
+but you shall never laugh at Sam McPherson," he cried, his voice shaking
+with excitement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+One evening, when he had grown so that he outtopped Windy, Sam McPherson
+returned from his paper route to find his mother arrayed in her black,
+church-going dress. An evangelist was at work in Caxton and she had
+decided to hear him. Sam shuddered. In the house it was an understood
+thing that when Jane McPherson went to church her son went with her.
+There was nothing said. Jane McPherson did all things without words,
+always there was nothing said. Now she stood waiting in her black
+dress when her son came in at the door and he hurriedly put on his best
+clothes and went with her to the brick church.
+
+Valmore, John Telfer, and Freedom Smith, who had taken upon themselves
+a kind of common guardianship of the boy and with whom he spent evening
+after evening at the back of Wildman's grocery, did not go to church.
+They talked of religion and seemed singularly curious and interested in
+what other men thought on the subject but they did not allow themselves
+to be coaxed into a house of worship. To the boy, who had become a
+fourth member of the evening gatherings at the back of the grocery
+store, they would not talk of God, answering the direct questions he
+sometimes asked by changing the subject. Once Telfer, the reader of
+poetry, answered the boy. "Sell papers and fill your pockets with money
+but let your soul sleep," he said sharply.
+
+In the absence of the others Wildman talked more freely. He was a
+spiritualist and tried to make Sam see the beauties of that faith.
+On long summer afternoons the grocer and the boy spent hours driving
+through the streets in a rattling old delivery wagon, the man striving
+earnestly to make clear to the boy the shadowy ideas of God that were in
+his mind.
+
+Although Windy McPherson had been the leader of a Bible class in his
+youth, and had been a moving spirit at revival meetings during his early
+days in Caxton, he no longer went to church and his wife did not ask
+him to go. On Sunday mornings he lay abed. If there was work to be done
+about the house or yard he complained of his wounds. He complained of
+his wounds when the rent fell due, and when there was a shortage of food
+in the house. Later in his life and after the death of Jane McPherson
+the old soldier married the widow of a farmer by whom he had four
+children and with whom he went to church twice on Sunday. Kate wrote
+Sam one of her infrequent letters about it. "He has met his match," she
+said, and was tremendously pleased.
+
+In church on Sunday mornings Sam went regularly to sleep, putting his
+head on his mother's arm and sleeping throughout the service. Jane
+McPherson loved to have the boy there beside her. It was the one thing
+in life they did together and she did not mind his sleeping the time
+away. Knowing how late he had been upon the streets at the paper selling
+on Saturday evenings, she looked at him with eyes filled with tenderness
+and sympathy. Once the minister, a man with brown beard and hard,
+tightly-closed mouth, spoke to her. "Can't you keep him awake?" he
+asked impatiently. "He needs the sleep," she said and hurried past the
+minister and out of the church, looking ahead of her and frowning.
+
+The evening of the evangelist meeting was a summer evening fallen on a
+winter month. All day the warm winds had come up from the southwest. Mud
+lay soft and deep in the streets and among the little pools of water
+on the sidewalks were dry spots from which steam arose. Nature had
+forgotten herself. A day that should have sent old fellows to their
+nests behind stoves in stores sent them forth to loaf in the sun. The
+night fell warm and cloudy. A thunder storm threatened in the month of
+February.
+
+Sam walked along the sidewalk with his mother bound for the brick
+church, wearing a new grey overcoat. The night did not demand the
+overcoat but Sam wore it out of an excess of pride in its possession.
+The overcoat had an air. It had been made by Gunther the tailor after a
+design sketched on the back of a piece of wrapping paper by John Telfer
+and had been paid for out of the newsboy's savings. The little
+German tailor, after a talk with Valmore and Telfer, had made it at a
+marvellously low price. Sam swaggered as he walked.
+
+He did not sleep in church that evening; indeed he found the quiet
+church filled with a medley of strange noises. Folding carefully the new
+coat and laying it beside him on the seat he looked with interest at
+the people, feeling within him something of the nervous excitement with
+which the air was charged. The evangelist, a short, athletic-looking man
+in a grey business suit, seemed to the boy out of place in the church.
+He had the assured business-like air of the travelling men who come to
+the New Leland House, and Sam thought he looked like a man who had goods
+to be sold. He did not stand quietly back of the pulpit giving out the
+text as did the brown-bearded minister, nor did he sit with closed eyes
+and clasped hands waiting for the choir to finish singing. While the
+choir sang he ran up and down the platform waving his arms and shouting
+excitedly to the people on the church benches, "Sing! Sing! Sing! For
+the glory of God, sing!"
+
+When the song was finished, he began talking, quietly at first, of life
+in the town. As he talked he grew more and more excited. "The town is a
+cesspool of vice!" he shouted. "It reeks with evil! The devil counts it
+a suburb of hell!"
+
+His voice rose, and sweat ran off his face. A sort of frenzy seized him.
+He pulled off his coat and throwing it over a chair ran up and down the
+platform and into the aisles among the people, shouting, threatening,
+pleading. People began to stir uneasily in their seats. Jane McPherson
+stared stonily at the back of the woman in front of her. Sam was
+horribly frightened.
+
+The newsboy of Caxton was not without a hunger for religion. Like all
+boys he thought much and often of death. In the night he sometimes
+awakened cold with fear, thinking that death must be just without the
+door of his room waiting for him. When in the winter he had a cold and
+coughed, he trembled at the thought of tuberculosis. Once, when he was
+taken with a fever, he fell asleep and dreamed that he had died and was
+walking on the trunk of a fallen tree over a ravine filled with lost
+souls that shrieked with terror. When he awoke he prayed. Had some one
+come into his room and heard his prayer he would have been ashamed.
+
+On winter evenings as he walked through the dark streets with the papers
+under his arm he thought of his soul. As he thought a tenderness came
+over him; a lump came into his throat and he pitied himself; he felt
+that there was something missing in his life, something he wanted very
+badly.
+
+Under John Telfer's influence, the boy, who had quit school to devote
+himself to money making, read Walt Whitman and had a season of admiring
+his own body with its straight white legs, and the head that was poised
+so jauntily on the body. Sometimes he would awaken on summer nights and
+be so filled with strange longing that he would creep out of bed and,
+pushing open the window, sit upon the floor, his bare legs sticking out
+beyond his white nightgown, and, thus sitting, yearn eagerly toward some
+fine impulse, some call, some sense of bigness and of leadership that
+was absent from the necessities of the life he led. He looked at the
+stars and listened to the night noises, so filled with longing that the
+tears sprang to his eyes.
+
+Once, after the affair of the bugle, Jane McPherson had been ill--and
+the first touch of the finger of death reaching out to her--had sat with
+her son in the warm darkness in the little grass plot at the front of
+the house. It was a clear, warm, starlit evening without a moon, and as
+the two sat closely together a sense of the coming of death crept over
+the mother.
+
+At the evening meal Windy McPherson had talked voluminously, ranting
+and shouting about the house. He said that a housepainter who had a real
+sense of colour had no business trying to work in a hole like Caxton.
+He had been in trouble with a housewife about a colour he had mixed for
+painting a porch floor and at his own table he raved about the woman
+and what he declared her lack of even a primitive sense of colour. "I
+am sick of it all," he shouted, going out of the house and up the street
+with uncertain steps. His wife had been unmoved by his outburst, but in
+the presence of the quiet boy whose chair touched her own she trembled
+with a strange new fear and began to talk of the life after death,
+making effort after effort to get at what she wanted to say, and only
+succeeding in finding expression for her thoughts in little sentences
+broken by long painful pauses. She told the boy she had no doubt at all
+that there was some kind of future life and that she believed she should
+see and live with him again after they had finished with this world.
+
+One day the minister who had been annoyed because he had slept in his
+church, stopped Sam on the street to talk to him of his soul. He said
+that the boy should be thinking of making himself one of the brothers in
+Christ by joining the church. Sam listened silently to the talk of the
+man, whom he instinctively disliked, but in his silence felt there was
+something insincere. With all his heart he wanted to repeat a sentence
+he had heard from the lips of grey-haired, big-fisted Valmore--"How can
+they believe and not lead a life of simple, fervent devotion to their
+belief?" He thought himself superior to the thin-lipped man who talked
+with him and had he been able to express what was in his heart he might
+have said, "Look here, man! I am made of different stuff from all the
+people there at the church. I am new clay to be moulded into a new man.
+Not even my mother is like me. I do not accept your ideas of life just
+because you say they are good any more than I accept Windy McPherson
+just because he happens to be my father."
+
+During one winter Sam spent evening after evening reading the Bible in
+his room. It was after Kate's marriage--she had got into an affair with
+a young farmer that had kept her name upon the tongues of whisperers for
+months but was now a housewife on a farm at the edge of a village some
+miles from Caxton, and the mother was again at her endless task among
+the soiled clothes in the kitchen and Windy McPherson off drinking and
+boasting about town. Sam read the book in secret. He had a lamp on a
+little stand beside his bed and a novel, lent him by John Telfer, beside
+it. When his mother came up the stairway he slipped the Bible under
+the cover of the bed and became absorbed in the novel. He thought it
+something not quite in keeping with his aims as a business man and a
+money getter to be concerned about his soul. He wanted to conceal his
+concern but with all his heart wanted to get hold of the message of
+the strange book, about which men wrangled hour after hour on winter
+evenings in the store.
+
+He did not get it; and after a time he stopped reading the book. Left to
+himself he might have sensed its meaning, but on all sides of him were
+the voices of the men--the men at Wildman's who owned to no faith and
+yet were filled with dogmatisms as they talked behind the stove in the
+grocery; the brown-bearded, thin-lipped minister in the brick church;
+the shouting, pleading evangelists who came to visit the town in
+the winter; the gentle old grocer who talked vaguely of the spirit
+world,--all these voices were at the mind of the boy pleading,
+insisting, demanding, not that Christ's simple message that men love
+one another to the end, that they work together for the common good, be
+accepted, but that their own complex interpretation of his word be taken
+to the end that souls be saved.
+
+In the end the boy of Caxton got to the place where he had a dread
+of the word soul. It seemed to him that the mention of the word in
+conversation was something shameful and to think of the word or the
+shadowy something for which the word stood an act of cowardice. In his
+mind the soul became a thing to be hidden away, covered up, not thought
+of. One might be allowed to speak of the matter at the moment of death,
+but for the healthy man or boy to have the thought of his soul in
+his mind or word of it on his lips--one might better become blatantly
+profane and go to the devil with a swagger. With delight he imagined
+himself as dying and with his last breath tossing a round oath into the
+air of his death chamber.
+
+In the meantime Sam continued to have inexplicable longings and hopes.
+He kept surprising himself by the changing aspect of his own viewpoint
+of life. He found himself indulging in the most petty meannesses, and
+following these with flashes of a kind of loftiness of mind. Looking at
+a girl passing in the street, he had unbelievably mean thoughts; and the
+next day, passing the same girl, a line caught from the babbling of John
+Telfer came to his lips and he went his way muttering, "June's twice
+June since she breathed it with me."
+
+And then into the complex nature of this boy came the sex motive.
+Already he dreamed of having women in his arms. He looked shyly at the
+ankles of women crossing the street, and listened eagerly when the crowd
+about the stove in Wildman's fell to telling smutty stories. He sank
+to unbelievable depths of triviality in sordidness, looking shyly into
+dictionaries for words that appealed to the animal lust in his queerly
+perverted mind and, when he came across it, lost entirely the beauty of
+the old Bible tale of Ruth in the suggestion of intimacy between man and
+woman that it brought to him. And yet Sam McPherson was no evil-minded
+boy. He had, as a matter of fact, a quality of intellectual honesty that
+appealed strongly to the clean-minded, simple-hearted old blacksmith
+Valmore; he had awakened something like love in the hearts of the women
+school teachers in the Caxton schools, at least one of whom continued
+to interest herself in him, taking him with her on walks along country
+roads, and talking to him constantly of the development of his mind; and
+he was the friend and boon companion of Telfer, the dandy, the reader of
+poems, the keen lover of life. The boy was struggling to find himself.
+One night when the sex call kept him awake he got up and dressed, and
+went and stood in the rain by the creek in Miller's pasture. The wind
+swept the rain across the face of the water and a sentence flashed
+through his mind: "The little feet of the rain run on the water." There
+was a quality of almost lyrical beauty in the Iowa boy.
+
+And this boy, who couldn't get hold of his impulse toward God, whose sex
+impulses made him at times mean, at times full of beauty, and who had
+decided that the impulse toward bargaining and money getting was the
+impulse in him most worth cherishing, now sat beside his mother in
+church and watched with wide-open eyes the man who took off his coat,
+who sweated profusely, and who called the town in which he lived a
+cesspool of vice and its citizens wards of the devil.
+
+The evangelist from talking of the town began talking instead of heaven
+and hell and his earnestness caught the attention of the listening boy
+who began seeing pictures.
+
+Into his mind there came a picture of a burning pit of fire in which
+great flames leaped about the heads of the people who writhed in the
+pit. "Art Sherman would be there," thought Sam, materialising the
+picture he saw; "nothing can save him; he keeps a saloon."
+
+Filled with pity for the man he saw in the picture of the burning pit,
+his mind centered on the person of Art Sherman. He liked Art Sherman.
+More than once he had felt the touch of human kindness in the man. The
+roaring, blustering saloonkeeper had helped the boy sell and collect
+for newspapers. "Pay the kid or get out of the place," the red-faced man
+roared at drunken men leaning on the bar.
+
+And then, looking into the burning pit, Sam thought of Mike McCarthy,
+for whom he had at that moment a kind of passion akin to a young girl's
+blind devotion to her lover. With a shudder he realised that Mike also
+would go into the pit, for he had heard Mike laughing at churches and
+declaring there was no God.
+
+The evangelist ran upon the platform and called to the people demanding
+that they stand upon their feet. "Stand up for Jesus," he shouted;
+"stand up and be counted among the host of the Lord God."
+
+In the church people began getting to their feet. Jane McPherson stood
+with the others. Sam did not stand. He crept behind his mother's dress,
+hoping to pass through the storm unnoticed. The call to the faithful to
+stand was a thing to be complied with or resisted as the people might
+wish; it was something entirely outside of himself. It did not occur to
+him to count himself among either the lost or the saved.
+
+Again the choir began singing and a businesslike movement began among
+the people. Men and women went up and down the aisles clasping the hands
+of people in the pews, talking and praying aloud. "Welcome among us,"
+they said to certain ones who stood upon their feet. "It gladdens our
+hearts to see you among us. We are happy at seeing you in the fold among
+the saved. It is good to confess Jesus."
+
+Suddenly a voice from the bench back of him struck terror to Sam's
+heart. Jim Williams, who worked in Sawyer's barber shop, was upon his
+knees and in a loud voice was praying for the soul of Sam McPherson.
+"Lord, help this erring boy who goes up and down in the company of
+sinners and publicans," he shouted.
+
+In a moment the terror of death and the fiery pit that had possessed him
+passed, and Sam was filled instead with blind, dumb rage. He remembered
+that this same Jim Williams had treated lightly the honour of his sister
+at the time of her disappearance, and he wanted to get upon his feet and
+pour out his wrath on the head of the man, who, he felt, had betrayed
+him. "They would not have seen me," he thought; "this is a fine trick
+Jim Williams has played me. I shall be even with him for this."
+
+He got to his feet and stood beside his mother. He had no qualms about
+passing himself off as one of the lambs safely within the fold. His mind
+was bent upon quieting Jim Williams' prayers and avoiding the attention
+of the people.
+
+The minister began calling on the standing people to testify of their
+salvation. From various parts of the church the people spoke out, some
+loudly and boldly and with a ring of confidence in their voices, some
+tremblingly and hesitatingly. One woman wept loudly shouting between the
+paroxysms of sobbing that seized her, "The weight of my sins is heavy on
+my soul." Girls and young men when called on by the minister responded
+with shamed, hesitating voices asking that a verse of some hymn be sung,
+or quoting a line of scripture.
+
+At the back of the church the evangelist with one of the deacons and two
+or three women had gathered about a small, black-haired woman, the wife
+of a baker to whom Sam delivered papers. They were urging her to rise
+and get within the fold, and Sam turned and watched her curiously, his
+sympathy going out to her. With all his heart he hoped that she would
+continue doggedly shaking her head.
+
+Suddenly the irrepressible Jim Williams broke forth again. A quiver
+ran over Sam's body and the blood rose to his cheeks. "Here is another
+sinner saved," shouted Jim, pointing to the standing boy. "Count this
+boy, Sam McPherson, in the fold among the lambs."
+
+On the platform the brown-bearded minister stood upon a chair and looked
+over the heads of the people. An ingratiating smile played about his
+lips. "Let us hear from the young man, Sam McPherson," he said, raising
+his hand for silence, and, then, encouragingly, "Sam, what have you to
+say for the Lord?"
+
+Become the centre for the attention of the people in the church Sam
+was terror-stricken. The rage against Jim Williams was forgotten in the
+spasm of fear that seized him. He looked over his shoulder to the door
+at the back of the church and thought longingly of the quiet street
+outside. He hesitated, stammered, grew more red and uncertain,
+and finally burst out: "The Lord," he said, and then looked about
+hopelessly, "the Lord maketh me to lie out in green pastures."
+
+In the seats behind him a titter arose. A young woman sitting among the
+singers in the choir put her handkerchief to her face and throwing back
+her head rocked back and forth. A man near the door guffawed loudly and
+went hurriedly out. All over the church people began laughing.
+
+Sam turned his eyes upon his mother. She was staring straight ahead of
+her, and her face was red. "I'm going out of this place and I'm never
+coming back again," he whispered, and, stepping into the aisle, walked
+boldly toward the door. He had made up his mind that if the evangelist
+tried to stop him he would fight. At his back he felt the rows of people
+looking at him and smiling. The laughter continued.
+
+In the street he hurried along consumed with indignation. "I'll never
+go into any church again," he swore, shaking his fist in the air.
+The public avowals he had heard in the church seemed to him cheap and
+unworthy. He wondered why his mother stayed in there. With a sweep of
+his arm he dismissed all the people in the church. "It is a place to
+make public asses of the people," he thought.
+
+Sam McPherson wandered through Main Street, dreading to meet Valmore and
+John Telfer. Finding the chairs back of the stove in Wildman's grocery
+deserted, he hurried past the grocer and hid in a corner. Tears of wrath
+stood in his eyes. He had been made a fool of. He imagined the scene
+that would go on when he came upon the street with the papers the next
+morning. Freedom Smith would be there sitting in the old worn buggy and
+roaring so that all the street would listen and laugh. "Going to lie out
+in any green pastures to-night, Sam?" he would shout. "Ain't you afraid
+you'll take cold?" By Geiger's drug store would stand Valmore and
+Telfer, eager to join in the fun at his expense. Telfer would pound on
+the side of the building with his cane and roar with laughter. Valmore
+would make a trumpet of his hands and shout after the fleeing boy. "Do
+you sleep out alone in them green pastures?" Freedom Smith would roar
+again.
+
+Sam got up and went out of the grocery. As he hurried along, blind with
+wrath, he felt he would like a stand-up fight with some one. And, then,
+hurrying and avoiding the people, he merged with the crowd on the street
+and became a witness to the strange thing that happened that night in
+Caxton.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Main Street hushed people stood about in groups talking. The air
+was heavy with excitement. Solitary figures went from group to group
+whispering hoarsely. Mike McCarthy, the man who had denied God and
+who had won a place for himself in the affection of the newsboy, had
+assaulted a man with a pocket knife and had left him bleeding and
+wounded beside a country road. Something big and sensational had
+happened in the life of the town.
+
+Mike McCarthy and Sam were friends. For years the man had idled upon the
+streets of the town, loitering about, boasting and talking. He had sat
+for hours in a chair under a tree before the New Leland House, reading
+books, doing tricks with cards, engaging in long discussions with John
+Telfer or any who would stand up to him.
+
+Mike McCarthy got into trouble in a fight over a woman. A young farmer
+living at the edge of Caxton had come home from the fields to find his
+wife in the bold Irishman's arms and the two men had gone out of the
+house together to fight in the road. The woman, weeping in the house,
+followed to ask forgiveness of her husband. Running in the gathering
+darkness along the road she had found him cut and bleeding terribly,
+lying in a ditch under a hedge. On down the road she ran and appeared at
+the door of a neighbour, screaming and calling for help.
+
+The story of the fight in the road got to Caxton just as Sam came out of
+the corner, back of the stove in Wildman's and appeared on the street.
+Men ran from store to store and from group to group along the street
+saying that the young farmer had died and that murder had been done. On
+a street corner Windy McPherson harangued the crowd declaring that the
+men of Caxton should arise in the defence of their homes and string the
+murderer to a lamp post. Hop Higgins, driving a horse from Culvert's
+livery, appeared on Main Street. "He will be at the McCarthy farm," he
+shouted. When several men, coming out of Geiger's drug store, stopped
+the marshal's horse, saying, "You will have trouble out there; you had
+better take help," the little red-faced marshal with the crippled leg
+laughed. "What trouble?" he asked--"To get Mike McCarthy? I shall ask
+him to come and he will come. The rest of that lot won't cut any figure.
+Mike can wrap the entire McCarthy family around his finger."
+
+There were six of the McCarthy men, all, except Mike, silent, sullen
+men who only talked when they were in liquor. Mike furnished the town's
+social touch with the family. It was a strange family to live there
+in that fat, corn-growing country, a family with something savage and
+primitive about it, one that belonged among western mining camps or
+among the half savage dwellers in deep alleys in cities, and the fact
+that it lived on a corn farm in Iowa was, in the words of John Telfer,
+"something monstrous in Nature."
+
+The McCarthy farm, lying some four miles east of Caxton, had once
+contained a thousand acres of good corn-growing land. Lem McCarthy, the
+father of the family, had inherited it from a brother, a gold miner,
+a forty-niner, a sport owning fast horses, who planned to breed race
+horses on the Iowa land. Lem had come out of the back streets of an
+eastern city, bringing his brood of tall, silent, savage boys to live
+upon the land and, like the forty-niner, to be a sport. Thinking the
+wealth that had come to him vast beyond spending, he had plunged into
+horse racing and gambling. When, within two years, five hundred acres
+of the farm had to be sold to pay gambling debts, and the wide acres lay
+covered with weeds, Lem became alarmed, and settled down to hard work,
+the boys working all day in the field and at long intervals coming
+into town at night to get into trouble. Having no mother or sister, and
+knowing that no Caxton woman could be hired to go upon the place, they
+did their own housework; and on rainy days sat about the old farmhouse
+playing cards and fighting. On other days they would stand around the
+bar in Art Sherman's saloon in Piety Hollow drinking until they had lost
+their savage silence and had become loud and quarrelsome, going from
+there upon the streets to seek trouble. Once, going into Hayner's
+restaurant, they took stacks of plates from shelves back of the counter
+and, standing in the doorway, threw them at people passing in the
+street, the crash of the breaking crockery accompanying their roaring
+laughter. When they had driven the people to cover they got upon their
+horses and with wild shouts raced up and down Main Street between the
+rows of tied horses until Hop Higgins, the town marshal, appeared, when
+they rode off into the country awakening the farmers along the darkened
+road as they fled, shouting and singing, toward home.
+
+When the McCarthy boys got into trouble in Caxton, old Lem McCarthy
+drove into town and got them out of it, paying for the damage done and
+going about declaring the boys meant no harm. When told to keep them out
+of town he shook his head and said he would try.
+
+Mike McCarthy did not ride swearing and singing with the five brothers
+along the dark road. He did not work all day in the hot corn fields. He
+was the family gentleman, and, wearing good clothes, strolled instead
+upon the street or loitered in the shade before the New Leland House.
+Mike had been educated. For some years he had attended a college in
+Indiana from which he was expelled for an affair with a woman. After his
+return from college he stayed in Caxton, living at the hotel and making
+a pretence of studying law in the office of old Judge Reynolds. He paid
+slight attention to the study of law, but with infinite patience had so
+trained his hands that he became wonderfully dexterous with coins and
+cards, plucking them out of the air and making them appear in the shoes,
+the hats, and even in the mouths, of bystanders. During the day he
+walked the streets looking at the girl clerks in the stores, or stood
+upon the station platform waving his hand to women passengers on passing
+trains. He told John Telfer that the flattery of women was a lost art
+that he intended to restore. Mike McCarthy carried in his pockets books
+which he read sitting in a chair before the hotel or on the stones
+before store windows. When on Saturdays the streets were filled with
+people, he stood on the corners giving gratuitous performances of his
+magical art with cards and coins, and eyeing country girls in the crowd.
+Once, a woman, the town stationer's wife, shouted at him, calling him
+a lazy lout, whereupon he threw a coin in the air, and when it did not
+come down rushed toward her shouting, "She has it in her stocking." When
+the stationer's wife ran into her shop and banged the door the crowd
+laughed and shouted with delight.
+
+Telfer had a liking for the tall, grey-eyed, loitering McCarthy
+and sometimes sat with him discussing a novel or a poem; Sam in the
+background listened eagerly. Valmore did not care for the man, shaking
+his head and declaring that such a fellow could come to no good end.
+
+The rest of the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this,
+sunned himself in the town's displeasure. For the sake of the public
+furor it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist,
+an anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone
+cared greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations
+of his passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in
+Wildman's grocery store he would stand whipping them into a frenzy by
+declaring for free love, and vowing that he would have the best of any
+woman who gave him the chance.
+
+For this man the frugal, hard working newsboy had conceived a regard
+amounting to a passion. As he listened to McCarthy he got continuous
+delightful little thrills. "There is nothing he would not dare," thought
+the boy. "He is the freest, the boldest, the bravest man in town."
+When the young Irishman, seeing the admiration in his eyes, flung him
+a silver dollar saying, "That is for your fine brown eyes, my boy; it
+I had them I would have half the women in town after me," Sam kept the
+dollar in his pocket and counted it a kind of treasure like the rose
+given a lover by his sweetheart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was past eleven o'clock when Hop Higgins returned to town with
+McCarthy, driving quietly along the street and through an alley at the
+back of the town hall. The crowd upon the street had broken up. Sam had
+gone from one to another of the muttering groups, his heart quaking with
+fear. Now he stood at the back of the mass of men gathered at the jail
+door. An oil lamp, burning at the top of the post above the door, threw
+dancing, flickering lights on the faces of the men before him. The
+thunder storm that had threatened had not come, but the unnatural warm
+wind continued and the sky overhead was inky black.
+
+Through the alley, to the jail door, drove the town marshal, the young
+McCarthy sitting in the buggy beside him. A man rushed forward to hold
+the horse. McCarthy's face was chalky white. He laughed and shouted,
+raising his hand toward the sky.
+
+"I am Michael, son of God. I have cut a man with a knife so that his
+red blood ran upon the ground. I am the son of God and this filthy jail
+shall be my sanctuary. In there I shall talk aloud with my Father," he
+roared hoarsely, shaking his fist at the crowd. "Sons of this cesspool
+of respectability, stay and hear! Send for your females and let them
+stand in the presence of a man!"
+
+Taking the white, wild-eyed man by the arm Marshal Higgins led him into
+the jail, the clank of locks, the low murmur of the voice of Higgins and
+the wild laughter of McCarthy floating out to the group of silent men
+standing in the mud of the alley.
+
+Sam McPherson ran past the group of men to the side of the jail and
+finding John Telfer and Valmore leaning silently against the wall of
+Tom Folger's wagon shop slipped between them. Telfer put out his arm and
+laid it upon the boy's shoulder. Hop Higgins, coming out of the jail,
+addressed the crowd. "Don't answer if he talks," he said; "he is as
+crazy as a loon."
+
+Sam moved closer to Telfer. The voice of the imprisoned man, loud,
+and filled with a startling boldness, rolled out of the jail. He began
+praying.
+
+"Hear me, Father Almighty, who has permitted this town of Caxton to
+exist and has let me, Thy son, grow to manhood. I am Michael, Thy son.
+They have put me in this jail where rats run across the floor and
+they stand in the mud outside as I talk with Thee. Are you there, old
+Truepenny?"
+
+A breath of cold air blew up the alley followed by a flaw of rain. The
+group under the flickering lamp by the jail entrance drew back against
+the walls of the building. Sam could see them dimly, pressing closely
+against the wall. The man in the jail laughed loudly.
+
+"I have had a philosophy of life, O Father," he shouted. "I have seen
+men and women here living year after year without children. I have seen
+them hoarding pennies and denying Thee new life on which to work Thy
+will. To these women I have gone secretly talking of carnal love. With
+them I have been gentle and kind; them I have flattered."
+
+A roaring laugh broke from the lips of the imprisoned man. "Are you
+there, oh dwellers in the cesspool of respectability?" he shouted. "Do
+you stand in the mud with cold feet listening? I have been with your
+wives. Eleven Caxton wives without babes have I been with and it has
+been fruitless. The twelfth woman I have just left, leaving her man in
+the road a bleeding sacrifice to thee. I shall call out the names of the
+eleven. I shall have revenge also upon the husbands of the women, some
+of whom wait with the others in the mud outside."
+
+He began calling off the names of Caxton wives. A shudder ran through
+the body of the boy, sensitised by the new chill in the air and by the
+excitement of the night. Among the men standing along the wall of the
+jail a murmur arose. Again they grouped themselves under the flickering
+light by the jail door, disregarding the rain. Valmore, stumbling out of
+the darkness beside Sam, stood before Telfer. "The boy should be going
+home," he said; "this isn't fit for him to hear."
+
+Telfer laughed and drew Sam closer to him. "He has heard enough lies in
+this town," he said. "Truth won't hurt him. I would not go myself, nor
+would you, and the boy shall not go. This McCarthy has a brain. Although
+he is half insane now he is trying to work something out. The boy and I
+will stay to hear."
+
+The voice from the jail continued calling out the names of Caxton wives.
+Voices in the group before the jail door began shouting: "This should be
+stopped. Let us tear down the jail."
+
+McCarthy laughed aloud. "They squirm, oh Father, they squirm; I have
+them in the pit and I torture them," he cried.
+
+An ugly feeling of satisfaction came over Sam. He had a sense of the
+fact that the names shouted from the jail would be repeated over and
+over through the town. One of the women whose names had been called out
+had stood with the evangelist at the back of the church trying to induce
+the wife of the baker to rise and be counted in the fold with the lambs.
+
+The rain, falling on the shoulders of the men by the jail door, changed
+to hail, the air grew colder and the hailstones rattled on the roofs of
+buildings. Some of the men joined Telfer and Valmore, talking in low,
+excited voices. "And Mary McKane, too, the hypocrite," Sam heard one of
+them say.
+
+The voice inside the jail changed. Still praying, Mike McCarthy seemed
+also to be talking to the group in the darkness outside.
+
+"I am sick of my life. I have sought leadership and have not found
+it. Oh Father! Send down to men a new Christ, one to get hold of us, a
+modern Christ with a pipe in his mouth who will swear and knock us about
+so that we vermin who pretend to be made in Thy image will understand.
+Let him go into churches and into courthouses, into cities, and into
+towns like this, shouting, 'Be ashamed! Be ashamed of your cowardly
+concern over your snivelling souls!' Let him tell us that never will our
+lives, so miserably lived, be repeated after our bodies lie rotting in
+the grave."
+
+A sob broke from his lips and a lump came into Sam's throat.
+
+"Oh Father! help us men of Caxton to understand that we have only this,
+our lives, this life so warm and hopeful and laughing in the sun, this
+life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls
+with their long legs and freckles on their noses, that are meant to
+carry life within themselves, new life, kicking and stirring, and waking
+them at night."
+
+The voice of the prayer broke. Wild sobs took the place of speech.
+"Father!" shouted the broken voice, "I have taken a life, a man that
+moved and talked and whistled in the sunshine on winter mornings; I have
+killed."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The voice inside the jail became inaudible. Silence, broken by low sobs
+from the jail, fell on the little dark alley and the listening men began
+going silently away. The lump in Sam's throat grew larger. Tears stood
+in his eyes. He went with Telfer and Valmore out of the alley and into
+the street, the two men walking in silence. The rain had ceased and a
+cold wind blew.
+
+The boy felt that he had been shriven. His mind, his heart, even his
+tired body seemed strangely cleansed. He felt a new affection for Telfer
+and Valmore. When Telfer began talking he listened eagerly, thinking
+that at last he understood him and knew why men like Valmore, Wildman,
+Freedom Smith, and Telfer loved each other and went on being friends
+year after year in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings. He
+thought that he had got hold of the idea of brotherhood that John Telfer
+talked of so often and so eloquently. "Mike McCarthy is only a brother
+who has gone the dark road," he thought and felt a glow of pride in the
+thought and in the apt expression of it in his mind.
+
+John Telfer, forgetting the boy, talked soberly to Valmore, the two men
+stumbling along in the darkness intent upon their own thoughts.
+
+"It is an odd thought," said Telfer and his voice seemed far away and
+unnatural like the voice from the jail; "it is an odd thought that but
+for a quirk in the brain this Mike McCarthy might himself have been a
+kind of Christ with a pipe in his mouth."
+
+Valmore stumbled and half fell in the darkness at a street crossing.
+Telfer went on talking.
+
+"The world will some day grope its way into some kind of an
+understanding of its extraordinary men. Now they suffer terribly. In
+success or in such failures as has come to this imaginative, strangely
+perverted Irishman their lot is pitiful. It is only the common, the
+plain, unthinking man who slides peacefully through this troubled
+world."
+
+At the house Jane McPherson sat waiting for her boy. She was thinking of
+the scene in the church and a hard light was in her eyes. Sam went
+past the sleeping room of his parents, where Windy McPherson snored
+peacefully, and up the stairway to his own room. He undressed and,
+putting out the light, knelt upon the floor. From the wild ravings of
+the man in the jail he had got hold of something. In the midst of the
+blasphemy of Mike McCarthy he had sensed a deep and abiding love of
+life. Where the church had failed the bold sensualist succeeded. Sam
+felt that he could have prayed in the presence of the entire town.
+
+"Oh, Father!" he cried, sending up his voice in the silence of the
+little room, "make me stick to the thought that the right living of
+this, my life, is my duty to you."
+
+By the door below, while Valmore waited on the sidewalk, Telfer talked
+to Jane McPherson.
+
+"I wanted Sam to hear," he explained. "He needs a religion. All young
+men need a religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man like Mike
+McCarthy keeps instinctively trying to justify himself before God."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+John Telfer's friendship was a formative influence upon Sam McPherson.
+His father's worthlessness and the growing realisation of the hardship
+of his mother's position had given life a bitter taste in his mouth,
+and Telfer sweetened it. He entered with zeal into Sam's thoughts
+and dreams, and tried valiantly to arouse in the quiet, industrious,
+money-making boy some of his own love of life and beauty. At night, as
+the two walked down country roads, the man would stop and, waving his
+arms about, quote Poe or Browning or, in another mood, would compel
+Sam's attention to the rare smell of a hayfield or to a moonlit stretch
+of meadow.
+
+Before people gathered on the streets he teased the boy, calling him a
+little money grubber and saying, "He is like a little mole that
+works underground. As the mole goes for a worm so this boy goes for a
+five-cent piece. I have watched him. A travelling man goes out of town
+leaving a stray dime or nickel here and within an hour it is in this
+boy's pocket. I have talked to banker Walker of him. He trembles lest
+his vaults become too small to hold the wealth of this young Croesus.
+The day will come when he will buy the town and put it into his vest
+pocket."
+
+For all his public teasing of the boy Telfer had the genius to adopt a
+different attitude when they were alone together. Then he talked to him
+openly and freely as he talked to Valmore and Freedom Smith and to other
+cronies of his on the streets of Caxton. Walking along the road he would
+point with his cane to the town and say, "You and that mother of yours
+have more of the real stuff in you than the rest of the boys and mothers
+of the town put together."
+
+In all Caxton Telfer was the only man who knew books and who took them
+seriously. Sam sometimes found his attitude toward them puzzling and
+would stand with open mouth listening as Telfer swore or laughed at a
+book as he did at Valmore or Freedom Smith. He had a fine portrait
+of Browning which he kept hung in the stable and before this he would
+stand, his legs spread apart, and his head tilted to one side, talking.
+
+"A rich old sport you are, eh?" he would say, grinning. "Getting
+yourself discussed by women and college professors in clubs, eh? You old
+fraud!"
+
+Toward Mary Underwood, the school teacher who had become Sam's friend
+and with whom the boy sometimes walked and talked, Telfer had no
+charity. Mary Underwood was a sort of cinder in the eyes of Caxton. She
+was the only child of Silas Underwood, the town harness maker, who once
+had worked in a shop belonging to Windy McPherson. After the business
+failure of Windy he had started independently and for a time did
+well, sending his daughter to a school in Massachusetts. Mary did
+not understand the people of Caxton and the people misunderstood and
+distrusted her. Taking no part in the life of the town and keeping to
+herself and to her books she awoke a kind of fear in others. Because she
+did not join them at church suppers, or go from porch to porch gossiping
+with other women through the long summer evenings, they thought her
+something abnormal. On Sundays she sat alone in her pew at church and
+on Saturday afternoons, come storm, come sunshine, she walked on country
+roads and through the woods accompanied by a collie dog. She was a small
+woman with a straight, slender figure and had fine blue eyes filled with
+changing lights, hidden by the eye-glasses she almost constantly wore.
+Her lips were very full and red, and she sat with them parted so that
+the edges of her fine teeth showed. Her nose was large, and a fine
+reddish-brown colour glowed in her cheeks. Though different, she had,
+like Jane McPherson, a habit of silence; and under her silence, she,
+like Sam's mother, possessed an unusually strong and vigorous mind.
+
+As a child she was a sort of half invalid and had not been on friendly
+footing with other children. It was then that her habit of silence and
+reticence had been established. The years in the school in Massachusetts
+restored her health but did not break this habit. She came home and took
+the place in the schools to earn money with which to take her back East,
+dreaming of a position as instructor in an eastern college. She was that
+rare thing, a woman scholar, loving scholarship for its own sake.
+
+Mary Underwood's position in the town and in the schools was insecure.
+Out of her silent, independent way of life had sprung a misunderstanding
+that, at least once, had taken definite form and had come near driving
+her from the town and schools. That she did not succumb to the storm of
+criticism that for some weeks beat about her head was due to her habit
+of silence and to a determination to get her own way in the face of
+everything.
+
+It was a suggestion of scandal that had put the grey hairs upon her
+head. The scandal had blown over before the time of her friendship for
+Sam, but he had known of it. In those days he knew of everything that
+went on in the town--his quick ears and eyes missed nothing. More than
+once he had heard the men waiting to be shaved in Sawyer's barber shop
+speak of her.
+
+The tale ran that she had been involved in an affair with a real estate
+agent who had afterward left town. It was said that the man, a tall,
+fine-looking fellow, had been in love with Mary and had wanted to desert
+his wife and go away with her. One night he had driven to Mary's house
+in a closed buggy and the two had driven into the country. They had sat
+for hours in the covered buggy at the side of the road and talked, and
+people driving past had seen them there talking together.
+
+And then she had got out of the buggy and walked home alone through snow
+drifts. The next day she was at school as usual. When told of it the
+school superintendent, a puttering old fellow with vacant eyes, had
+shaken his head in alarm and declared that it must be looked into. He
+called Mary into his little narrow office in the school building, but
+lost courage when she sat before him, and said nothing. The man in the
+barber shop, who repeated the tale, said that the real estate man drove
+on to a distant station and took a train to the city, and that some days
+later he came back to Caxton and moved his family out of town.
+
+Sam dismissed the story from his mind. Having begun a friendship for
+Mary he put the man in the barber shop into a class with Windy McPherson
+and thought of him as a pretender and liar who talked for the sake of
+talk. He remembered with a shock the crude levity with which the loafers
+in the shop had greeted the repetition of the tale. Their comments
+had come back to his mind as he walked through the streets with his
+newspapers and had given him a kind of jolt. He went along under the
+trees thinking of the sunlight falling upon the grey hair as they walked
+together on summer afternoons, and bit his lip and opened and closed his
+fist convulsively.
+
+During Mary's second year in the Caxton schools her mother died, and at
+the end of another year, her father, failing in the harness business,
+Mary became a fixture in the schools. The house at the edge of the town,
+the property of her mother, had come down to her and she lived there
+with an old aunt. After the passing of the wind of scandal concerning
+the real estate man the town lost interest in her. She was thirty-six
+at the time of her first friendship with Sam and lived alone among her
+books.
+
+Sam had been deeply moved by her friendship. It had seemed to him
+something significant that grown people with affairs of their own should
+be so in earnest about his future as she and Telfer were. Boylike, he
+counted it a tribute to himself rather than to the winsome youth in him,
+and was made proud by it. Having no real feeling for books, and only
+pretending to have out of a desire to please, he sometimes went from one
+to the other of his two friends, passing off their opinions as his own.
+
+At this trick Telfer invariably caught him. "That is not your notion,"
+he would shout, "you have it from that school teacher. It is the opinion
+of a woman. Their opinions, like the books they sometimes write, are
+founded on nothing. They are not the real things. Women know nothing.
+Men only care for them because they have not had what they want from
+them. No woman is really big--except maybe my woman, Eleanor."
+
+When Sam continued to be much in the company of Mary, Telfer grew more
+bitter.
+
+"I would have you observe women's minds and avoid letting them influence
+your own," he told the boy. "They live in a world of unrealities. They
+like even vulgar people in books, but shrink from the simple, earthy
+folk about them. That school teacher is so. Is she like me? Does she,
+while loving books, love also the very smell of human life?"
+
+In a way Telfer's attitude toward the kindly little school teacher
+became Sam's attitude. Although they walked and talked together the
+course of study she had planned for him he never took up and as he
+grew to know her better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced
+appealed to him less and less. He thought that she, as Telfer held,
+lived in a world of illusion and unreality and said so. When she lent
+him books, he put them in his pocket and did not read them. When he did
+read, he thought the books reminded him of something that hurt him. They
+were in some way false and pretentious. He thought they were like
+his father. One day he tried reading aloud to Telfer from a book Mary
+Underwood had lent him.
+
+The story was one of a poetic man with long, unclean fingernails who
+went among people preaching the doctrine of beauty. It began with a
+scene on a hillside in a rainstorm where the poetic man sat under a tent
+writing a letter to his sweetheart.
+
+Telfer was beside himself. Jumping from his seat under a tree by the
+roadside he waved his arms and shouted:
+
+"Stop! Stop it! Do not go on with it. The story lies. A man could not
+write love letters under the circumstances and he was a fool to pitch
+his tent on a hillside. A man in a tent on a hillside in a storm would
+be cold and wet and getting the rheumatism. To be writing letters he
+would need to be an unspeakable ass. He had better be out digging a
+trench to keep the water from running through his tent."
+
+Waving his arms, Telfer went off up the road and Sam followed thinking
+him altogether right, and, if later in life he learned that there are
+men who could write love letters on a piece of housetop in a flood, he
+did not know it then and the least suggestion of windiness or pretence
+lay heavy in his stomach.
+
+Telfer had a vast enthusiasm for Bellamy's "Looking Backward," and read
+it aloud to his wife on Sunday afternoons, sitting under the apple trees
+in the garden. They had a fund of little personal jokes and sayings that
+they were forever laughing over, and she had infinite delight in his
+comments on the life and people of Caxton, but did not share his love of
+books. When she sometimes went to sleep in her chair during the Sunday
+afternoon readings he poked her with his cane and laughingly told her
+to wake up and listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning's
+verses his favourites were "A Light Woman" and "Fra Lippo Lippi," and
+he would recite these aloud with great gusto. He declared Mark Twain the
+greatest man in the world and in certain moods he would walk the road
+beside Sam reciting over and over one or two lines of verse, often this
+from Poe:
+
+  Helen, thy beauty is to me
+  Like some Nicean bark of yore.
+
+Then, stopping and turning upon the boy, he would demand whether or not
+the writing of such lines wasn't worth living a life for.
+
+Telfer had a pack of dogs that always went with them on their walks
+at night and he had for them long Latin names that Sam could never
+remember. One summer be bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and
+gave great attention to the colt, which he named Bellamy Boy, trotting
+him up and down a little driveway by the side of his house for hours at
+a time and declaring he would be a great trotting horse. He could recite
+the colt's pedigree with great gusto and when he had been talking to Sam
+of some book he would repay the boy's attention by saying, "You, my boy,
+are as far superior to the run of boys about town as the colt, Bellamy
+Boy, is superior to the farm horses that are hitched along Main Street
+on Saturday afternoons." And then, with a wave of his hand and a look
+of much seriousness on his face, he would add, "And for the same reason.
+You have been, like him, under a master trainer of youth."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One evening Sam, now grown to man's stature and full of the awkwardness
+and self-consciousness of his new growth, was sitting on a cracker
+barrel at the back of Wildman's grocery. It was a summer evening and a
+breeze blew through the open doors swaying the hanging oil lamps that
+burned and sputtered overhead. As usual he was listening in silence to
+the talk that went on among the men.
+
+Standing with legs wide apart and from time to time jabbing with his
+cane at Sam's legs, John Telfer held forth on the subject of love.
+
+"It is a theme that poets do well to write of," he declared. "In
+writing of it they avoid the necessity of embracing it. In trying for a
+well-turned line they forget to look at well-turned ankles. He who
+sings most passionately of love has been in love the least; he woos the
+goddess of poesy and only gets into trouble when he, like John Keats,
+turns to the daughter of a villager and tries to live the lines he has
+written."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense," roared Freedom Smith, who had been sitting tilted
+far back in a chair with his feet against the cold stove, smoking a
+short, black pipe, and who now brought his feet down upon the floor with
+a bang. Admiring Telfer's flow of words he pretended to be filled with
+scorn. "The night is too hot for eloquence," he bellowed. "If you must
+be eloquent talk of ice cream or mint juleps or recite a verse about the
+old swimming pool."
+
+Telfer, wetting his finger, thrust it into the air.
+
+"The wind is in the north-west; the beasts roar; we will have a storm,"
+he said, winking at Valmore.
+
+Banker Walker came into the store, followed by his daughter. She was a
+small, dark-skinned girl with black, quick eyes. Seeing Sam sitting with
+swinging legs upon the cracker barrel she spoke to her father and went
+out of the store. At the sidewalk she stopped and, turning, made a quick
+motion with her hand.
+
+Sam jumped off the cracker barrel and strolled toward the street door.
+A flush was on his cheeks. His mouth felt hot and dry. He went with
+extreme deliberateness, stopping to bow to the banker, and for a moment
+lingering to read a newspaper that lay upon the cigar case, to avoid the
+comments he feared his going might excite among the men by the stove.
+In his heart he trembled lest the girl should have disappeared down the
+street, and with his eyes, he looked guiltily at the banker, who had
+joined the group at the back of the store and who now stood listening
+to the talk, while he read from a list held in his hand and Wildman
+went here and there doing up packages and repeating aloud the names of
+articles called off by the banker.
+
+At the end of the lighted business section of Main Street, Sam found the
+girl waiting for him. She began to tell of the subterfuge by which she
+had escaped her father.
+
+"I told him I would go home with my sister," she said, tossing her head.
+
+Taking hold of the boy's hand, she led him along the shaded street. For
+the first time Sam walked in the company of one of the strange beings
+that had begun to bring him uneasy nights, and overcome with the wonder
+of it the blood climbed through his body and made his head reel so that
+he walked in silence unable to understand his own emotions. He felt the
+soft hand of the girl with delight; his heart pounded against the walls
+of his chest and a choking sensation gripped at his throat.
+
+Walking along the street, past lighted residences where the low voices
+of women in talk greeted his ears, Sam was inordinately proud. He
+thought that he should like to turn and walk with this girl through the
+lighted Main Street. Had she not chosen him from among all the boys of
+the town; had she not, with a flutter of her little, white hand, called
+to him with a call that he wondered the men upon the cracker barrels had
+not heard? Her boldness and his own took his breath away. He could not
+talk. His tongue seemed paralysed.
+
+Down the street went the boy and girl, loitering in the shadows,
+hurrying past the dim oil lamps at street crossings, getting from each
+other wave after wave of exquisite little thrills. Neither spoke. They
+were beyond words. Had they not together done this daring thing?
+
+In the shadow of a tree they stopped and stood facing each other; the
+girl looked at the ground and stood facing the boy. Putting out his hand
+he laid it upon her shoulder. In the darkness on the other side of the
+street a man stumbled homeward along a board sidewalk. The lights of
+Main Street glowed in the distance. Sam drew the girl toward him. She
+raised her head. Their lips met, and then, throwing her arms about his
+neck, she kissed him again and again eagerly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sam's return to Wildman's was marked by extreme caution. Although he had
+been absent but fifteen minutes it seemed to him that hours must have
+passed and he would not have been surprised to see the stores locked
+and darkness settled down on Main Street. It was inconceivable that the
+grocer could still be wrapping packages for banker Walker. Worlds had
+been remade. Manhood had come to him. Why! the man should have wrapped
+the entire store, package after package, and sent it to the ends of the
+earth. He lingered in the shadows at the first of the store lights
+where ages before he had gone, a mere boy, to meet her, a mere girl, and
+looked with wonder at the lighted way before him.
+
+Sam crossed the street and, from the front of Sawyer's barber shop,
+looked into Wildman's. He felt like a spy looking into the camp of an
+enemy. There before him sat the men into whose midst he had it in
+his power to cast a thunderbolt. He might walk to the door and say,
+truthfully enough, "Here before you is a boy that by the flutter of a
+white hand has been made into a man; here is one who has wrung the heart
+of womankind and eaten his fill at the tree of the knowledge of life."
+
+In the grocery the talk still continued among the men upon the cracker
+barrels who seemed unconscious of the boy's slinking entrance. Indeed,
+their talk had sunk. From talking of love and of poets they talked of
+corn and of steers. Banker Walker, his packages of groceries lying on
+the counter, smoked a cigar.
+
+"You can fairly hear the corn growing to-night," he said. "It wants but
+another shower or two and we shall have a record crop. I plan to feed a
+hundred steers at my farm out Rabbit Road this winter."
+
+The boy climbed again upon a cracker barrel and tried to look
+unconcerned and interested in the talk. Still his heart thumped; still
+a throbbing went on in his wrists. He turned and looked at the floor
+hoping his agitation would pass unnoticed.
+
+The banker, taking up the packages, walked out at the door. Valmore and
+Freedom Smith went over to the livery barn for a game of pinochle.
+And John Telfer, twirling his cane and calling to a troup of dogs that
+loitered in an alley back of the store, took Sam for a walk into the
+country.
+
+"I will continue this talk of love," said Telfer, striking at weeds
+along the road with his cane and from time to time calling sharply to
+the dogs that, filled with delight at being abroad, ran growling and
+tumbling over each other in the dusty road.
+
+"That Freedom Smith is a sample of life in this town. At the word love
+he drops his feet upon the floor and pretends to be filled with disgust.
+He will talk of corn or steers or of the stinking hides that he buys,
+but at the mention of the word love he is like a hen that has seen a
+hawk in the sky. He runs about in circles making a fuss. 'Here! Here!
+Here!' he cries, 'you are making public something that should be kept
+hidden. You are doing in the light of day what should only be done with
+a shamed face in a darkened room.' Why, boy, if I were a woman in
+this town I would not stand it--I would go to New York, to France,
+to Paris--To be wooed for but a passing moment by a shame-faced yokel
+without art--uh--it is unthinkable."
+
+The man and the boy walked in silence. The dogs, scenting a rabbit,
+disappeared across a long pasture, their master letting them go. From
+time to time he threw back his head and took long breaths of the night
+air.
+
+"I am not like banker Walker," he declared. "He thinks of the growing
+corn in terms of fat steers feeding on the Rabbit Run farm; I think of
+it as something majestic. I see the long corn rows with the men and the
+horses half hidden, hot and breathless, and I think of a vast river of
+life. I catch a breath of the flame that was in the mind of the man who
+said, 'The land is flowing with milk and honey.' I am made happy by my
+thoughts not by the dollars clinking in my pocket.
+
+"And then in the fall when the corn stands shocked I see another
+picture. Here and there in companies stand the armies of the corn.
+It puts a ring in my voice to look at them. 'These orderly armies has
+mankind brought out of chaos,' I say to myself. 'On a smoking black ball
+flung by the hand of God out of illimitable space has man stood up these
+armies to defend his home against the grim attacking armies of want.'"
+
+Telfer stopped and stood in the road with his legs spread apart. He took
+off his hat and throwing back his head laughed up at the stars.
+
+"Freedom Smith should hear me now," he cried, rocking back and forth
+with laughter and switching his cane at the boy's legs so that Sam had
+to hop merrily about in the road to avoid it. "Flung by the hand of God
+out of illimitable space--eh! not bad, eh! I should be in Congress. I
+am wasted here. I am throwing priceless eloquence to dogs who prefer to
+chase rabbits and to a boy who is the worst little money grubber in the
+town."
+
+The midsummer madness that had seized Telfer passed and for a time he
+walked in silence. Suddenly, putting his arm on the boy's shoulder, he
+stopped and pointed to where a faint light in the sky marked the lighted
+town.
+
+"They are good people," he said, "but their ways are not my ways or your
+ways. You will go out of the town. You have genius. You will be a man of
+finance. I have watched you. You are not niggardly and you do not cheat
+and lie--result--you will not be a little business man. What have you?
+You have the gift of seeing dollars where the rest of the boys of the
+town see nothing and you are tireless after those dollars--you will be
+a big man of dollars, it is plain." Into his voice came a touch of
+bitterness. "I also was marked out. Why do I carry a cane? why do I not
+buy a farm and raise steers? I am the most worthless thing alive. I have
+the touch of genius without the energy to make it count."
+
+Sam's mind that had been inflamed by the kiss of the girl cooled in the
+presence of Telfer. In the summer madness of the talking man there was
+something soothing to the fever in his blood. He followed the words
+eagerly, seeing pictures, getting thrills, filled with happiness.
+
+At the edge of town a buggy passed the walking pair. In the buggy sat
+a young farmer, his arm about the waist of a girl, her head upon his
+shoulder. Far in the distance sounded the faint call of the dogs. Sam
+and Telfer sat down on a grassy bank under a tree while Telfer rolled
+and lighted a cigarette.
+
+"As I promised, I will talk to you of love," he said, making a wide
+sweep with his arm each time as he put his cigarette into his mouth.
+
+The grassy bank on which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot
+days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind
+them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of
+serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer and
+his face became serious.
+
+"My foolishness is more than half earnest," he said. "I think that a
+man or boy who has set for himself a task had better let women and girls
+alone. If he be a man of genius, he has a purpose independent of all
+the world, and should cut and slash and pound his way toward his mark,
+forgetting every one, particularly the woman that would come to grips
+with him. She also has a mark toward which she goes. She is at war with
+him and has a purpose that is not his purpose. She believes that the
+pursuit of women is an end for a life. For all they now condemn Mike
+McCarthy who went to the asylum because of them and who, while loving
+life, came near to taking life, the women of Caxton do not condemn his
+madness for themselves; they do not blame him for loitering away his
+good years or for making an abortive mess of his good brain. While he
+made an art of the pursuit of women they applauded secretly. Did
+not twelve of them accept the challenge thrown out by his eyes as he
+loitered in the streets?"
+
+The man, who had begun talking quietly and seriously, raised his voice
+and waved the lighted cigarette in the air and the boy who had begun
+to think again of the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker listened
+attentively. The barking of the dogs grew nearer.
+
+"If you as a boy can get from me, a grown man, an understanding of the
+purpose of women you will not have lived in this town for nothing. Set
+your mark at money making if you will, but drive at that. Let yourself
+but go and a sweet wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd or a pair
+of little feet running over a dance floor will retard your growth for
+years. No man or boy can grow toward the purpose of a life while he
+thinks of women. Let him try it and he will be undone. What is to him
+a passing humour is to them an end. They are diabolically clever. They
+will run and stop and run and stop again, keeping just without his
+reach. He sees them here and there about him. His mind is filled with
+vague, delicious thoughts that come out of the very air; before he
+realises what he has done he has spent his years in vain pursuit and
+turning finds himself old and undone."
+
+Telfer began jabbing at the ground with his stick.
+
+"I had my chance. In New York I had money to live on and time to have
+made an artist of myself. I won prize after prize. The master, walking
+up and down back of us, lingered longest over my easel. There was a
+fellow sat beside me who had nothing. I made sport of him and called him
+Sleepy Jock after a dog we used to have about our house here in Caxton.
+Now I am here idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only
+last week I saw in a paper that he had won a place among the world's
+great artists by a picture he has painted. In the school I watched for
+a look in the eyes of the girl students and went about with them night
+after night winning, like Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy
+Jock had the best of it. He did not look about with open eyes but kept
+peering instead at the face of the master. My days were full of small
+successes. I could wear clothes. I could make soft-eyed girls turn to
+look at me in a dance hall. I remember a night. We students gave a dance
+and Sleepy Jock came. He went about asking for dances and the girls
+laughed and told him they had none to give, that the dances were taken.
+I followed him and had my ears filled with flattery and my card with
+names. In riding the wave of small success I got the habit of small
+success. When I could not catch the line I wanted to make a drawing
+live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my arm, went for a
+day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I overheard two women
+talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy for a week."
+
+Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.
+
+"My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me?
+Let me tell you. It has brought me to this--that at fifty I, who might
+have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of
+beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a
+flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising
+corn.
+
+"If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small
+success and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you
+that I got it when I saw it lurking in a woman's eyes and heard the
+pleasant little songs that lull to sleep upon a woman's lips."
+
+The boy, sitting upon the grassy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of
+life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare
+silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at
+night, of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little
+blue-eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith's home and
+of how he had gone at night to stand under her window.
+
+In Caxton adolescent love had about it a virility befitting a land
+that raised so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers
+through the streets to be loaded upon cars. Men and women went their
+ways believing, with characteristic American what-boots-it attitude
+toward the needs of childhood, that it was well for growing boys and
+girls to be much alone together. To leave them alone together was a
+principle with them. When a young man called upon his sweetheart,
+her parents sat in the presence of the two with apologetic eyes and
+presently disappeared leaving them alone together. When boys' and girls'
+parties were given in Caxton houses, parents went away leaving the
+children to shift for themselves.
+
+"Now have a good time and don't tear the house down," they said, going
+off upstairs.
+
+Left to themselves the children played kissing games and young men
+and tall half-formed girls sat on the front porches in the darkness,
+thrilled and half frightened, getting through their instincts, crudely
+and without guidance, their first peep at the mystery of life. They
+kissed passionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds
+fevered and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.
+
+Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing
+aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a
+kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as
+a drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on
+the next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost
+their keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men
+about the station and in the stores, they went slinking through the
+streets in groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said,
+"It is the loutish age."
+
+If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to
+increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to
+the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and
+to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now
+sat musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to
+do with the Walker girl. He remembered his sister's affair with a young
+farmer and shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the
+shoulder of the man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the
+rolling fields stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came
+Telfer's speech. So vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the
+armies of standing corn which men had set up in the fields to protect
+themselves against the march of pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the
+picture in his mind as he followed the sense of Telfer's talk, thought
+that all society had resolved itself into a few sturdy souls who went
+on and on regardless, and a hunger to make of himself such another arose
+engulfing him. The desire within him seemed so compelling that he turned
+and haltingly tried to express what was in his mind.
+
+"I will try," he stammered, "I will try to be a man. I will try to
+not have anything to do with them--with women. I will work and make
+money--and--and----"
+
+Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the
+ground.
+
+"To Hell with women and girls," he burst forth as though throwing
+something distasteful out of his throat.
+
+In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits,
+came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the grassy
+bank, covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his
+sensitive nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. His _sang
+froid_ had returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the
+dogs he cried joyfully, "We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy,
+and dog. We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked
+into bed."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to
+him. For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun
+come up hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the
+streets in the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from
+the north came into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on
+the deserted little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry
+Donlin to hurry with his work that they might get back into the warm
+stale air of the smoking car.
+
+In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become
+a man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some
+subtle way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that
+to make money and to have money would in some way make up for the old
+half-forgotten humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and
+would set it on a more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had
+provided, grew and influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly
+he kept at his efforts to get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of
+dollars. Jane McPherson had herself a passion for frugality. In spite
+of Windy's incompetence and her own growing ill health, she would
+not permit the family to go into debt, and although, in the long hard
+winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush until his mind revolted at the
+thought of a corn field, yet was the rent of the little house paid on
+the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to increase the totals in the
+yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the death of his wife had lived
+in a loft above his shop and who was a blacksmith of the old days, a
+workman first and a money maker later, did not despise the thought of
+gain.
+
+"It is money makes the mare go," he said with a kind of reverence as
+banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of
+Wildman's grocery.
+
+Of John Telfer's attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain.
+The man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.
+
+"That's right," he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express
+opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly
+that the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their
+achievements, "Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big
+world! Get your name up for a modern, high-class American!"
+
+And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to
+berate the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that
+the day would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning,
+he shouted, "Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old
+clerkliness lies asleep!"
+
+Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who
+had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a
+man, was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they
+talked to him of the city and of the money to be made there.
+
+"It is the place for a live young man," they said.
+
+Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their
+affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into
+his nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the
+great ways filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching
+the sky, the men running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks
+going on year after year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of,
+and yet not understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises
+that supported them.
+
+In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of
+life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a
+sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing,
+had he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he
+not introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the
+Saturday night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the
+totals in the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He
+felt within him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and
+would do.
+
+"I will be richer than any man in town here," he declared in his pride.
+"I will be richer than Ed Walker."
+
+Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks
+in the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn
+venders, for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses
+close by the beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the
+farmers, and the labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth
+to mingle with their fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores,
+the sidewalks, and drinking places, and men stood about in groups
+talking while young girls with their lovers walked up and down. In
+the hall over Geiger's drug store a dance went on and the voice of the
+caller-off rose above the clatter of voices and the stamping of horses
+in the street. Now and then a fight broke out among the roisterers in
+Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was killed with a knife.
+
+In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.
+
+"Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon," he said, pushing a paper
+into the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. "Recipes for cooking new
+dishes," he urged to the farmer's wife. "There is a page of new fashions
+in dress," he told the young girl.
+
+Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and
+the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Saturday
+paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day's business.
+
+And it was on a Saturday night that he decided to drop paper selling.
+
+"I will take you into business with me," announced Freedom Smith,
+stopping him as he hurried by. "You are getting too old to sell papers
+and you know too much."
+
+Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday
+night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year
+he had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he
+nodded his head as he hurried away.
+
+"It is the end of romance," shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom
+Smith before Geiger's drug store and who had heard the offer. "A boy,
+who has seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe
+and Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am
+overcome by the thought."
+
+The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to
+Sam of the matter at length.
+
+"For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place," he
+declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time
+to time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. "For any boy
+I put money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who
+despise money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she
+puts into the selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been
+the making of her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without
+the millinery business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon
+clothes and with it she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to
+her."
+
+Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the
+ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking
+thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the
+boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret
+regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face
+by throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue,
+making the words roll and tumble from his lips.
+
+"No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes
+many virtues that are forever on men's lips," he declared fiercely as
+though trying to down an opponent. "It is one of the virtues that proves
+man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power
+to make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys
+fear. Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings
+into men's lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go
+adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.
+
+"Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
+wealth," he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. "No doubt
+the things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the
+instinct to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of
+poverty, the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim
+silences of the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient,
+and the defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid
+rich man's city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a
+factory at the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty
+than you and I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious,
+and who has not acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables
+him to get on, may build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is
+diseased and decaying."
+
+Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his
+eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.
+
+"The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that
+makes our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for
+shrewd money getting or it will destroy itself," he declared. "And the
+really great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve
+in garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages
+on Fifth Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for
+yourself. Visit the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to
+one that you will find him not only incapable in money getting but also
+incapable in the very art for which he starves."
+
+After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer
+for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted
+a chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and
+hides he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged
+persistency with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank
+had caught Freedom's imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the
+fact.
+
+Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty
+dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn
+business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with
+the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business,
+backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the
+cashier telling of Sam's record as a depositor, and the seven hundred
+dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with
+Freedom, Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his
+savings as he had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was
+impressed. He thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a
+week Sam had seen the silent suggestive power of cash.
+
+The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to
+more than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have
+two-thirds of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other
+hand was to furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam
+was to take care of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things
+bought were to be fixed each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at
+less than the prices named two-thirds of the savings went to him. The
+arrangement was suggested by Sam, who thought he would make more from
+the saving than from the wage.
+
+Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice,
+roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great
+inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man,
+woman and child he knew and liked. "Old Maybe-Not" he called Windy
+McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed
+rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low
+phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip
+in the top. To Sam's knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed
+during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying.
+Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar
+until the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him.
+And then haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his
+way while the farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward
+child.
+
+Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton's best
+streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked
+him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing
+and roaring about it. "Good morning, Mary," he would shout at the neat
+German woman across the street. "Wait and you'll see me clean up about
+here. I'm going at it right now. I'm going to brush the flies off the
+fence first."
+
+Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the
+county.
+
+Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and
+agricultural implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard,
+gathering rust and decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the
+lot were a half dozen buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction
+engine, a mowing machine, several farm wagons and other farm tools gone
+beyond naming. Every few days he came home bringing a new prize. They
+overflowed the yard and crept onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell
+any of this stuff. He had at one time sixteen sets of harness all broken
+and unrepaired in the barn and in a shed back of the house. A great
+flock of chickens and two or three pigs wandered about among this junk
+and all the children of the neighbourhood joined Freedom's four and ran
+howling and shouting over and under the mass.
+
+Freedom's wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house.
+She had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally
+stood at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at
+evening as he stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both
+she and Freedom treated him with great respect.
+
+As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling.
+He was a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very
+systematically and within a year more than doubling the bulk of
+Freedom's purchases.
+
+There is a little of Windy McPherson's grotesque pretentiousness in
+every man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of
+it. He let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value
+of their goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they
+had recovered from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam's day,
+farmers did not watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets
+were not systematised and regulated as they were later, and the skill
+of the buyer was of the first importance. Having the skill, Sam used
+it constantly to put money into his pockets, but in some way kept the
+confidence and respect of the men with whom he traded.
+
+The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading
+ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the
+streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.
+
+"Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy," he would shout to the
+loafers in the store.
+
+Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his
+own affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom's
+affairs, but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and
+apples, butter and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working
+always to swell his commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business
+and many times profited little, but the two liked and respected each
+other and it was through Freedom's efforts that Sam finally got out of
+Caxton and into larger affairs.
+
+One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam
+stood taking the harness off his horse.
+
+"Here is a chance for you, my boy," he said, putting his hand
+affectionately on Sam's shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his
+voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the
+things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had
+replied making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might
+hope for in Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.
+
+When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for
+him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at
+last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in
+the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the
+door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his
+thumb to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told
+him that in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and
+filled with uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom's
+stable wishing that he also might be gone.
+
+Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken
+from the horse upon a peg in the wall.
+
+"I will be glad to go," he said heavily.
+
+Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who
+had come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man
+of eighteen. He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago
+company because of his affection for the boy and because he believed him
+capable of something more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence
+holding the lantern aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the
+yard, filled with regrets.
+
+By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who,
+putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her
+eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street,
+Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From
+a street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could
+see them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom's hand and the
+slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving
+March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom's hand. At the
+front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on
+the gate and looking at the sky.
+
+"We shall have a rain," he said in a quavering voice, as though giving
+a decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an
+answer went along a narrow path into the house.
+
+The incident brought a smile to Sam's lips followed by a kind of
+weariness of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had,
+day after day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking
+at the sky. The man was one of Sam's old newspaper customers who stood
+as a kind of figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he
+had been a gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part
+in more than one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he
+had come to end his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself
+by keeping year after year a carefully tabulated record of weather
+variations. Once or twice a month during the warm season he stumbled
+into Wildman's and, sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the
+accuracy of his records and the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at
+his heels. In his present mood the endless sameness and uneventfulness
+of the man's life seemed to Sam amusing and in some way sad.
+
+"To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point
+to a day--to look forward to and depend upon that--what deadliness!" he
+thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt with pleasure
+the letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much of the big
+outside world to him.
+
+In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he
+felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought
+on by his mother's approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of
+confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost
+cheerful. The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom
+was renewed by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at
+the sky.
+
+"I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching
+a mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer," he
+thought.
+
+The three years in Freedom Smith's service had taught Sam not to doubt
+his ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his
+way. He knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business
+man, one of the men who direct and control the affairs in which they
+are concerned because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He
+recalled with pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped
+calling him a bright boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.
+
+At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these
+things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old
+man he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his
+mother's life had been as barren as that of the man who depended for
+companionship upon a dog and a thermometer.
+
+"Indeed," he said to himself, pursuing the thought, "it has been worse.
+She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the
+remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the
+last days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old
+man watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house
+chasing playthings." The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the
+wind singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional
+drop of rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with
+his mother. During the last two or three years he had been trying to
+make things up to her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the
+beginning of his success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub
+and since the beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after
+evening with her instead of going to Wildman's to sit with the four
+friends and hear the talk that went on among them. No more did he walk
+with Telfer or Mary Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the
+bedside of the sick woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an
+arm chair upon the grass plot at the front of the house.
+
+The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an
+understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to
+the ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together,
+the mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much
+speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it
+unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought
+of the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had
+been made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which
+he had been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the
+doings of the pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane's illness
+continued to go off after pension day for long periods of drunkenness,
+and who only came home to weep and wail through the house, when the
+pension money was gone, regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the
+loss of both the washwoman and the wife.
+
+"She has been the most wonderful woman in the world," he told himself
+and tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend,
+John Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy
+trotting beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of
+her long gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A
+picture of George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness
+in the kitchen of Freedom Smith's house, had caught his eye some days
+before, and in the darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his
+lips, realising that in some indescribable way it was like his mother
+as she had been before her illness. Freedom's wife had given him the
+picture and he had been carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on
+lonely stretches of road as he went about his work.
+
+Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of
+an attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue
+the thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details
+of a long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It
+was extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could
+remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her
+youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy's
+mind. She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of
+a thin-lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a
+farm, and of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved
+to buy books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a
+school teacher, and of her marriage to Windy--then John McPherson.
+
+Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in
+the town's life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man
+who walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and
+who taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.
+
+When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him
+eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should
+have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.
+
+"And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour
+and unhappiness for me," the sick woman had told her son.
+
+After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton
+where he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the
+store into the sheriff's hands and his wife into the position of town
+laundress.
+
+In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted
+across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy
+and another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the
+state giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs
+and had written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the
+applause that greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances,
+the little dimly-lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces
+shining in the light of the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted
+Windy running here and there, talking the jargon of stageland, arraying
+himself in his motley and strutting upon the little stage.
+
+"And all winter he did not send me a penny," the sick woman had said,
+interrupting his thoughts.
+
+Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth,
+the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been
+killed in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an
+anecdote, touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her
+son.
+
+The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for
+an hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old
+woman looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter
+feel she had been a fool to come.
+
+At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The
+story ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding
+the woman alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman,
+then in her prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house.
+The railroad agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and
+laughed.
+
+"She knocked him out, too," he said, "knocked him cold upon the ground
+and then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town
+declaring her the finest woman in the state."
+
+In the darkness by the broken shed Sam's mind turned from thoughts of
+his mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young
+farmer. He thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of
+the failings of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of
+the house to wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of
+war talk always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of
+the night when, getting a rig from Culvert's livery, she had driven off
+alone into the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show
+her wedding ring.
+
+Before him there rose a picture of a summer afternoon when he had seen
+a part of the love making that had preceded this. He had gone into the
+store to see his sister when the young farmer came in, looked awkwardly
+about and pushed a new gold watch across the counter to Kate. A sudden
+wave of respect for his sister had pervaded the boy. "What a sum it must
+have cost," he thought, and looked with new interest at the back of the
+lover and at the flushed cheek and shining eyes of his sister. When the
+lover, turning, had seen young McPherson standing at the counter, he
+laughed self-consciously and walked out at the door. Kate had been
+embarrassed and secretly pleased and flattered by the look in her
+brother's eyes, but had pretended to treat the gift lightly, twirling
+it carelessly back and forth on the counter and walking up and down
+swinging her arms.
+
+"Don't go telling," she had said.
+
+"Then don't go pretending," the boy had answered.
+
+Sam thought that his sister's indiscretion, which had brought her a babe
+and a husband in the same month had, after all, ended better than the
+indiscretion of his mother in her marriage with Windy.
+
+Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for
+the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of
+his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.
+
+Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and
+presently returned, bringing a daughter.
+
+There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in
+a house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an
+attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code,
+if she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The
+thought amused and saddened him.
+
+"You would have thought her safe," he mused. She was fifty, small,
+nervous and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled
+as she talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue
+because of nervousness.
+
+In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the
+door holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of
+himself.
+
+"My wife--my wife is dying. She may die any day," he wailed, tears
+standing in his eyes.
+
+The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed
+had been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with
+anger and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and
+began sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped
+and Sam could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as
+the man turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels
+rose a voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had
+begun to rain.
+
+"He has got into the wrong street," thought the boy stupidly.
+
+Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs
+echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air
+of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother's ironing board stood
+against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering
+in Sam's heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store
+doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of
+his father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate's wedding, when
+Windy had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and
+the mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house,
+sick with humiliation.
+
+The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores
+replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy's anger. Sam began thinking
+again of his mother's life.
+
+The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now
+seemed utterly fruitless. "I would like to repay him," he thought,
+shaken with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him.
+The cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages
+on the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol
+of the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he
+turned his face and stared at the wall.
+
+He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith's house.
+Freedom had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just
+as to-night he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and
+just as Sam was shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the
+stable door had come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy
+girl of fourteen with the strength of a man and an inclination to burst
+out of her clothes at unexpected places, they had come charging into the
+stables to carry Sam off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them
+on, his voice roaring in the stable so that the horses jumped about in
+their stalls. Into the house they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of
+four, sitting astride his back and beating on his head with a woollen
+cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern and giving an occasional helpful
+push with his hand.
+
+A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of
+the big dining room in Freedom's house came back into the mind of
+the boy now sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted,
+badly-cooked food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great
+dishes heaped with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had
+always been just enough food for the single meal. The thing was nicely
+calculated, when you had finished the table was bare.
+
+How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a
+flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and
+passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh
+supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the
+children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the
+tomboy girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of
+the boy.
+
+"My mother never knew anything like that," he thought.
+
+The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking
+loudly--some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he talked
+of the cost of school books.
+
+"They change the books in the school too often," he declared in a loud
+voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an
+audience. "It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I
+will not stand it."
+
+Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a
+message upon it.
+
+"Be silent," he wrote. "If you say another word or make another sound to
+disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the
+street."
+
+Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a
+fork taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under
+the lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a
+desire to spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had
+brought his mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking
+at her very death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared
+about the kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.
+
+Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not
+understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his
+pocket.
+
+"A dog is dead, eh?" he shouted. "Well you're getting too big and smart,
+lad. What do I care for a dead dog?"
+
+Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put
+his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.
+
+"I must not kill," he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a
+stranger. "I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill."
+
+In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise,
+struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at
+him and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a
+start that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly
+it stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had
+become.
+
+"I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub
+by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with
+so little extra pressure," he thought.
+
+The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the
+forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon
+of drunken carousing.
+
+"If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it
+looks now all the days of my life," thought the boy.
+
+In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman
+speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the
+sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and
+went carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down
+upon him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind,
+shaking loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it
+against his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before
+the house he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into
+the road. Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the
+street.
+
+"I will go for Mary Underwood," he thought, his mind returning to the
+friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose
+friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer's tirades against all
+women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his
+bare head.
+
+"We need a woman in our house," he kept saying over and over to himself.
+"We need a woman in our house."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Leaning against the wall under the veranda of Mary Underwood's house,
+Sam tried to get in his mind a remembrance of what had brought him
+there. He had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along a
+country road. Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He
+had forgotten the purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The
+unexpected and terrible hatred of his father that had come upon him in
+the tense silence of the kitchen had so paralysed his brain that he now
+felt light-headed and wonderfully happy and carefree.
+
+"I have been doing something," he thought; "I wonder what it is."
+
+The house faced a grove of pine trees and was reached by climbing a
+little rise and following a winding road out beyond the graveyard and
+the last of the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled
+on the tin roof overhead, and Sam, his back closely pressed against the
+front of the house, fought to regain control of his mind.
+
+For an hour he stood there staring into the darkness and watched with
+delight the progress of the storm. He had--an inheritance from his
+mother--a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a boy
+and his mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the
+house singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did
+not hear, and in his bed upstairs Sam had lain awake listening to the
+noises--the rain on the roof, the occasional crash of thunder, the
+snoring of Windy, and the unusual and, he thought, beautiful sound of
+the mother singing in the storm.
+
+Now, lifting up his head, he looked about with delight. Trees in the
+grove in front of him bent and tossed in the wind. The inky blackness of
+the night was relieved by the flickering oil lamp in the road beyond
+the graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the
+windows of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which
+he stood made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees
+through which the raindrops fell gleaming and sparkling. An occasional
+flash of lightning lit up the trees and the winding road, and the
+cannonry of the skies rolled and echoed overhead. A kind of wild song
+sang in Sam's heart.
+
+"I wish it would last all night," he thought, his mind fixed on the
+singing of his mother in the dark house when he was a boy.
+
+The door opened and a woman stepped out upon the veranda and stood
+before him facing the storm, the wind tossing the soft kimono in which
+she was clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air
+was filled with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted
+her head and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her
+fine contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and
+going on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover
+riding through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the
+song--
+
+  "He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"
+
+sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch
+and leaning forward into the storm.
+
+Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who
+had been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind
+had turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman
+standing singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother
+singing on the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on,
+seeing pictures as he used to see them when a boy walking under
+the stars and listening to the talk of John Telfer. He saw a
+broad-shouldered man shouting defiance to the storm as he rode down a
+mountain path.
+
+"And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak," went on the voice of
+the singer.
+
+Mary Underwood's singing there in the rain made her seem near and
+likeable as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.
+
+"John Telfer was wrong about her," he thought.
+
+She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down
+across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating
+the spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon
+his clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation
+of surprise broke from her lips:
+
+"Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the
+rain."
+
+"I like it here," replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at
+the storm.
+
+Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary
+looked into the darkness.
+
+"You have been a long time coming to see me," she said, "come in."
+
+Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the
+veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon
+a table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the
+shelves along the walls. On a table burned a student's lamp and in the
+corners of the room lay heavy shadows.
+
+Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes.
+
+Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned
+clad in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began
+moving about the room picking up odds and ends of woman's clothing
+scattered on the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks
+piled in an open grate at the side of the room.
+
+"It was the storm made me want to sing," she said self-consciously, and
+then briskly, "we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in
+the road and got yourself covered with mud."
+
+From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into
+his mind.
+
+"I have come here courting," he thought; "I have come to ask Mary
+Underwood to be my wife and live in my house."
+
+The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused
+something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore,
+falling away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by
+the kimono, wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the
+soft grey hair and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks
+caused a jumping of his heart.
+
+"We are needing a woman in our house," he said heavily, repeating the
+words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept
+streets and along the mud-covered roads. "We are needing a woman in our
+house, and I have come to take you there.
+
+"I intend to marry you," he added, lurching across the room and grasping
+her roughly by the shoulders. "Why not? I am needing a woman."
+
+Mary Underwood was dismayed and frightened by the face looking down at
+her, and by the strong hands clenched upon her shoulders. In his youth
+she had conceived a kind of maternal passion for the newsboy and had
+planned a future for him. Her plans if followed would have made him a
+scholar, a man living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had
+chosen to live his life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about
+the country like Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen
+him driving at evening through the street to Freedom's house, going in
+and out of Wildman's, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim
+way she knew that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from
+the things of which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John
+Telfer, the talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had
+come back to her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of
+the road, and talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother,
+of marriage and of coming to live with him in his house. She stood,
+chilled, looking into the eager, strong face and the eyes with the
+pained, dazed look in them.
+
+Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to
+Sam, and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.
+
+"It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you," he began, "it was
+because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired
+of them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little
+schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew
+tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks
+and looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to
+get out of there and into the streets myself."
+
+Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and
+stared into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from
+his trousers legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to
+reconstruct an old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer's,
+that had years before come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and
+Telfer had made of the ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central
+figure, a stoop-shouldered, feeble old man stumbling along the street,
+muttering to himself and poking in a gutter with a stick. The picture
+was a caricature of puttering old Frank Huntley, superintendent of the
+Caxton schools.
+
+Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood's house, become, for the
+moment, a boy, facing a boy's problems, Sam did not want to be such a
+man. He wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the
+kind of man he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of
+the world and making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get
+expressed when he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind,
+he felt that he must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that
+the schools were not giving him what he wanted. His brain worked on the
+problem of how to tell her about it.
+
+Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: "I am going to quit the
+schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same."
+
+Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the
+chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the
+door opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called
+sharply, "Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here."
+
+A startled, trembling voice answered from above, "Who is it?"
+
+Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her
+hand gently on his shoulder, said, "It is your mother and you are only a
+sick, half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it."
+
+Sam shook his head. "She is still there in the bed, coughing." He roused
+himself and stood up. "I have just killed my father," he announced. "I
+choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the
+house. He made horrible noises in the kitchen and mother was tired and
+wanted to sleep."
+
+Mary Underwood began running about the room. From a little alcove under
+a stairway she took clothes, throwing them upon the floor about the
+room. She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam's presence,
+raised her skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the
+stockinged foot and the other on the bare one, she turned to him. "We
+will go back to your house. I think you are right. You need a woman
+there."
+
+In the street she walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall
+fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over
+Sam. He felt he had accomplished something--something he had set out to
+accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion
+that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith's, began planning
+the evening he would spend with her.
+
+"I will tell her of the letter from the Chicago company and of what I
+will do when I go to the city," he thought.
+
+At the gate before the McPherson house Mary looked into the road below
+the grassy bank that ran down from the fence, but in the darkness she
+could see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and
+shouted as it rushed through the bare branches of the trees. Sam went
+through the gate and around the house to the kitchen door intent upon
+getting to his mother's bedside.
+
+In the house the neighbour woman sat asleep in a chair before the
+kitchen stove. The daughter had gone.
+
+Sam went through the house to the parlour and sat down in a chair beside
+his mother's bed, picking up her hand and holding it in his own. "She
+must be asleep," he thought.
+
+At the kitchen door Mary Underwood stopped, and, turning, ran away into
+the darkness along the street. By the kitchen fire the neighbour
+woman still slept. In the parlour Sam, sitting on the chair beside his
+mother's bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little
+stand beside the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a
+tall, aristocratic-looking woman with rings on her fingers, that hung
+upon the wall. The picture belonged to Windy and was claimed by him as a
+portrait of his mother, and it had once brought on a quarrel between Sam
+and his sister.
+
+Kate had taken the portrait of the lady seriously, and the boy had come
+upon her sitting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands
+lying in her lap in imitation of the pose maintained so haughtily by the
+great lady who looked down at her.
+
+"It is a fraud," he had declared, irritated by what he believed his
+sister's devotion to one of the father's pretensions. "It is a fraud
+he has picked up somewhere and now claims as his mother to make people
+believe he is something big."
+
+The girl, ashamed at having been caught in the pose, and furious because
+of the attack upon the authenticity of the portrait, had gone into a
+spasm of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the
+floor with her foot. Then she had run across the room and dropped upon
+her knees before a little couch, buried her face in a pillow and shook
+with anger and grief.
+
+Sam had turned and walked out of the room. The emotions of the sister
+had seemed to him to have the flavour of one of Windy's outbreaks.
+
+"She likes it," he had thought, dismissing the incident. "She likes
+believing in lies. She is like Windy and would rather believe in them
+than not."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer's house and beat on
+the door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, holding a lamp
+above her head, appeared at the door. With Telfer she went back through
+the streets to the front of Sam's house thinking of the terrible choked
+and disfigured man they should find there. She went along clinging to
+Telfer's arm as she had clung to Sam's, unconscious of her bare head
+and scanty attire. In his hand Telfer carried a lantern secured from the
+stable.
+
+In the road before the house they found nothing. Telfer went up and down
+swinging the lantern and peering into gutters. The woman walked beside
+him, her skirts lifted and the mud splashing upon her bare leg.
+
+Suddenly Telfer threw back his head and laughed. Taking her hand he led
+Mary with a rush up the bank and through the gate.
+
+"What a muddle-headed old fool I am!" he cried. "I am getting old and
+addle-pated! Windy McPherson is not dead! Nothing could kill that old
+war horse! He was in at Wildman's grocery after nine o'clock to-night
+covered with mud and swearing he had been in a fight with Art Sherman.
+Poor Sam and you--to have come to me and to have found me a stupid ass!
+Fool! Fool! What a fool I have become!"
+
+In at the kitchen door ran Mary and Telfer, frightening the woman by
+the stove so that she sprang to her feet and began nervously making the
+false teeth rattle with her tongue. In the parlour they found Sam, his
+head upon the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand
+of Jane McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood stooped
+over and kissed his wet hair as the neighbour woman came in at the
+doorway bearing the kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, holding his finger to
+his lips, commanded silence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He
+thought that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become
+coarsened--she looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had
+an air of having quarrelled with her husband when they came out of
+their bedroom in the morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the
+parlour, astonished and irritated by the endless number of women that
+crowded into the house. They were everywhere, in the kitchen, the
+sleeping room back of the parlour; and in the parlour, where the
+dead woman lay in her coffin, they were massed. When the thin-lipped
+minister, holding a book in his hand, held forth upon the virtues of
+the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the floor and thought that thus
+they would have wept over the body of the dead Windy, had his fingers
+but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister would have talked
+in the same way--blatantly and without knowledge--of the virtues of the
+dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved husband, in new
+black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious undertaker kept
+moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his trade.
+
+During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the
+floor at Sam's feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to
+distract his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of
+the weeping women, none of whom had before been in the house and all
+of whom he thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of
+privacy. The note was from John Telfer.
+
+"I will not come to your mother's funeral," he wrote. "I respected your
+mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she
+is dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in
+Wildman's, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the
+moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore's shop, I will
+go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If
+he or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their
+friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know
+that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take
+them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of
+the dead."
+
+The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something
+that had slipped from him.
+
+"It is good sense, after all," he thought, and realised that even in the
+days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the
+fact that Jane McPherson's long, hard role was just being played out
+to the end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore
+was beating upon his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with
+a flourish. He arose, interrupting the minister's discourse. Mary
+Underwood had come in just as the minister began talking and had dropped
+into an obscure corner near the door leading into the street. Sam
+crowded past the women who stared and the minister who frowned and the
+baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands and, dropping the note into
+her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking and listening with
+breathless curiosity, "It is from John Telfer. Read it. Even he, hating
+women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door."
+
+In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their
+heads together and their hands before their faces, nodded toward
+the school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had
+created, went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting
+until the talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the
+streets should be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book.
+
+"I have become older than all of these people here," thought the youth.
+"They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of
+my hand."
+
+Mary Underwood, lacking Sam's unconsciousness of the people, looked
+about with burning cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and putting their
+heads together, a chill of fear ran through her. Into the room had been
+thrust the face of an old enemy to her--the scandal of a small town.
+Picking up the note she slipped out at the door and stole away along
+the street. The old maternal love for Sam had returned strengthened and
+ennobled by the terror through which she had passed with him that night
+in the rain. Going to her house she whistled the collie dog and set out
+along a country road. At the edge of a grove of trees she stopped, sat
+down on a log, and read Telfer's note. From the soft ground into which
+her feet sank there came the warm pungent smell of the new growth. Tears
+came into her eyes. She thought that in a few days much had come to her.
+She had got a boy upon whom she could pour out the mother love in her
+heart, and she had made a friend of Telfer, whom she had long regarded
+with fear and doubt.
+
+For a month Sam lingered in Caxton. It seemed to him there was something
+that wanted doing there. He sat with the men at the back of Wildman's,
+and walked aimlessly through the streets and out of the town along the
+country roads, where men worked all day in the fields behind sweating
+horses, ploughing the land. The thrill of spring was in the air, and
+in the evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree below his bedroom
+window. Sam walked and loitered in silence, looking at the ground.
+In his mind was the dread of people. The talk of the men in the store
+wearied him and when he went alone into the country he found himself
+accompanied by the voices of all of those he had come out of town to
+escape. On the street corner the thin-lipped, brown-bearded minister
+stopped him and talked of the future life as he had stopped and talked
+to a bare-legged newsboy.
+
+"Your mother," he said, "has but gone before. It is for you to get into
+the narrow path and follow her. God has sent this sorrow as a warning
+to you. He wants you also to get into the way of life and in the end to
+join her. Begin coming to our church. Join in the work of the Christ.
+Find truth."
+
+Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The
+minister's talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of
+which he got but one thought.
+
+"Find truth," he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his
+mind play with the idea. "The best men are all trying to do that. They
+spend their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth."
+
+He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the
+interpretation he had put upon the minister's words. The terrible
+moments in the kitchen followed by his mother's death had put a new
+look of seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of
+responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the
+street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become
+public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public
+affairs.
+
+"He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour's wife," said
+John Telfer.
+
+Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken
+him to its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had
+encouraged him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father,
+and patronised him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was
+a boy, scurrying between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a
+Saturday night, there was always some one to speak a word to him of his
+morals and to shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected
+to remain there, with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the
+Savings Bank--built to that during his years with Freedom Smith--he
+might soon become one of the town's solid men.
+
+He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and
+that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the
+train and be off.
+
+One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences,
+hearing the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the
+smell of the new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town
+and sat down on a low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the
+railroad station, to wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken
+on a new meaning to him since any day might see him on such a train
+bound into his new life.
+
+A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed
+by two women.
+
+"Here, watch these," he said to the women, setting the bags upon
+the platform; "I will go for the tickets," and disappeared into the
+darkness.
+
+The two women resumed their interrupted talk.
+
+"Ed's wife has been poorly these ten years," said one of them. "It will
+be better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long
+ride. I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to
+be train-sick."
+
+Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John
+Telfer's old talks with him.
+
+"They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away
+from here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain."
+
+He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending
+shoes on a side street back of Geiger's drug store and the two women,
+one short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery
+shop and were Eleanor Telfer's only competitors.
+
+"Well, the town knows her now for what she is," said the tall woman.
+"Milly Peters says she won't rest until she has put that stuck-up Mary
+Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house and
+it was her told Milly. I never heard such a story. To think of Jane
+McPherson working all these years and then having such goings-on in her
+house when she lay dying, Milly says that Sam went away early in the
+evening and came home late with that Underwood thing, half dressed,
+hanging on his arm. Milly's mother looked out of the window and saw
+them. Then she ran out by the kitchen stove and pretended to be asleep.
+She wanted to see what was up. And the bold hussy came right into the
+house with Sam. Then she went away, and after a while back she came with
+that John Telfer. Milly is going to see that Eleanor Telfer finds it
+out. I guess it will bring her down, too. And there is no telling
+how many other men in this town Mary Underwood is running with. Milly
+says----"
+
+The two women turned as out of the darkness came a tall figure roaring
+and swearing. Two hands flashed out and sank into their hair.
+
+"Stop it!" growled Sam, beating the two heads together, "stop your dirty
+lies!--you ugly she-beasts!"
+
+Hearing the two women screaming the man who had gone for the railroad
+tickets came running down the station platform followed by Jerry Donlin.
+Springing forward Sam knocked the shoemaker over the iron fence into a
+newly spaded flower bed and then turned to the baggage man.
+
+"They were telling lies about Mary Underwood," he shouted. "She tried to
+save me from killing my father and now they are telling lies about her."
+
+The two women picked up the bags and ran whimpering away along
+the station platform. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and
+confronted the surprised and frightened shoemaker.
+
+"What the Hell are you doing in my flower bed?" he growled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hurrying through the streets Sam's mind was in a ferment. Like the Roman
+emperor he wished that all the world had but one head that he might cut
+it off with a slash. The town that had seemed so paternal, so cheery, so
+intent upon wishing him well, now seemed horrible. He thought of it as a
+great, crawling, slimy thing lying in wait amid the cornfields.
+
+"To be saying that of her, of that white soul!" he exclaimed aloud in
+the empty street, all of his boyish loyalty and devotion to the woman
+who had put out a hand to him in his hour of trouble aroused and burning
+in him.
+
+He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a
+swinging blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to
+his own house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing
+meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets
+past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone
+and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and
+quiet. He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane
+McPherson's funeral.
+
+"It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another," he
+thought.
+
+For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy
+he saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with
+coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They
+were the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers.
+He remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the
+papers and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational
+murder cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive
+and the details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain
+their curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing
+the newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and
+over on their tongues.
+
+In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the
+thought of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small,
+unaired, unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and
+clothes--only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no
+clean thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in
+a darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such
+a yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these
+women come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat
+hurriedly and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of
+utter physical exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in
+stockinged feet before crawling away to sleep and oblivion.
+
+In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed
+ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the
+man they have snatched from society they cling also with a tenacity
+to be measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the
+craving for food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the
+despair of reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put
+the black dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, "The female of
+the species is more deadly than the male." At their worst they are to be
+seen drunk with emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution
+or immersed in the secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious
+persecution. At their best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth
+coming to them, they throw themselves into garish display of it and
+flash upon the sight of Newport or Palm Beach. In their native lair in
+the close little houses, they sleep in the bed of the man who has put
+clothes upon their backs and food into their mouths because that is the
+usage of their kind and give him of their bodies grudgingly or willingly
+as the laws of their physical needs direct. They do not love, they sell,
+instead, their bodies in the market place and cry out that man shall
+witness their virtue because they had had the joy of finding one buyer
+instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce animalism in them
+makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the days of its
+softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch again
+an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy, no
+longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite. Having
+passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of emotions
+and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the eloquence of
+evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell--the call to the one being
+brother to the call of the other--crying upon the troubled air of hot
+little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of vulgarity, "The
+weight of my sins is heavy on my soul." Along streets they go lifting
+heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel to roll
+upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the life
+of a Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its
+offal. Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air,
+dream dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of
+animal youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door
+to kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has
+found a carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it
+forward to the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the
+fine emotion of achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having
+hysteria rather than reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of
+femininity--and none of it. For the most part they live and die unseen,
+unknown, eating rank food, sleeping overmuch, and sitting through
+summer afternoons rocking in chairs and looking at people passing in the
+street. In the end they die full of faith, hoping for a life to come.
+
+Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making
+on Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields
+that lay beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness
+and he thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that
+had been marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and
+shivered as he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air
+aggravating the dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the
+assurance of the days before his mother's illness and to get again the
+strong belief in his own destiny that had kept him at the money making
+and saving and had urged him to the efforts to rise above the level of
+the man who bred him. He didn't succeed. The feeling of age that had
+settled upon him in the midst of the people mourning over the body of
+his mother came back, and, turning, he went along the road toward the
+town, saying to himself: "I will go and talk to Mary Underwood."
+
+While he waited on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided
+that after all a marriage with her might lead to happiness. The half
+spiritual, half physical love of woman that is the glory and mystery of
+youth was gone from him. He thought that if he could only drive from her
+presence the fear of the faces that had been coming and going in his own
+mind he would, for his own part, be content to live his life as a worker
+and money maker, one without dreams.
+
+Mary Underwood came to the door wearing the same heavy long coat she had
+worn on that other night and taking her by the hand Sam led her to the
+edge of the veranda. He looked with content at the pine trees before
+the house, thinking that some benign influence must have guided the hand
+that planted them there to stand clothed and decent amid the barrenness
+of the land at the end of winter.
+
+"What is it, boy?" asked the woman, and her voice was filled with
+anxiety. The maternal passion again glowing in her had for days coloured
+all her thoughts, and with all the ardour of an intense nature she had
+thrown herself into her love of Sam. Thinking of him, she felt in fancy
+the pangs of birth, and in her bed at night relived with him his boyhood
+in the town and built again her plans for his future. In the day time
+she laughed at herself and said tenderly, "You are an old fool."
+
+Brutally and frankly Sam told her of the thing he had heard on the
+station platform, looking past her at the pine trees and gripping the
+veranda rail. From the dead land there came again the smell of the new
+growth as it had come to him on the road before the revelation at the
+railroad station.
+
+"Something kept telling me not to go away," he said. "It must have been
+in the air--this thing. Already these evil crawling things were at work.
+Oh, if only all the world, like you and Telfer and some of the others
+here, had an appreciation of the sense of privacy."
+
+Mary Underwood laughed quietly.
+
+"I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making
+you a man at work upon the things of the mind," she said. "The sense of
+privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer's method was
+better than my own. He has given you the knack of saying things with a
+flourish."
+
+Sam shook his head.
+
+"Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh," he said
+stoutly. "Here is something at you--it is tearing at you--it has got to
+be met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter over
+in their minds. To-morrow they will be at you again. There is but one
+way and we must take it. You and I will have to marry."
+
+Mary looked at the serious new lines of his face.
+
+"What a proposal!" she cried.
+
+On an impulse she began singing, her voice fine and strong running
+through the quiet night.
+
+  "He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"
+
+she sang, and laughed again.
+
+"You should come like that," she said, and then, "you poor muddled boy.
+Don't you know that I am your new mother?" she added, taking hold of
+his two arms and turning him about facing her. "Don't be absurd. I don't
+want a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him.
+I adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick
+and covered with mud. As for these women--away with them--I'll face them
+down--I did it once before and I'll do it again. Go to your city and
+make your fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman's fight."
+
+"It is horrible. You don't understand," Sam protested.
+
+A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood's face.
+
+"I understand," she said. "I have been on that battlefield. It is to be
+won only by silence and tireless waiting. Your very effort to help would
+make the matter worse."
+
+The woman and the tall boy, suddenly become a man, stood in thought.
+She was thinking of the end toward which her life was drifting.
+How differently she had planned it. She thought of the college in
+Massachusetts and of the men and women walking under the elm trees
+there.
+
+"But I have got me a son and I am going to keep him," she said aloud,
+putting her hand on Sam's arm.
+
+Very serious and troubled, Sam went down the gravel path toward the
+road. He felt there was something cowardly in the part she had given him
+to play, but he could see no alternative.
+
+"After all," he reflected, "it is sensible--it is a woman's battle."
+
+Half way to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his
+arms and gave her a great hug.
+
+"Good-bye, little Mother," he cried and kissed her upon the lips.
+
+And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was
+overcome with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning
+against the house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling
+through her tears she called after him.
+
+"Did you crack their heads hard, boy?" she asked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From Mary's house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had
+come to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen
+table with pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the
+parlour he could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and
+writing again. Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read
+over and over what he had written, and putting on his coat went through
+the dawn to the house of Tom Comstock, editor of the _Caxton Argus_, and
+roused him out of bed.
+
+"I'll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won't cost you anything,"
+Comstock promised. "But why run it? Let the matter drop."
+
+"I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago,"
+Sam thought.
+
+Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at
+Valmore's suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter's jewelry store. For an
+hour they bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When
+the choice was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a
+box on the counter Telfer made a speech.
+
+"I will talk straight to that boy," he declared, laughing. "I am not
+going to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have
+him fail me. I shall tell him that if he doesn't make money in that
+Chicago I shall come and take the watch from him."
+
+Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along
+the street to Eleanor's shop. He strutted through the display room and
+into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.
+
+"What am I going to do, Eleanor?" he demanded, standing with legs spread
+apart and frowning down upon her, "what am I going to do without Sam?"
+
+A freckle-faced boy opened the shop door and threw a newspaper on the
+floor. The boy had a ringing voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer went
+again through the display room, touching with his cane the posts upon
+which hung the finished hats, and whistling. Standing before the shop,
+with the cane hooked upon his arm, he rolled a cigarette and watched the
+boy running from door to door along the street.
+
+"I shall have to be adopting a new son," he said musingly.
+
+After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood in his white nightgown and re-read
+the statement just given him. He read it over and over, and then, laying
+it on the kitchen table, filled and lighted a corncob pipe. A draft of
+wind blew into the room under the kitchen door chilling his thin shanks
+so that he drew his bare feet, one after the other, up behind the
+protective walls of his nightgown.
+
+"On the night of my mother's death," ran the statement, "I sat in the
+kitchen of our house eating my supper when my father came in and began
+shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother who was asleep. I
+put my hand at his throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, and
+carried him around the house and threw him into the road. Then I ran to
+the house of Mary Underwood, who was once my schoolteacher, and told her
+what I had done. She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went
+to look for the body of my father, who was not dead after all. John
+McPherson knows this is true, if he can be made to tell the truth."
+
+Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous woman with red cheeks,
+who set up type in the shop, did her own housework, and gathered most of
+the news and advertising for _The Argus_.
+
+"Ain't that a slasher?" he asked, handing her the statement Sam had
+written.
+
+"Well, it ought to stop the mean things they are saying about Mary
+Underwood," she snapped. Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and
+looking at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her much help
+with _The Argus_, was the best checker player in Caxton and had once
+been to a state tournament of experts in that sport, she added, "Poor
+Jane McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better father for him
+than that liar Windy. Choked him, eh? Well, if the men of this town had
+any spunk they would finish the job."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns
+in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like
+Freedom Smith, bought the farmers' products. On Sundays he sat in chairs
+before country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or,
+getting back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown
+streets and among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on
+the road. From time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with
+the men in Wildman's, stealing away later for an evening with Mary
+Underwood.
+
+In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the
+farmer's widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In
+the store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose--the same John Telfer
+had watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show
+Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker
+barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging
+cane and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer
+had not got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad
+station and make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the
+loss of that opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and
+thinking of many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour
+to the speech he had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam,
+while the gift had touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind
+the essential solid goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he
+lost much of the bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood,
+had been able to make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his
+room in Chicago he had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting
+in and taking out flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of
+thanks.
+
+Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now
+that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom
+Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in
+the wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore's shop as the blacksmith
+walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.
+
+"What has happened to Sam--he has changed so much?" he asked, dropping
+a foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel. "Already the
+city has changed him," he added regretfully.
+
+Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.
+
+"He bites off his words," continued Valmore; "he sits for an hour in the
+store and then goes away, and doesn't come back to say good-bye when he
+leaves town. What has got into him?"
+
+Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust
+of the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had
+been hurled at him.
+
+"If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all
+right," he exploded. "He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes
+to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like
+it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing,
+hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy
+from the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the
+money-maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems
+of life and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great
+game in which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited
+patiently until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would
+possess. With the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they
+pounced and Sam felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with
+country buyers used it ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look
+that came into the eyes of unsuccessful business men at critical moments
+and watched for it and took advantage of it as a successful prize
+fighter watches for a similar vague, uncertain look in the eyes of an
+opponent.
+
+He had found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that
+comes with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the
+successful business men about him is the stroke also of the master
+painter, scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of
+Whistler, Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been
+in him when as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook,
+and now and then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road.
+In the city where men of wealth and power in affairs rubbed elbows with
+him in the street cars and walked past him in hotel lobbies he watched
+and waited saying to himself, "I also will be such a one."
+
+Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked
+on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of
+himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a
+knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of
+vast work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but
+for the most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about
+him, keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.
+
+During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton
+family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but
+that still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer
+vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed
+him during the month after his mother's death, and letters regarding him
+had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down
+to dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and
+talk of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.
+
+"I was thinking of old John Moore to-day--does he still drive that
+team of black ponies?" the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman
+of thirty, would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a
+conversation of baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new
+office building to be erected in the Loop.
+
+"No, he don't," Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in
+a machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake
+been the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that
+he looked upon Sam as an intruder. "John told me last summer when I was
+home that he intended to sell the blacks and buy mules," he would add,
+looking at the youth challengingly.
+
+The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar
+and bustle of Chicago's vast west side, it still turned with hungry
+heart toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for
+Jake, its mainstay, could be found in that paradise.
+
+Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey
+moustache, and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so
+that they stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of
+a lawn, worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night,
+going to bed at nine o'clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling,
+from room to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers,
+or sitting in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the
+habits formed in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home
+with his pay in his pocket, settled with the two sisters for the
+week's living, sat down to dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then
+disappeared upon the troubled waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening
+he re-appeared, with empty pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and
+a noisy attempt at self-possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl
+into bed in preparation for another week of toil and respectability. The
+man had a certain Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new
+ladies met on his weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall.
+He once took Sam upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half
+around the room.
+
+Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of
+thirty-five who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and
+blessed with a remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical
+student in the front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired
+woman stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer
+from a wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little
+Southern wife.
+
+The women in the Pergrin house seemed to Sam tremendously concerned
+about their health and each evening talked of the matter, he thought,
+more than his mother had talked during her illness. While Sam lived with
+them they were all under the influence of a strange sort of faith healer
+and took what they called "Health Suggestion" treatments. Twice each
+week the faith healer came to the house, laid his hands upon their backs
+and took their money. The treatment afforded Jake a never-ending source
+of amusement and in the evening he went through the house putting his
+hands upon the backs of the women and demanding money from them, but
+the dry-goods buyer's wife, who for years had coughed at night, slept
+peacefully after some weeks of the treatment and the cough did not
+return while Sam remained in the house.
+
+In the house Sam had a standing. Glowing tales of his shrewdness in
+business, his untiring industry, and the size of his bank account, had
+preceded him from Caxton, and these tales the Pergrins, in their loyalty
+to the town and to all the products of the town, did not allow to shrink
+in the re-telling. The housekeeping sister, a kindly woman, became fond
+of Sam, and in his absence would boast of him to chance callers or to
+the boarders gathered in the living room in the evening. She it was who
+laid the foundation of the medical student's belief that Sam was a kind
+of genius in money matters, a belief that enabled him later to make a
+successful assault upon a legacy which came to that young man.
+
+Frank Eckardt, the medical student, Sam took as a friend. On Sunday
+afternoons they went to walk in the streets, or, taking two girl friends
+of Frank's, who were also students at the medical school, on their arms,
+they went to the park and sat upon benches under the trees.
+
+For one of these young women Sam conceived a regard that approached
+tenderness. Sunday after Sunday he spent with her, and once, walking
+through the park on an evening in the late fall, the dry brown leaves
+rustling under their feet and the sun going down in red splendour before
+their eyes, he took her hand and walked in silence, feeling tremendously
+alive and vital as he had felt on that other night walking under the
+trees of Caxton with the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker.
+
+That nothing came of the affair and that after a time he did not see
+the girl again was due, he thought, to his own growing interest in money
+making and to the fact that there was in her, as in Frank Eckardt, a
+blind devotion to something that he could not himself understand.
+
+Once he had a talk with Eckardt of the matter. "She is fine and
+purposeful like a woman I knew in my home town," he said, thinking of
+Eleanor Telfer, "but she will not talk to me of her work as sometimes
+she talks to you. I want her to talk. There is something about her that
+I do not understand and that I want to understand. I think that she
+likes me and once or twice I have thought she would not greatly mind my
+making love to her, but I do not understand her just the same."
+
+One day in the office of the company for which he worked Sam became
+acquainted with a young advertising man named Jack Prince, a brisk, very
+much alive young fellow who made money rapidly, spent it lavishly, and
+had friends and acquaintances in every office, every hotel lobby, every
+bar room and restaurant in the down-town section of the city. The chance
+acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. The clever, witty Prince made
+a kind of hero of Sam, admiring his reserve and good sense and boasting
+of him far and wide through the town. With Prince, Sam occasionally went
+on mild carouses, and, once, in the midst of thousands of people sitting
+about tables and drinking beer at the Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, he and
+Prince got into a fight with two waiters, Prince declaring he had been
+cheated and Sam, although he thought his friend in the wrong, striking
+out with his fist and dragging Prince through the door and into a
+passing street car in time to avoid a rush of other waiters hurrying to
+the aid of the one who lay dazed and sputtering on the sawdust floor.
+
+After these evenings of carousal, carried on with Jack Prince and with
+young men met on trains and about country hotels, Sam spent hour after
+hour walking about town absorbed in his own thoughts and getting his own
+impressions of what he saw. In the affairs with the young men he played,
+for the most part, a passive role, going with them from place to place
+and drinking until they became loud and boisterous, or morose and
+quarrelsome, and then slipping away to his own room, amused or irritated
+as the circumstances, or the temperament of his companions, had made
+or marred the joviality of the evening. On his nights alone, he put his
+hands into his pockets and walked for endless miles through the lighted
+streets, getting in a dim way a realisation of the hugeness of life. All
+of the faces going past him, the women in their furs, the young men
+with cigars in their mouths going to the theatres, the bald old men with
+watery eyes, the boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and
+the slim prostitutes lurking in the hallways, should have interested him
+deeply. In his youth, and with the pride of sleeping power in him, he
+saw them only as so many individuals that might some day test their
+ability against his own. And if he peered at them closely and marked
+down face after face in the crowds it was as a sitter in the great game
+of business that he looked, exercising his mind by imagining this or
+that one arrayed against him in deals, and planning the method by which
+he would win in the imaginary struggle.
+
+There was at that time in Chicago a place, to be reached by a bridge
+above the Illinois Central Railroad track, that Sam sometimes visited
+on stormy nights to watch the lake lashed by the wind. Great masses
+of water moving swiftly and silently broke with a roar against wooden
+piles, backed by hills of stone and earth, and the spray from the broken
+waves fell upon Sam's face and on winter nights froze on his coat. He
+had learned to smoke, and leaning upon the railing of the bridge would
+stand for hours with a pipe in his mouth looking at the moving water,
+filled with awe and admiration of the silent power of it.
+
+One night in September, when he was walking alone in the streets, an
+incident happened that showed him also a silent power within himself,
+a power that startled and for the moment frightened him. Walking into
+a little street back of Dearborn, he was suddenly aware of the faces of
+women looking out at him through small square windows cut in the fronts
+of the houses. Here and there, before and behind him, were the faces;
+voices called, smiles invited, hands beckoned. Up and down the street
+went men looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their
+necks, their hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces
+of the women pressed against the little squares of glass and then,
+turning, suddenly, sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued.
+Among the walkers on the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats
+whose feet scuffled as they hurried along, and young boys with the pink
+of virtue in their cheeks. In the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It
+got into Sam's brain and he stood hesitating and uncertain, startled,
+nerveless, afraid. He remembered a story he had once heard from John
+Telfer, a story of the disease and death that lurks in the little side
+streets of cities, and ran into Van Buren Street and from that into
+lighted State. He climbed up the stairway of the elevated railroad and
+jumping on the first train went away south to walk for hours on a gravel
+roadway at the edge of the lake in Jackson Park. The wind from the lake
+and the laughter and talk of people passing under the lights cooled
+the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the eloquence of John
+Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his voice marshalling
+the armies of the standing corn.
+
+Into Sam's mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great
+masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there
+was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of,
+moving always forward, silent, powerful--the force of sex. He wondered
+how the force would be broken in his own case, against what breakwater
+it would spend itself. At midnight, he went home across the city and
+crept into his alcove in the Pergrin house, puzzled and for the time
+utterly tired. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and
+resolutely closing his eyes tried to sleep. "There are things not to
+be understood," he told himself. "To live decently is a matter of good
+sense. I will keep thinking of what I want to do and not go into such a
+place again."
+
+One day, when he had been in Chicago two years, there happened an
+incident of another sort, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, so full
+of youth, that for days after it happened he thought of it with delight,
+and walked in the streets or sat in a passenger train laughing joyfully
+at the remembrance of some new detail of the affair.
+
+Sam, who was the son of Windy McPherson and who had more than once
+ruthlessly condemned all men who put liquor into their mouths, got
+drunk, and for eighteen hours went shouting poetry, singing songs, and
+yelling at the stars like a wood god on the bend.
+
+Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in
+DeJonge's restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before
+him on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers,
+talked to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.
+
+"He will be late, of course," he exclaimed, refilling Sam's glass. "The
+man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would
+take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from
+the cheeks of a maiden."
+
+Sam had already seen the man for whom they waited. He was thirty-five,
+small and narrow-shouldered, with a little wrinkled face, a huge nose,
+and a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. Sam had seen him in
+a Michigan Avenue club with Prince solemnly pitching silver dollars at a
+chalk mark on the floor with a group of serious, solid-looking old men.
+
+"They are the crowd that have just put through the big deal in Kansas
+oil stock and the little one is Morris, who handled the publicity for
+them," Prince had explained.
+
+Later, when they were walking down Michigan Avenue, Prince talked at
+length of Morris, whom he admired immensely. "He is the best advertising
+and publicity man in America," he declared. "He isn't a four-flusher,
+as I am, and does not make as much money, but he can take another man's
+ideas and express them so simply and forcibly that they tell the
+man's story better than he knew it himself. And that's all there is to
+advertising."
+
+He began laughing.
+
+"It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the
+man for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every
+pat phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He
+will howl like a beast at paying Tom's bill, and then the next time he
+will try to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so
+that he has to send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like
+shelling corn off the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him."
+
+Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge
+pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. "I am on my way
+to the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company," he
+explained to Prince. "I can't stop at all. I have here the layout of
+a circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common
+stock of theirs that hasn't paid a dividend for ten years."
+
+Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. "Never mind
+the Biscuit Machine people and their stock," he commanded; "they will
+always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to
+meet McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help
+him with."
+
+Morris reached across the table and took Sam's hand; his own was small
+and soft like that of a woman. "I am worked to death," he complained;
+"I have my eye on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am going down there to
+live."
+
+For an hour the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked of
+a place in Wisconsin where the fish should be biting. "A man has told me
+of the place twenty times," he declared; "I am sure I could find it on
+a railroad folder. I have never been fishing nor have you, and Sam here
+comes from a place to which they carry water in wagons over the plains."
+
+The little man who had been drinking copiously of the wine looked from
+Prince to Sam. From time to time he took off his glasses and wiped them
+with a handkerchief. "I don't understand your being in such society," he
+announced; "you have the solid, substantial look of a bucket-shop man.
+Prince here will get nowhere. He is honest, sells wind and his charming
+society, and spends the money that he gets, instead of marrying and
+putting it in his wife's name."
+
+Prince arose. "It is useless to waste time in persiflage," he began
+and then turning to Sam, "There is a place in Wisconsin," he said
+uncertainly.
+
+Morris picked up the portfolio and with a grotesque effort at steadiness
+started for the door followed by Prince and Sam walking with wavering
+steps. In the street Prince took the portfolio out of the little man's
+hand. "Let your mother carry it, Tommy," he said, shaking his finger
+under Morris's nose. He began singing a lullaby. "When the bough bends
+the cradle will fall."
+
+The three men walked out of Monroe and into State Street, Sam's head
+feeling strangely light. The buildings along the street reeled against
+the sky. A sudden fierce longing for wild adventure seized him. On a
+corner Morris stopped, took the handkerchief from his pocket and again
+wiped his glasses. "I want to be sure that I see clearly," he said; "it
+seems to me that in the bottom of that last glass of wine I saw three
+of us in a cab with a basket of life oil on the seat between us going
+to the station to catch the train for that place Jack's friend told fish
+lies about."
+
+The next eighteen hours opened up a new world to Sam. With the fumes of
+liquor rising in his brain, he rode for two hours on a train, tramped
+in the darkness along dusty roads and, building a bonfire in a woods,
+danced in the light of it upon the grass, holding the hands of Prince
+and the little man with the wrinkled face. Solemnly he stood upon a
+stump at the edge of a wheatfield and recited Poe's "Helen," taking on
+the voice, the gestures and even the habit of spreading his legs apart,
+of John Telfer. And then overdoing the last, he sat down suddenly on the
+stump, and Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand said, "Fill
+the lamp, man--the light of reason has gone out."
+
+From the bonfire in the woods and Sam's recital from the stump, the
+three friends emerged again upon the road, and a belated farmer driving
+home half asleep on the seat of his wagon caught their attention. With
+the skill of an Indian boy the diminutive Morris sprang upon the wagon
+and thrust a ten dollar bill into the farmer's hand. "Lead us, O man of
+the soil!" he shouted, "Lead us to a gilded palace of sin! Take us to a
+saloon! The life oil gets low in the can!"
+
+Beyond the long, jolting ride in the wagon Sam never became quite clear.
+In his mind ran vague notions of a wild carousal in a country tavern, of
+himself acting as bartender, and a huge red-faced woman rushing here and
+there under the direction of a tiny man, dragging reluctant rustics to
+the bar and commanding them to keep on drinking the beer that Sam drew
+until the last of the ten dollars given to the man of the wagon should
+have gone into her cash drawer. Also, he thought that Jack Prince
+had put a chair upon the bar and that he sat on it explaining to the
+hurrying drawer of beer that although the Egyptian kings had built great
+pyramids to celebrate themselves they never built anything more gigantic
+than the jag Tom Morris was building among the farm hands in the room.
+
+Later Sam thought that he and Jack Prince tried to sleep under a pile of
+grain sacks in a shed and that Morris came to them weeping because every
+one in the world was asleep and most of them lying under tables.
+
+And then, his head clearing, Sam found himself with the two others
+walking again upon the dusty road in the dawn and singing songs.
+
+On the train, with the help of a Negro porter, the three men tried
+to efface the dust and the stains of the wild night. The pasteboard
+portfolio containing the circular for the Biscuit Machine Company was
+still under Jack Prince's arm and the little man, wiping and re-wiping
+his glasses, peered at Sam.
+
+"Did you come with us or are you a child we have adopted here in these
+parts?" he asked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street in Chicago where Sam
+came to make his business start in the city, and it was proof of the dry
+unresponsiveness in him that he did not sense more fully its meaning and
+its message. All day the food stuff of a vast city flowed through the
+narrow streets. Blue-shirted, broad-shouldered teamsters from the tops
+of high piled wagons bawled at scurrying pedestrians. On the sidewalks
+in boxes, bags, and barrels, lay oranges from Florida and California,
+figs from Arabia, bananas from Jamaica, nuts from the hills of Spain and
+the plains of Africa, cabbages from Ohio, beans from Michigan, corn
+and potatoes from Iowa. In December, fur-coated men hurried through the
+forests of northern Michigan gathering Christmas trees that found
+their way to warm firesides through the street. And summer and winter a
+million hens laid the eggs that were gathered there, and the cattle on
+a thousand hills sent their yellow butter fat packed in tubs and piled
+upon trucks to add to the confusion.
+
+Into this street Sam walked, thinking little of the wonder of these
+things and thinking haltingly, getting his sense of the bigness of it in
+dollars and cents. Standing in the doorway of the commission house for
+which he was to work, strong, well clad, able and efficient, he looked
+through the streets, seeing and hearing the hurry and the roar and the
+shouting of voices, and then with a smile upon his lips went inside. In
+his brain was an unexpressed thought. As the old Norse marauders looked
+at the cities sitting in their splendour on the Mediterranean so looked
+he. "What loot!" a voice within him said, and his brain began devising
+methods by which he should get his share of it.
+
+Years later, when Sam was a man of big affairs, he drove one day in
+a carriage through the streets and turning to his companion, a
+grey-haired, dignified Boston man who sat beside him, said, "I worked
+here once and used to sit on a barrel of apples at the edge of the
+sidewalk thinking how clever I was to make more money in one month than
+the man who raised the apples made in a year."
+
+The Boston man, stirred by the sight of so much foodstuff and moved to
+epigram by his mood, looked up and down the street.
+
+"The foodstuff of an empire rattling o'er the stones," he said.
+
+"I should have made more money here," answered Sam dryly.
+
+The commission firm for which Sam worked was a partnership, not a
+corporation, and was owned by two brothers. Of the two Sam thought that
+the elder, a tall, bald, narrow-shouldered man, with a long narrow face
+and a suave manner, was the real master, and represented most of the
+ability in the partnership. He was oily, silent, tireless. All day he
+went in and out of the office and warehouses and up and down the crowded
+street, sucking nervously at an unlighted cigar. He was a great worker
+in a suburban church, but a shrewd and, Sam suspected, an unscrupulous
+business man. Occasionally the minister or some of the women of the
+suburban church came into the office to talk with him, and Sam was
+amused at the thought that Narrow Face, when he talked of the affairs of
+the church, bore a striking resemblance to the brown-bearded minister of
+the church in Caxton.
+
+The other brother was a far different sort, and, in business, Sam
+thought, a much inferior man. He was a heavy, broad-shouldered,
+square-faced man of about thirty, who sat in the office dictating
+letters and who stayed out two or three hours to lunch. He sent out
+letters signed by him on the firm's stationery with the title of
+General Manager, and Narrow Face let him do it. Broad Shoulders had
+been educated in New England and even after several years away from
+his college seemed more interested in it than in the welfare of the
+business. For a month or more in the spring he took most of the time
+of one of the two stenographers employed by the firm writing letters to
+graduates of Chicago high schools to induce them to go East to finish
+their education; and when a graduate of the college came to Chicago
+seeking employment, he closed his desk and spent entire days going from
+place to place, introducing, urging, recommending. Sam noticed, however,
+that when the firm employed a new man in their own office or on the road
+it was Narrow-Face who chose the man.
+
+Broad-shoulders had been a famous football player in his day and wore
+an iron brace on his leg. The offices, like most of the offices on the
+street, were dark and narrow, and smelled of decaying vegetables
+and rancid butter. Noisy Greek and Italian hucksters wrangled on the
+sidewalk in front, and among these went Narrow-Face hurrying about
+making deals.
+
+In South Water Street Sam did well, multiplying his thirty-six hundred
+dollars by ten during the three years that he stayed there, or went out
+from there to towns and cities directing a part of the great flowing
+river of foodstuff through his firm's front door.
+
+With almost his first day on the street he began seeing on all sides of
+him opportunity for gain, and set himself industriously at work to get
+his hand upon money with which to take advantage of the chances that
+he thought lay so invitingly about. Within a year he had made much
+progress. From a woman on Wabash Avenue he got six thousand dollars, and
+he planned and executed a coup that gave him the use of twenty thousand
+dollars that had come as a legacy to his friend, the medical student,
+who lived at the Pergrin house.
+
+Sam had eggs and apples lying in warehouse against a rise; game,
+smuggled across the state line from Michigan and Wisconsin, lay frozen
+in cold storage tagged with his name and ready to be sold at a long
+profit to hotels and fashionable restaurants; and there were even secret
+bushels of corn and wheat lying in other warehouses along the Chicago
+River ready to be thrown on the market at a word from him, or, the
+margins by which he kept his hold on the stuff not being forthcoming, at
+a word from a LaSalle Street broker.
+
+Getting the twenty thousand dollars out of the hands of the medical
+student was a turning point in Sam's life. Sunday after Sunday he walked
+with Eckardt in the streets or loitered with him in the parks thinking
+of the money lying idle in the bank and of the deals he might be turning
+with it in the street or on the road. Daily he saw more clearly the
+power of cash. Other commission merchants along South Water Street came
+running into the office of his firm with tense, anxious faces asking
+Narrow-Face to help them over rough spots in the day's trading.
+Broad-Shoulders, who had no business ability but who had married a rich
+woman, went on month after month taking half the profits brought in by
+the ability of his tall, shrewd brother, and Narrow-Face, who had taken
+a liking for Sam and who occasionally stopped for a word with him, spoke
+of the matter often and eloquently.
+
+"Spend your time with no one who hasn't money to help you," he said; "on
+the road look for the men with money and then try to get it. That's all
+there is to business--money-getting." And then looking across to the
+desk of his brother he would add, "I would kick half the men in business
+out of it if I could, but I myself must dance to the tune that money
+plays."
+
+One day Sam went to the office of an attorney named Webster, whose
+reputation for the shrewd drawing of contracts had come to him from
+Narrow-Face.
+
+"I want a contract drawn that will give me absolute control of twenty
+thousand dollars with no risk on my part if I lose the money and no
+promise to pay more than seven per cent if I do not lose," he said.
+
+The attorney, a slender, middle-aged man with a swarthy skin and black
+hair, put his hands on the desk before him and looked at the tall young
+man.
+
+"What collateral?" he asked.
+
+Sam shook his head. "Can you draw such a contract that will be legal and
+what will it cost me?" he asked.
+
+The lawyer laughed good naturedly. "I can draw it of course. Why not?"
+
+Sam, taking a roll of bills from his pocket, counted the amount upon the
+table.
+
+"Who are you anyway?" asked Webster. "If you can get twenty thousand and
+without collateral you're worth knowing. I might be getting up a gang to
+rob a mail train."
+
+Sam did not answer. He put the contract in his pocket and went home to
+his alcove at the Pergrins. He wanted to get by himself and think. He
+did not believe that he would by any chance lose Frank Eckardt's money,
+but he knew that Eckardt himself would draw back from the kind of deals
+that he expected to make with the money, that they would frighten and
+alarm him, and he wondered if he was being honest.
+
+In his own room after dinner Sam studied carefully the agreement drawn
+by Webster. It seemed to him to cover what he wanted covered, and
+having got it well fixed in his mind he tore it up. "There is no use his
+knowing I have been to a lawyer," he thought guiltily.
+
+Getting into bed, he began building plans for the future. With more than
+thirty thousand dollars at his command he thought that he should be able
+to make headway rapidly. "In my hands it will double itself every year,"
+he told himself and getting out of bed he drew a chair to the window and
+sat down, feeling strangely alive and awake like a young man in love. He
+saw himself going on and on, directing, managing, ruling men. It seemed
+to him that there was nothing he could not do. "I will run factories
+and banks and maybe mines and railroads," he thought and his mind leaped
+forward so that he saw himself, grey, stern, and capable, sitting at
+a broad desk high in a great stone building, a materialisation of John
+Telfer's word picture--"You will be a big man of dollars--it is plain."
+
+And then into Sam's mind came another picture. He remembered a Saturday
+afternoon when a young man had come running into the office on South
+Water Street, a young man who owed Narrow-Face a sum of money and could
+not pay it. He remembered the unpleasant tightening of the mouth and the
+sudden shrewd hard look in his employer's long narrow face. He had not
+heard much of the talk, but he was aware of a strained pleading quality
+in the voice of the young man who had said over and over slowly and
+painfully, "But, man, my honour is at stake," and of a coldness in the
+answering voice replying persistently, "With me it is not a matter of
+honour but of dollars, and I am going to get them."
+
+From the alcove window Sam looked out upon a vacant lot covered
+with patches of melting snow. Beyond the lot facing him stood a flat
+building, and the snow, melting on the roof, made a little stream that
+ran down some hidden pipe and rattled out upon the ground. The noise
+of the falling water and the sound of distant footsteps going homeward
+through the sleeping city brought back thoughts of other nights when as
+a boy in Caxton he had sat thus, thinking disconnected thoughts.
+
+Without knowing it Sam was fighting one of the real battles of his life,
+a battle in which the odds were very much against the quality in him
+that got him out of bed to look at the snow-clad vacant lot.
+
+There was in the youth much of the brute trader, blindly intent
+upon gain; much of the quality that has given America so many of its
+so-called great men. It was the quality that had sent him in secret
+to Lawyer Webster to protect himself without protecting the simple
+credulous young medical student, and that had made him say as he came
+home with the contract in his pocket, "I will do what I can," when in
+truth he meant, "I will get what I can."
+
+There may be business men in America who do not get what they can, who
+simply love power. One sees men here and there in banks, at the heads of
+great industrial trusts, in factories and in great mercantile houses of
+whom one would like to think thus. They are the men who one dreams have
+had an awakening, who have found themselves; they are the men hopeful
+thinkers try to recall again and again to the mind.
+
+To these men America is looking. It is asking them to keep the faith,
+to stand themselves up against the force of the brute trader, the dollar
+man, the man who with his one cunning wolf quality of acquisitiveness
+has too long ruled the business of the nation.
+
+I have said that the sense of equity in Sam fought an unequal battle.
+He was in business, and young in business, in a day when all America was
+seized with a blind grappling for gain. The nation was drunk with it,
+trusts were being formed, mines opened; from the ground spurted oil and
+gas; railroads creeping westward opened yearly vast empires of new land.
+To be poor was to be a fool; thought waited, art waited; and men at
+their firesides gathered their children around them and talked glowingly
+of men of dollars, holding them up as prophets fit to lead the youth of
+the young nation.
+
+Sam had in him the making of the new, the commanding man of business. It
+was that quality in him that made him sit by the window thinking before
+going to the medical student with the unfair contract, and the same
+quality had sent him forth night after night to walk alone in the
+streets when other young men went to theatres or to walk with girls in
+the park. He had, in truth, a taste for the lonely hours when thought
+grows. He was a step beyond the youth who hurries to the theatre or
+buries himself in stories of love or adventure. He had in him something
+that wanted a chance.
+
+In the flat building across the vacant lot a light appeared at a window
+and through the lighted window he saw a man clad in pajamas who propped
+a sheet of music against a dressing-table and who had a shining silver
+horn in his hand. Sam watched, filled with mild curiosity. The man,
+not reckoning on an onlooker at so late an hour, began an elaborate and
+amusing schedule of personation. He opened the window, put the horn to
+his lips and then turning bowed before the lighted room as before an
+audience. He put his hand to his lips and blew kisses about, then put
+the horn to his lips and looked again at the sheet of music.
+
+The note that came out of the window on the still air was a failure,
+it flattened into a squawk. Sam laughed and pulled down the window. The
+incident had brought back to his mind another man who bowed to a crowd
+and blew upon a horn. Getting into bed he pulled the covers about him
+and went to sleep. "I will get Frank's money if I can," he told himself,
+settling the matter that had been in his mind. "Most men are fools and
+if I do not get his money some other man will."
+
+On the next afternoon Eckardt had lunch down town with Sam. Together
+they went to a bank where Sam showed the profits of deals he had made
+and the growth of his bank account, going afterward into South Water
+Street where Sam talked glowingly of the money to be made by a shrewd
+man who knew the ways of the street and had a head upon his shoulders.
+
+"That's just it," said Frank Eckardt, falling quickly into the trap
+Sam had set, and hungering for profits; "I have money but no head on my
+shoulders for using it. I wish you would take it and see what you can
+do."
+
+With a thumping heart Sam went home across the city to the Pergrin
+house, Eckardt beside him in the elevated train. In Sam's room the
+agreement was written out by Sam and signed by Eckardt. At dinner time
+they had the drygoods buyer in to sign as witness.
+
+And the agreement turned out to Eckardt's advantage. In no year did
+Sam return him less than ten per cent, and in the end gave back the
+principal more than doubled so that Eckardt was able to retire from
+the practice of medicine and live upon the interest of his capital in a
+village near Tiffin, Ohio.
+
+With the thirty thousand dollars in his hands Sam began to reach out
+and extend the scope of his ventures. He bought and sold constantly, not
+only eggs, butter, apples, and grain, but also houses and building lots.
+Through his head marched long rows of figures. Deals worked themselves
+out in detail in his brain as he went about town drinking with young
+men, or sat at dinner in the Pergrin house. He even began working over
+in his head various schemes for getting into the firm by which he was
+employed, and thought that he might work upon Broad-Shoulders, getting
+hold of his interest and forcing himself into control. And then, the
+fear of Narrow-Face holding him back and his growing success in deals
+keeping his mind occupied, he was suddenly confronted by an opportunity
+that changed entirely the plans he was making for himself.
+
+Through Jack Prince's suggestion Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey
+Arms Company sent for him and offered him a position as buyer of all the
+materials used in their factories.
+
+It was the kind of connection Sam had unconsciously been seeking--a
+company, strong, old, conservative, known throughout the world. There
+was, in the talk with Colonel Tom, a hint of future opportunities to get
+stock in the company and perhaps to become eventually an official--these
+things were of course remote--to be dreamed of and worked toward--the
+company made it a part of its policy.
+
+Sam said nothing, but already he had decided to accept the place, and
+was thinking of a profitable arrangement touching percentages on the
+amount saved in buying that had worked out so well for him during his
+years with Freedom Smith.
+
+Sam's work for the firearms company took him off the road and confined
+him to an office all day long. In a way he regretted this. The
+complaints he had heard among travelling men in country hotels with
+regard to the hardship of travel meant nothing to his mind. Any kind of
+travel was a keen pleasure to him. Against the hardships and discomforts
+he balanced the tremendous advantages of seeing new places and faces
+and getting a look into many lives, and he looked back with a kind of
+retrospective joy on the three years of hurrying from place to place,
+catching trains, and talking with chance acquaintances met by the way.
+Also, the years on the road had given him many opportunities for secret
+and profitable deals of his own.
+
+Over against these advantages the place at Rainey's threw him into close
+and continuous association with men of big affairs. The offices of the
+Arms Company occupied an entire floor of one of Chicago's newest and
+biggest skyscrapers and millionaire stockholders and men high in the
+service of the state and of the government at Washington came in and
+went out at the door. Sam looked at them closely. He wanted to have a
+tilt with them and try if his Caxton and South Water Street shrewdness
+would keep the head upon his shoulders in LaSalle Street. The
+opportunity seemed to him a big one and he went about his work quietly
+and ably, intent upon making the most of it.
+
+The Rainey Arms Company, at the time of Sam's coming with it, was still
+largely owned by the Rainey family, father and daughter. Colonel Rainey,
+a grey-whiskered military looking man with a paunch, was the president
+and largest individual stockholder. He was a pompous, swaggering old
+fellow with a habit of making the most trivial statement with the air
+of a judge pronouncing the death sentence, and sat dutifully at his desk
+day after day looking very important and thoughtful, smoking long black
+cigars and signing personally piles of letters brought him by the heads
+of various departments. He looked upon himself as a silent but very
+important spoke in the government at Washington and every day issued
+many orders which the men at the heads of departments received with
+respect and disregarded in secret. Twice he had been prominently
+mentioned in connection with cabinet positions in the national
+government, and in talks with his cronies at clubs and restaurants he
+gave the impression of having actually refused an offer of appointment
+on both occasions.
+
+Having got himself established as a factor in the management of the
+business, Sam found many things that surprised him. In every company of
+which he knew there was some one man to whom all looked for guidance,
+who at critical moments became dominant, saying "Do this, or that," and
+making no explanations. In the Rainey Company he found no such man, but,
+instead, a dozen strong departments, each with its own head and each
+more or less independent of the others.
+
+Sam lay in his bed at night and went about in the evening thinking of
+this and of its meaning. Among the department heads there was a great
+deal of loyalty and devotion to Colonel Tom, and he thought that among
+them were a few men who were devoted to other interests than their own.
+
+At the same time he told himself there was something wrong. He himself
+had no such feeling of loyalty and although he was willing to give
+lip service to the resounding talk of the colonel about the fine old
+traditions of the company, he could not bring himself to a belief in the
+idea of conducting a vast business on a system founded upon lip service
+to traditions, or upon loyalty to an individual.
+
+"There must be loose ends lying about everywhere," he thought and
+followed the thought with another. "A man will come along, pick up these
+loose ends, and run the whole shop. Why not I?"
+
+The Rainey Arms Company had made its millions for the Rainey and
+Whittaker families during the Civil War. Whittaker had been an inventor,
+making one of the first practical breech-loading guns, and the original
+Rainey had been a dry-goods merchant in an Illinois town who backed the
+inventor.
+
+It proved itself a rare combination. Whittaker developed into a
+wonderful shop manager for his day, and, from the first, stayed at home
+building rifles and making improvements, enlarging the plant, getting
+out the goods. The drygoods merchant scurried about the country, going
+to Washington and to the capitals of the individual states, pulling
+wires, appealing to patriotism and state pride, taking big orders at fat
+prices.
+
+In Chicago there is a tradition that more than once he went south of the
+Dixie line and that following these trips thousands of Rainey-Whittaker
+rifles found their way into the hands of Confederate soldiers, but this
+story which increased Sam's respect for the energetic little drygoods
+merchant, Colonel Tom, his son, indignantly denied. In reality Colonel
+Tom would have liked to think of the first Rainey as a huge, Jove-like
+god of arms. Like Windy McPherson of Caxton, given a chance, he would
+have invented a new ancestor.
+
+After the Civil War, and Colonel Tom's growing to manhood, the Rainey
+and Whittaker fortunes were merged into one through the marriage of Jane
+Whittaker, the last of her line, to the only surviving Rainey, and upon
+her death her fortune, grown to more than a million, stood in the name
+of Sue Rainey, twenty-six, the only issue of the marriage.
+
+From the first day, Sam began to forge ahead in the Rainey Company. In
+the buying end he found a rich field for spectacular money saving and
+money making and made the most of it. The position as buyer had for
+ten years been occupied by a distant cousin to Colonel Tom, now dead.
+Whether the cousin was a fool or a knave Sam could never quite decide
+and did not greatly care, but after he had got the situation in hand
+he felt that the man must have cost the company a tremendous sum, which
+_he_ intended to save.
+
+Sam's arrangement with the company gave him, besides a fair salary, half
+he saved in the fixed prices of standard materials. These prices had
+stood fixed for years and Sam went into them, cutting right and left,
+and making for himself during his first year twenty-three thousand
+dollars. At the end of the year, when the directors asked to have an
+adjustment made and the percentage contract annulled, he got a generous
+slice of company stock, the respect of Colonel Tom Rainey and the
+directors, the fear of some of the department heads, the loyal devotion
+of others, and the title of Treasurer of the company.
+
+The Rainey Arms Company was in truth living largely upon the reputation
+built up for it by the first pushing energetic Rainey, and the inventive
+genius of his partner, Whittaker. Under Colonel Tom it had found
+new conditions and new competition which he had ignored, or met in a
+half-hearted way, standing on its reputation, its financial strength,
+and on the glory of its past achievements. Dry rot ate at its heart.
+The damage done was not great, but was growing greater. The heads of the
+departments, in whose hands so much of the running of the business lay,
+were many of them incompetent men with nothing to commend them but long
+years of service. And in the treasurer's office sat a quiet young man,
+barely turned twenty, who had no friends, wanted his own way, and who
+shook his head over the office traditions and was proud of his unbelief.
+
+Seeing the absolute necessity of working through Colonel Tom, and having
+a head filled with ideas of things he wanted done, Sam began working
+to get suggestions into the older man's mind. Within a month after his
+elevation the two men were lunching together daily and Sam was spending
+many extra hours behind closed doors in Colonel Tom's office.
+
+Although American business and manufacturing had not yet achieved the
+modern idea of efficiency in shop and office management, Sam had many of
+these ideas in his mind and expounded them tirelessly to Colonel Tom. He
+hated waste; he cared nothing for company tradition; he had no idea, as
+did the heads of other departments, of getting into a comfortable berth
+and spending the rest of his days there, and he was bent on managing the
+great Rainey Company, if not directly, then through Colonel Tom, who, he
+felt, was putty in his hands.
+
+From his new position as treasurer Sam did not drop his work as buyer,
+but, after a talk with Colonel Tom, merged the two departments, put in
+capable assistants of his own, and went on with his work of effacing
+the tracks of the cousin. For years the company had been overpaying for
+inferior material. Sam put his own material inspectors into the west
+side factories and brought several big Pennsylvania steel companies
+scurrying to Chicago to make restitution. The restitution was stiff, but
+when Colonel Tom was appealed to, Sam went to lunch with him, bought a
+bottle of wine, and stiffened his back.
+
+One afternoon in a room in the Palmer House a scene was played out that
+for days stayed in Sam's mind as a kind of realisation of the part he
+wanted to play in the business world. The president of a lumber company
+took Sam into the room, and, laying five one thousand dollar bills upon
+a table, walked to the window and stood looking out.
+
+For a moment Sam stood looking at the money on the table and at the
+back of the man by the window, burning with indignation. He felt that
+he should like to take hold of the man's throat and press as he had once
+pressed on the throat of Windy McPherson. And then a cold gleam coming
+into his eyes he cleared his throat and said, "You are short here; you
+will have to build this pile higher if you expect to interest me."
+
+The man by the window shrugged his shoulders--he was a slender,
+young-looking man in a fancy waistcoat--and then turning and taking a
+roll of bills from his pocket he walked to the table, facing Sam.
+
+"I shall expect you to be reasonable," he said, as he laid the bills on
+the table.
+
+When the pile had reached twenty thousand, Sam reached out his hand and
+taking it up put it in his pocket. "You will get a receipt for this
+when I get back to the office," he said; "it is about what you owe our
+company for overcharges and crooked material. As for our business, I
+made a contract with another company this morning."
+
+Having got the buying end of the Rainey Arms Company straightened out
+to his liking, Sam began spending much time in the shops and, through
+Colonel Tom, forced big changes everywhere. He discharged useless
+foremen, knocked out partitions between rooms, pushed everywhere for
+more and better work. Like the modern efficiency man, he went about with
+a watch in his hand, cutting out lost motion, rearranging, getting his
+own way.
+
+It was a time of great agitation. The offices and shops buzzed like bees
+disturbed and black looks followed him about. But Colonel Tom rose to
+the situation and went about at Sam's heels, swaggering, giving orders,
+throwing back his shoulders like a man remade. All day long he was at
+it, discharging, directing, roaring against waste. When a strike broke
+out in one of the shops because of innovations Sam had forced upon the
+workmen there, he got upon a bench and delivered a speech--written by
+Sam--on a man's place in the organisation and conducting of a great
+modern industry and his duty to perfect himself as a workman.
+
+Silently, the men picked up their tools and started again for their
+benches and when he saw them thus affected by his words Colonel Tom
+brought what threatened to be a squally affair to a hurrahing climax by
+the announcement of a five per cent increase in the wage scale--that was
+Colonel Tom's own touch and the rousing reception of it brought a glow
+of pride to his cheeks.
+
+Although the affairs of the company were still being handled by Colonel
+Tom, and though he daily more and more asserted himself, the officers
+and shops, and later the big jobbers and buyers as well as the rich
+LaSalle Street directors, knew that a new force had come into the
+company. Men began dropping quietly into Sam's office, asking questions,
+suggesting, seeking favours. He felt that he was getting hold. Of the
+department heads, about half fought him and were secretly marked for
+slaughter; the others came to him, expressed approval of what was going
+on and asked him to look over their departments and to make suggestions
+for improvements through them. This Sam did eagerly, getting by it their
+loyalty and support which later stood him in good stead.
+
+In choosing the new men that came into the company Sam also took a hand.
+The method used was characteristic of his relations with Colonel Tom. If
+a man applying for a place suited him, he got admission to the colonel's
+office and listened for half an hour to a talk anent the fine old
+traditions of the company. If a man did not suit Sam, he did not get to
+the colonel. "You can't have your time taken up by them," Sam explained.
+
+In the Rainey Company, the various heads of departments were
+stockholders in the company, and selected from among themselves two men
+to sit upon the board, and in his second year Sam was chosen as one of
+these employee directors. During the same year five heads of departments
+resigning in a moment of indignation over one of Sam's innovations--to
+be replaced later by two--their stock by a prearranged agreement came
+back into the company's hands. This stock and another block, secured for
+him by the colonel, got into Sam's hands through the use of Eckardt's
+money, that of the Wabash Avenue woman, and his own snug pile.
+
+Sam was a growing force in the company. He sat on the board of
+directors, the recognised practical head of the business among its
+stockholders and employees; he had stopped the company's march toward a
+second place in its industry and had faced it about. All about him, in
+offices and shops, there was the swing and go of new life and he felt
+that he was in a position to move on toward real control and had begun
+laying lines with that end in view. Standing in the offices in LaSalle
+Street or amid the clang and roar of the shops he tilted up his chin
+with the same odd little gesture that had attracted the men of Caxton
+to him when he was a barefoot newsboy and the son of the town drunkard.
+Through his head went big ambitious projects. "I have in my hand a great
+tool," he thought; "with it I will pry my way into the place I mean to
+occupy among the big men of this city and this nation."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Sam McPherson, who stood in the shops among the thousands of employees
+of the Rainey Arms Company, who looked with unseeing eyes at the faces
+of the men intent upon the operation of machines and saw in them but so
+many aids to the ambitious projects stirring in his brain, who, while
+yet a boy, had because of the quality of daring in him, combined with a
+gift of acquisitiveness, become a master, who was untrained, uneducated,
+knowing nothing of the history of industry or of social effort, walked
+out of the offices of his company and along through the crowded streets
+to the new apartment he had taken on Michigan Avenue. It was Saturday
+evening at the end of a busy week and as he walked he thought of things
+he had accomplished during the week and made plans for the one to come.
+Through Madison Street he went and into State, seeing the crowds of men
+and women, boys and girls, clambering aboard the cable cars, massed upon
+the pavements, forming in groups, the groups breaking and reforming, and
+the whole making a picture intense, confusing, awe-inspiring. As in
+the shops among the men workers, so here, also, walked the youth with
+unseeing eyes. He liked it all; the mass of people; the clerks in their
+cheap clothing; the old men with young girls on their arms going to dine
+in restaurants; the young man with a wistful look in his eyes waiting
+for his sweetheart in the shadow of the towering office building. The
+eager, straining rush of the whole, seemed no more to him than a kind of
+gigantic setting for action; action controlled by a few quiet, capable
+men--of whom he intended to be one--intent upon growth.
+
+In State Street he stopped at a shop and buying a bunch of roses came
+out again upon the crowded street. In the crowd before him walked a
+woman--tall, freewalking, with a great mass of reddish-brown hair on
+her head. As she passed through the crowd men stopped and looked back at
+her, their eyes ablaze with admiration. Seeing her, Sam sprang forward
+with a cry.
+
+"Edith!" he called, and running forward thrust the roses into her hand.
+"For Janet," he said, and lifting his hat walked beside her along State
+to Van Buren Street.
+
+Leaving the woman at a corner Sam came into a region of cheap theatres
+and dingy hotels. Women spoke to him; young men in flashy overcoats and
+with a peculiar, assertive, animal swing to their shoulders loitered
+before the theatres or in the doorways of the hotels; from an upstairs
+restaurant came the voice of another young man singing a popular song of
+the street. "There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night," sang the
+voice.
+
+Over a cross street Sam went into Michigan Avenue, faced by a long
+narrow park and beyond the railroad tracks by the piles of new earth
+where the city was trying to regain its lake front. In the cross
+street, standing in the shadow of the elevated railroad, he had passed
+a whining, intoxicated old woman who lurched forward and put a hand
+upon his coat. Sam had flung her a quarter and passed on shrugging his
+shoulders. Here also he had walked with unseeing eyes; this too was
+a part of the gigantic machine with which the quiet, competent men of
+growth worked.
+
+From his new quarters in the top floor of the hotel facing the lake, Sam
+walked north along Michigan Avenue to a restaurant where Negro men went
+noiselessly about among white-clad tables, serving men and women who
+talked and laughed under the shaded lamps had an assured, confident air.
+Passing in at the door of the restaurant, a wind, blowing over the
+city toward the lake, brought the sound of a voice floating with it.
+"There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night," again insisted the
+voice.
+
+After dining Sam got on a grip car of the Wabash Avenue Cable, sitting
+on the front seat and letting the panorama of the town roll up to him.
+From the region of cheap theatres he passed through streets in which
+saloons stood massed, one beside another, each with its wide garish
+doorway and its dimly lighted "Ladies' Entrance," and into a region of
+neat little stores where women with baskets upon their arms stood by the
+counters and Sam was reminded of Saturday nights in Caxton.
+
+The two women, Edith and Janet Eberly, met through Jack Prince, to one
+of whom Sam had sent the roses at the hands of the other, and from whom
+he had borrowed the six thousand dollars when he was new in the city,
+had been in Chicago for five years when Sam came to know them. For all
+of the five years they had lived in a two-story frame building that had
+been a residence in Wabash Avenue near Thirty-ninth Street and that
+was now both a residence and a grocery store. The apartment upstairs,
+reached by a stairway at the side of the grocery, had in the five years,
+and under the hand of Janet Eberly, become a thing of beauty, perfect in
+the simplicity and completeness of its appointment.
+
+The two women were the daughters of a farmer who had lived in one of the
+middle western states facing the Mississippi River. Their grandfather
+had been a noted man in the state, having been one of its first
+governors and later serving it in the senate in Washington. There was a
+county and a good-sized town named for him and he had once been talked
+of as a vice-presidential possibility but had died at Washington before
+the convention at which his name was to have been put forward. His one
+son, a youth of great promise, went to West Point and served brilliantly
+through the Civil War, afterward commanding several western army posts
+and marrying the daughter of another army man. His wife, an army belle,
+died after having borne him the two daughters.
+
+After the death of his wife Major Eberly began drinking, and to get away
+from the habit and from the army atmosphere where he had lived with his
+wife, whom he loved intensely, took the two little girls and returned to
+his home state to settle on a farm.
+
+About the county where the two girls grew to womanhood, their father,
+Major Eberly, got the name of a character, seeing people but seldom and
+treating rudely the friendly advances of his farmer neighbours. He would
+sit in the house for days poring over books, of which he had a great
+many, and hundreds of which were now on open shelves in the apartment
+of the two girls. These days of study, during which he would brook no
+intrusion, were followed by days of fierce industry during which he led
+team after team to the field, ploughing or reaping day and night with no
+rest except to eat.
+
+At the edge of the Eberly farm there was a little wooden country church
+surrounded by a hay field, and on Sunday mornings during the summer the
+ex-army man was always to be found in the field, running some noisy,
+clattering agricultural implement up and down under the windows of the
+church and disturbing the worship of the country folk; in the winter he
+drew a pile of logs there and went on Sunday mornings to split firewood
+under the church windows. While his daughters were small he was several
+times haled into court and fined for cruel neglect of his animals. Once
+he locked a great herd of fine sheep in a shed and went into the house
+and stayed for days intent upon his books so that many of them suffered
+cruelly for want of food and water. When he was taken into court
+and fined, half the county came to the trial and gloated over his
+humiliation.
+
+To the two girls the father was neither cruel nor kind, leaving them
+largely to themselves but giving them no money, so that they went about
+in dresses made over from those of the mother, that lay piled in trunks
+in the attic. When they were small, an old Negro woman, an ex-servant of
+the army belle, lived with and mothered them, but when Edith was a girl
+of ten this woman went off home to Tennessee, so that the girls were
+thrown on their own resources and ran the house in their own way.
+
+Janet Eberly was, at the beginning of her friendship with Sam, a slight
+woman of twenty-seven with a small expressive face, quick nervous
+fingers, black piercing eyes, black hair and a way of becoming so
+absorbed in the exposition of a book or the rush of a conversation
+that her little intense face became transfigured and her quick fingers
+clutched the arm of her listener while her eyes looked into his and she
+lost all consciousness of his presence or of the opinions he may have
+expressed. She was a cripple, having fallen from the loft of a barn in
+her youth injuring her back so that she sat all day in a specially made
+reclining wheeled chair.
+
+Edith was a stenographer, working in the office of a publisher down
+town, and Janet trimmed hats for a milliner a few doors down the street
+from the house in which they lived. In his will the father left the
+money from the sale of the farm to Janet, and Sam used it, insuring his
+life for ten thousand dollars in her name while it was in his possession
+and handling it with a caution entirely absent from his operations with
+the money of the medical student. "Take it and make money for me,"
+the little woman had said impulsively one evening shortly after the
+beginning of their acquaintance and after Jack Prince had been talking
+flamboyantly of Sam's ability in affairs. "What is the good of having a
+talent if you do not use it to benefit those who haven't it?"
+
+Janet Eberly was an intellect. She disregarded all the usual womanly
+points of view and had an attitude of her own toward life and people. In
+a way she had understood her hard-driven, grey-haired father and during
+the time of her great physical suffering they had built up a kind of
+understanding and affection for each other. After his death she wore a
+miniature of him, made in his boyhood, on a chain about her neck. When
+Sam met her the two immediately became close friends, sitting for hours
+in talk and coming to look forward with great pleasure to the evenings
+spent together.
+
+In the Eberly household Sam McPherson was a benefactor, a wonder-worker.
+In his hands the six thousand dollars was bringing two thousand a year
+into the house and adding immeasurably to the air of comfort and good
+living that prevailed there. To Janet, who managed the house, he was
+guide, counsellor, and something more than friend.
+
+Of the two women it was the strong, vigorous Edith, with the
+reddish-brown hair and the air of physical completeness that made men
+stop to look at her on the street, who first became Sam's friend.
+
+Edith Eberly was strong of body, given to quick flashes of anger, stupid
+intellectually and hungry to the roots of her for wealth and a place in
+the world. She had heard, through Jack Prince, of Sam's money making
+and of his ability and prospects and, for a time, had designs upon his
+affections. Several times when they were alone together she gave his
+hand a characteristically impulsive squeeze and once upon the stairway
+beside the grocery store offered him her lips to kiss. Later there
+sprang up between her and Jack Prince a passionate love affair, dropped
+finally by Prince through fear of her violent fits of anger. After Sam
+had met Janet Eberly and had become her loyal friend and henchman all
+show of affection or even of interest between him and Edith was at an
+end and the kiss upon the stairs was forgotten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Going up the stairway after the ride in the cable car Sam stood beside
+Janet's wheel chair in the room at the front of the apartment facing
+Wabash Avenue. The chair was by the window and faced an open coal
+fire in a grate she had had built into the wall of the house. Outside,
+through an open arched doorway, Edith moved noiselessly about taking
+dishes from a little table. He knew that after a time Jack Prince would
+come and take her to the theatre, leaving Janet and him to finish their
+talk.
+
+Sam lighted his pipe and between puffs began talking, making a statement
+that he knew would arouse her, and Janet, putting her hand impulsively
+on his shoulder, began tearing the statement to bits.
+
+"You talk!" she broke out. "Books are not full of pretence and lies; you
+business men are--you and Jack Prince. What do you know of books? They
+are the most wonderful things in the world. Men sit writing them and
+forget to lie, but you business men never forget. You and books! You
+haven't read books, not real ones. Didn't my father know; didn't he save
+himself from insanity through books? Do I not, sitting here, get the
+real feel of the movement of the world through the books that men
+write? Suppose I saw those men. They would swagger and strut and take
+themselves seriously just like you or Jack or the grocer down stairs.
+You think you know what's going on in the world. You think you are doing
+things, you Chicago men of money and action and growth. You are blind,
+all blind."
+
+The little woman, a light, half scorn, half amusement in her eyes,
+leaned forward and ran her fingers through Sam's hair, laughing down
+into the astonished face he turned up to her.
+
+"Oh, I'm not afraid, in spite of what Edith and Jack Prince say of you,"
+she went on impulsively. "I like you all right and if I were a well
+woman I should make love to you and marry you and then see to it there
+was something in this world for you besides money and tall buildings and
+men and machines that make guns."
+
+Sam grinned. "You are like your father, driving the mowing machine up
+and down under the church windows on Sunday mornings," he declared; "you
+think you could remake the world by shaking your fist at it. I should
+like to go and see you fined in a court room for starving sheep."
+
+Janet, closing her eyes and lying back in her chair, laughed with
+delight and declared that they would have a splendid quarrelsome
+evening.
+
+After Edith had gone out, Sam sat through the evening with Janet,
+listening to her exposition of life and what she thought it should mean
+to a strong capable fellow like himself, as he had been listening ever
+since their acquaintanceship began. In the talk, and in the many talks
+they had had together, talks that rang in his ears for years, the little
+black-eyed woman gave him a glimpse into a whole purposeful universe of
+thought and action of which he had never dreamed, introducing him to a
+new world of men: methodical, hard-thinking Germans, emotional, dreaming
+Russians, analytical, courageous Norwegians, Spaniards and Italians with
+their sense of beauty, and blundering, hopeful Englishmen wanting so
+much and getting so little; so that at the end of the evening he went
+out of her presence feeling strangely small and insignificant against
+the great world background she had drawn for him.
+
+Sam did not understand Janet's point of view. It was all too new and
+foreign to everything life had taught him, and in his mind he fought
+her ideas doggedly, clinging to his own concrete, practical thoughts and
+hopes, but on the train homeward bound, and in his own room later, he
+turned over and over in his mind the things she had said and tried in a
+dim way to grasp the bigness of the conception of human life she had got
+sitting in a wheel chair and looking down into Wabash Avenue.
+
+Sam loved Janet Eberly. No word of that had ever passed between them
+and he had seen her hand flash out and grasp the shoulder of Jack Prince
+when she was laying down to him some law of life as she saw it, as it
+had so often shot out and grasped his own, but had she been able to
+spring out of the wheel chair he should have taken her hand and gone
+with her to the clergyman within the hour and in his heart he knew that
+she would have gone with him gladly.
+
+Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam's work for the gun
+company without a direct declaration of affection from him, but during
+the years when they were much together he thought of her as in a sense
+his wife and when she died he was desolate, overdrinking night after
+night and wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets during hours
+when he should have been asleep. She was the first woman who ever got
+hold of and stirred his manhood, and she awoke something in him that
+made it possible for him later to see life with a broadness and scope of
+vision that was no part of the pushing, energetic young man of dollars
+and of industry who sat beside her wheeled chair during the evenings on
+Wabash Avenue.
+
+After Janet's death, Sam did not continue his friendship with Edith, but
+turned over to her the ten thousand dollars to which the six thousand of
+Janet's money had grown in his hands and did not see her again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+One night in April Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey Arms Company
+and his chief lieutenant, young Sam McPherson, treasurer and chairman of
+the board of directors of the company, slept together in a room in a St.
+Paul hotel. It was a double room with two beds, and Sam, lying on his
+pillow, looked across the bed to where the colonel's paunch protruding
+itself between him and the light from a long narrow window, made a round
+hill above which the moon just peeped. During the evening the two men
+had sat for several hours at a table in the grill down stairs while Sam
+discussed a proposition he proposed making to a St. Paul jobber the
+next day. The account of the jobber, a large one, had been threatened by
+Lewis, the Jew manager of the Edwards Arms Company, the Rainey Company's
+only important western rival, and Sam was full of ideas to checkmate the
+shrewd trade move the Jew had made. At the table, the colonel had been
+silent and taciturn, an unusual attitude of mind for him, and Sam lay in
+bed and looked at the moon gradually working its way over the undulating
+abdominal hill, wondering what was in his mind. The hill dropped,
+showing the full face of the moon, and then rose again obliterating it.
+
+"Sam, were you ever in love?" asked the colonel, with a sigh.
+
+Sam turned and buried his face in the pillow and the white covering
+of his bed danced up and down. "The old fool, has it come to that with
+him?" he asked himself. "After all these years of single life is he
+going to begin running after women now?"
+
+He did not answer the colonel's question. "There are breakers ahead for
+you, old boy," he thought, the figure of quiet, determined, little Sue
+Rainey, the colonel's daughter, as he had seen her on the rare occasions
+when he had dined at the Rainey home or she had come into the LaSalle
+Street offices, coming into his mind. With a quiver of enjoyment of the
+mental exercise, he tried to imagine the colonel as a swaggering blade
+among women.
+
+The colonel, oblivious of Sam's mirth and of his silence regarding his
+experience in the field of love, began talking, making amends for the
+silence in the grill. He told Sam that he had decided to take to himself
+a new wife, and confessed that the view of the matter his daughter might
+take worried him. "Children are so unfair," he complained; "they forget
+about a man's feelings and can't realise that his heart is still young."
+
+With a smile on his lips, Sam began trying to picture a woman's lying in
+his place and looking at the moon over the pulsating hill. The colonel
+continued talking. He grew franker, telling the name of his beloved and
+the circumstances of their meeting and courtship. "She is an actress, a
+working girl," he said feelingly. "I met her at a dinner given by Will
+Sperry one evening and she was the only woman there who did not drink
+wine. After the dinner we went for a drive together and she told me of
+her hard life, of her fight against temptations, and of her brother, an
+artist, she is trying to get started in the world. We have been together
+a dozen times and have written letters, and, Sam, we have discovered an
+affinity for each other."
+
+Sam sat up in bed. "Letters!" he muttered. "The old dog is going to get
+himself involved." He dropped again upon the pillow. "Well, let him. Why
+need I bother myself?"
+
+The colonel, having begun talking, could not stop. "Although we have
+seen each other only a dozen times, a letter has passed between us every
+day. Oh, if you could see the letters she writes. They are wonderful."
+
+A worried sigh broke from the colonel. "I want Sue to invite her to
+the house, but I am afraid," he complained; "I am afraid she will be
+wrong-headed about it. Women are such determined creatures. She and my
+Luella should meet and know each other, but if I go home and tell her
+she may make a scene and hurt Luella's feelings."
+
+The moon had risen, shedding its light in Sam's eyes, and he turned his
+back to the colonel and prepared to sleep. The naive credulity of the
+older man had touched a spring of mirth in him and from time to time the
+covering of his bed continued to quiver suggestively.
+
+"I would not hurt her feelings for anything. She is the squarest little
+woman alive," the voice of the colonel announced. The voice broke
+and the colonel, who habitually roared forth his sentiments, began to
+dither. Sam wondered if his feelings had been touched by the thoughts of
+his daughter or of the lady from the stage. "It is a wonderful thing,"
+half sobbed the colonel, "when a young and beautiful woman gives her
+whole heart into the keeping of a man like me."
+
+It was a week later before Sam heard more of the affair. Looking up
+from his desk in the offices in LaSalle Street one morning, he found Sue
+Rainey standing before him. She was a small athletic looking woman with
+black hair, square shoulders, cheeks browned by the sun and wind, and
+quiet grey eyes. She stood facing Sam's desk and pulled off a glove
+while she looked down at him with amused, quizzical eyes. Sam rose, and
+leaning over the flat-topped desk, took her hand, wondering what had
+brought her there.
+
+Sue Rainey did not mince matters, but plunged at once into an
+explanation of the purpose of her visit. From birth she had lived in an
+atmosphere of wealth. Although she was not counted a beautiful woman,
+she had, because of her wealth and the charm of her person, been much
+courted. Sam, who had talked briefly with her a half dozen times, had
+long had a haunting curiosity to know more of her personality. As she
+stood there before him looking so wonderfully well-kept and confident he
+thought her baffling and puzzling.
+
+"The colonel," she began, and then hesitated and smiled. "You, Mr.
+McPherson, have become a figure in my father's life. He depends upon
+you very much. He tells me that he has talked with you concerning a Miss
+Luella London from the theatre, and that you have agreed with him that
+the colonel and she should marry."
+
+Sam watched her gravely. A flicker of mirth ran through him, but his
+face was grave and disinterested.
+
+"Yes?" he said, looking into her eyes. "Have you met Miss London?"
+
+"I have," answered Sue Rainey. "Have you?"
+
+Sam shook his head.
+
+"She is impossible," declared the colonel's daughter, clutching the
+glove held in her hand and staring at the floor. A flush of anger rose
+in her cheeks. "She is a crude, hard, scheming woman. She colours her
+hair, she cries when you look at her, she hasn't even the grace to be
+ashamed of what she is trying to do, and she has got the colonel into a
+fix."
+
+Sam looked at the brown of Sue Rainey's cheek and thought the texture of
+it beautiful. He wondered why he had heard her called a plain woman.
+The heightened colour brought to her face by her anger had, he thought,
+transfigured her. He liked her direct, forceful way of putting the
+matter of the colonel's affair, and felt keenly the compliment implied
+by her having come to him. "She has self-respect," he told himself, and
+felt a thrill of pride in her attitude as though it had been inspired by
+himself.
+
+"I have been hearing of you a great deal," she continued, glancing up
+at him and smiling. "At our house you are brought to the table with the
+soup and taken away with the liqueur. My father interlards his
+table talk, and introduces all of his wise new axioms on economy and
+efficiency and growth, with a constant procession of 'Sam says' and
+'Sam thinks.' And the men who come to the house talk of you also.
+Teddy Foreman says that at directors' meetings they all sit about like
+children waiting for you to tell them what to do."
+
+She threw out her hand with an impatient little gesture. "I am in a
+hole," she said. "I might handle my father but I cannot handle that
+woman."
+
+While she had been talking to him Sam looked past her and out at a
+window. When her eyes wandered from his face he looked again at her
+brown firm cheeks. From the beginning of the interview he had been
+intending to help her.
+
+"Give me the lady's address," he said; "I'll go look her over."
+
+Three evenings later Sam took Miss Luella London to a midnight supper
+at one of the town's best restaurants. She knew the motive of his taking
+her, as he had been quite frank in the few minutes' talk near the stage
+door of the theatre when the engagement was made. As they ate, they
+talked of the plays at the Chicago theatres, and Sam told her a story
+of an amateur performance that had once taken place in the hall over
+Geiger's drug store in Caxton when he was boy. In the performance Sam
+had taken the role of a drummer boy killed on the field of battle by a
+swaggering villain in a grey uniform, and John Telfer, in the role of
+villain, had become so in earnest that, a pistol not exploding at a
+critical moment, he had chased Sam about the stage trying to hit him
+with the butt of the weapon while the audience roared with delight
+at the realism of Telfer's rage and at the frightened boy begging for
+mercy.
+
+Luella London laughed heartily at Sam's story and then, the coffee being
+served, she fingered the handle of the cup and a shrewd look came into
+her eyes.
+
+"And now you are a big business man and have come to see me about
+Colonel Rainey," she said.
+
+Sam lighted a cigar.
+
+"Just how much are you counting on this marriage between yourself and
+the colonel?" he asked bluntly.
+
+The actress laughed and poured cream into her coffee. A line came and
+went on her forehead between her eyes. Sam thought she looked capable.
+
+"I have been thinking of what you told me at the stage door," she
+said, and a childlike smile played about her lips. "Do you know, Mr.
+McPherson, I can't just figure you. I can't just see how you get into
+this. Where are your credentials, anyway?"
+
+Sam, keeping his eyes upon her face, took a jump into the dark.
+
+"It's this way," he said, "I'm something of an adventurer myself. I fly
+the black flag. I come from where you do. I had to reach out my hand and
+take what I wanted. I do not blame you in the least, but it just happens
+that I saw Colonel Tom Rainey first. He is my game and I do not propose
+to have you fooling around. I am not bluffing. You have got to get off
+him."
+
+Leaning forward, he stared at her intently, and then lowered his voice.
+"I've got your record. I know the man you used to live with. He's going
+to help me get you if you do not drop it."
+
+Sitting back in his chair Sam watched her gravely. He had taken the odd
+chance to win quickly by a bluff and had won. But Luella London was not
+to be defeated without a struggle.
+
+"You lie," she cried, half springing from her chair. "Frank has never--"
+
+"Oh yes, Frank has," answered Sam, turning as though to call a waiter;
+"I will have him here in ten minutes if you wish to be shown."
+
+Picking up a fork the woman began nervously picking holes in the table
+cloth and a tear appeared upon her cheek. She took a handkerchief from
+a bag that hung hooked over the back of a chair at the side of the table
+and wiped her eyes.
+
+"All right! All right!" she said, bracing herself, "I'll drop it. If
+you've dug up Frank Robson you've got me. He'll do anything you say for
+a piece of money."
+
+For some minutes the two sat in silence. A tired look had come into the
+woman's eyes.
+
+"I wish I was a man," she said. "I get whipped at everything I tackle
+because I'm a woman. I'm getting past my money-making days in the
+theatre and I thought the colonel was fair game."
+
+"He is," answered Sam dispassionately, "but you see I beat you to it.
+He's mine."
+
+Glancing cautiously about the room, he took a roll of bills from his
+pocket and began laying them one at a time upon the table.
+
+"Look here," he said, "you've done a good piece of work. You should have
+won. For ten years half the society women of Chicago have been trying
+to marry their daughters or their sons to the Rainey fortune. They
+had everything to help them, wealth, good looks, and a standing in the
+world. You have none of these things. How did you do it?
+
+"Anyway," he went on, "I'm not going to see you trimmed. I've got ten
+thousand dollars here, as good Rainey money as ever was printed. You
+sign this paper and then put the roll in your purse."
+
+"That's square," said Luella London, signing, and with the light coming
+back into her eyes.
+
+Sam beckoned to the proprietor of the restaurant whom he knew and had
+him and a waiter sign as witnesses.
+
+Luella London put the roll of bills into her purse.
+
+"What did you give me that money for when you had me beat anyway?" she
+asked.
+
+Sam lighted a fresh cigar and folding the paper put it in his pocket.
+
+"Because I like you and I admire your skill," he said, "and anyway I did
+not have you beaten until right now."
+
+They sat studying the people getting up from the tables and going
+through the door to waiting carriages and automobiles, the well-dressed
+women with assured airs serving Sam's mind to make a contrast for the
+woman who sat with him.
+
+"I presume you are right about women," he said musingly, "it must be a
+stiff game for you if you like winning on your own hook."
+
+"Winning! We don't win." The lips of the actress drew back showing her
+white teeth. "No woman ever won who tried to play a straight fighting
+game for herself."
+
+Her voice grew tense and the lines upon her forehead reappeared.
+
+"Woman can't stand alone," she went on, "she is a sentimental fool. She
+reaches out her hand to some man and that in the end beats her. Why,
+even when she plays the game as I played it against the colonel some rat
+of a man like Frank Robson, for whom she has given up everything worth
+while to a woman, sells her out."
+
+Sam looked at her hand, covered with rings, lying on the table.
+
+"Let's not misunderstand each other," he said quietly, "do not blame
+Frank for this. I never knew him. I just imagined him."
+
+A puzzled look came into the woman's eyes and a flush rose in her
+cheeks.
+
+"You grafter!" she sneered.
+
+Sam called to a passing waiter and ordered a fresh bottle of wine.
+
+"What's the use being sore?" he asked. "It's simple enough. You staked
+against a better mind. Anyway you have the ten thousand, haven't you?"
+
+Luella reached for her purse.
+
+"I don't know," she said, "I'll look. Haven't you decided to steal it
+back yet?"
+
+Sam laughed.
+
+"I'm coming to that," he said, "don't hurry me."
+
+For several minutes they sat eyeing each other, and then, with an
+earnest ring in his voice and a smile on his lips, Sam began talking
+again.
+
+"Look here!" he said, "I'm no Frank Robson and I do not like giving
+a woman the worst of it. I have been studying you and I can't see you
+running around loose with ten thousand dollars of real money on you. You
+do not fit into the picture and the money will not last a year in your
+hands.
+
+"Give it to me," he urged; "let me invest it for you. I'm a winner. I'll
+double it for you in a year."
+
+The actress stared past Sam's shoulder to where a group of young men sat
+about a table drinking and talking loudly. Sam began telling an anecdote
+of an Irish baggage man in Caxton. When he had finished he looked at her
+and laughed.
+
+"As that shoemaker looked to Jerry Donlin so you, as the colonel's wife,
+looked to me," he said. "I had to make you get out of my flower bed."
+
+A gleam of resolution came into the wandering eyes of Luella London and
+she took the purse from the back of the chair and brought out the roll
+of bills.
+
+"I'm a sport," she said, "and I'm going to lay a bet on the best horse I
+ever saw. You may trim me, but I always would take a chance."
+
+Turning, she called a waiter and, handing him a bill from her purse,
+threw the roll on the table.
+
+"Take the pay for the spread and the wine we have had out of that," she
+said, handing him the loose bill and then turning to Sam. "You ought to
+beat the world. Anyway your genius gets recognition from me. I pay for
+this party and when you see the colonel say good-bye to him for me."
+
+The next day, at his request, Sue Rainey called at the offices of the
+Arms Company and Sam handed her the paper signed by Luella London. It
+was an agreement on her part to divide with Sam, half and half, any
+money she might be able to blackmail out of Colonel Rainey.
+
+The colonel's daughter glanced from the paper to Sam's face.
+
+"I thought so," she said, and a puzzled look came into her eyes. "But I
+do not understand this. What does this paper do and what did you pay for
+it?"
+
+"The paper," Sam answered, "puts her in a hole and I paid ten thousand
+dollars for it."
+
+Sue Rainey laughed and taking a checkbook from her handbag laid it on
+the desk and sat down.
+
+"Do you get your half?" she asked.
+
+"I get it all," answered Sam, and then leaning back in his chair
+launched into an explanation. When he had told her of the talk in the
+restaurant she sat with the checkbook lying before her and with the
+puzzled look still in her eyes.
+
+Without giving her time for comment, Sam plunged into the midst of what
+had been in his mind to say to her.
+
+"The woman will not bother the colonel any more," he declared; "if that
+paper won't hold her something else will. She respects me and she is
+afraid of me. We had a talk after she had signed the paper and she gave
+me the ten thousand dollars to invest for her. I promised to double it
+for her within a year and I want to make good. I want you to double it
+now. Make the check for twenty thousand."
+
+Sue Rainey wrote the check, making it payable to bearer, and pushed it
+across the table.
+
+"I cannot say that I understand yet," she confessed. "Did you also fall
+in love with her?"
+
+Sam grinned. He was wondering whether he would be able to get into words
+just what he wanted to tell her of the actress soldier of fortune. He
+looked across the table at her frank grey eyes and then on an impulse
+decided that he would tell it straight out as though she had been a man.
+
+"It's like this," he said. "I like ability and good brains and that
+woman has them. She isn't a good woman, but nothing in her life has made
+her want to be good. All her life she has been going the wrong way, and
+now she wants to get on her feet and squared around. That's what she was
+after the colonel for. She did not want to marry him, she wanted to
+make him give her the start she was after. I got the best of her because
+somewhere there is a snivelling little whelp of a man who has taken all
+the good and the fineness out of her and who now stands ready to sell
+her out for a few dollars. I imagined there would be such a man when I
+saw her and I bluffed my way through to him. But I do not want to whip a
+woman, even in such an affair, through the cheapness of some man. I want
+to do the square thing by her. That's why I asked you to make that check
+for twenty thousand."
+
+Sue Rainey rose and stood by the desk looking down at him. He was
+thinking how wonderfully clear and honest her eyes.
+
+"And what about the colonel?" she asked. "What will he think of all
+this?"
+
+Sam walked around the desk and took her hand.
+
+"We'll have to agree not to consider him," he said. "We really did that
+you know when we started this thing. I think we can depend upon Miss
+London's putting the finishing touches on the job."
+
+And Miss London did. She sent for Sam a week later and put tweny-five
+hundred dollars into his hand.
+
+"That's not to invest for me," she said, "that's for yourself. By the
+agreement I signed with you we were to split anything I got out of the
+colonel. Well, I went light. I only got five thousand dollars."
+
+With the money in his hand Sam stood by the side of a little table in
+her room looking at her.
+
+"What did you tell the colonel?" he asked.
+
+"I called him up here to my room last night and lying here in bed I told
+him that I had just discovered I was the victim of an incurable disease.
+I told him that within a month I would be in bed for keeps and asked
+him to marry me at once and to take me away with him to some quiet place
+where I could die in his arms."
+
+Coming over to Sam, Luella London put a hand upon his arm and laughed.
+
+"He began to beg off and make excuses," she went on, "and then I brought
+out his letters to me and talked straight. He wilted at once and paid
+the five thousand dollars I asked for the letters without a murmur. I
+might have made it fifty and with your talent you ought to get all he
+has in six months."
+
+Sam shook hands with her and told her of his success in doubling the
+money she had put into his hands. Then putting the twenty-five hundred
+dollars in his pocket he went back to his desk. He did not see her
+again and when, through a lucky market turn, he had increased the twenty
+thousand dollars she had left with him to twenty-five, he placed it
+in the hands of a trust company for her and forgot the incident.
+Years later he heard that she was running a fashionable dressmaking
+establishment in a western city.
+
+And Colonel Tom Rainey, who had for months talked of nothing but factory
+efficiency and of what he and young Sam McPherson were going to do
+in the way of enlarging the business, began the next morning a tirade
+against women that lasted the rest of his life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Sue Rainey had long touched the fancy of the youths of Chicago society
+who, while looking at her trim little figure and at the respectable
+size of the fortune behind it, were yet puzzled and disconcerted by her
+attitude toward themselves. On the wide porches at golf clubs, where
+young men in white trousers lounged and smoked cigarettes, and in
+the down-town clubs, where the same young men spent winter afternoons
+playing Kelly pool, they spoke of her, calling her an enigma. "She'll
+end by being an old maid," they declared, and shook their heads at the
+thought of so good a connection dangling loosely in the air just without
+their reach. From time to time, one of the young men tore himself loose
+from the group that contemplated her, and, with an opening volley of
+books, candy, flowers and invitations to theatres, charged down upon
+her, only to have the youthful ardour of his attack cooled by her
+prolonged attitude of indifference. When she was twenty-one, a young
+English cavalry officer, who came to Chicago to ride in the horse show
+had, for some weeks, been seen much in her company and a report of their
+engagement had been whispered through the town and talked of about the
+nineteenth hole at the country clubs. The rumour proved to be without
+foundation, the attraction to the cavalry officer having been a certain
+brand of rare old wine the colonel had stored in his cellar and a
+feeling of brotherhood with the swaggering old gun maker, rather than
+the colonel's quiet little daughter.
+
+After the beginning of his acquaintanceship with her, and all during
+the days when he stirred things up in the offices and shops of the
+gun company, tales of the assiduous and often needy young men who were
+camped on her trail reached Sam's ears. They would be in at the office
+to see and talk with the colonel, who had several times confided to Sam
+that his daughter Sue was already past the age at which right-minded
+young women should marry, and in the absence of the father two or three
+of them had formed a habit of stopping for a word with Sam, whom they
+had met through the colonel or Jack Prince. They declared that they were
+"squaring themselves with the colonel." Not a difficult thing to do, Sam
+thought, as he drank the wine, smoked the cigars, and ate the dinners
+of all without prejudice. Once, at luncheon, Colonel Tom discussed
+these young men with Sam, pounding on a table so that the glasses jumped
+about, and calling them damned upstarts.
+
+For his own part, Sam did not feel that he knew Sue Rainey, and
+although, after their first meeting one evening at the Rainey house, he
+had been pricked by a mild curiosity concerning her, no opportunity
+to satisfy it had presented itself. He knew that she was athletic,
+travelled much, rode, shot, and sailed a boat; and he had heard Jack
+Prince speak of her as a woman of brains, but, until the incident of
+the colonel and Luella London threw them for the moment into the same
+enterprise and started him thinking of her with real interest, he had
+seen and talked with her for but brief passing moments brought about by
+their mutual interest in the affairs of her father.
+
+After Janet Eberly's sudden death, and while he was yet in the midst of
+his grief at her loss, Sam had his first long talk with Sue Rainey. It
+was in Colonel Tom's office, and Sam, walking hurriedly in, found her
+sitting at the colonel's desk and staring out of the window at a broad
+expanse of flat roofs. A man, climbing a flag pole to replace a slipped
+rope, caught his attention and standing by the window looking at the
+minute figure clinging to the swaying pole, he began talking of the
+absurdity of human endeavour.
+
+The colonel's daughter listened respectfully to his rather obvious
+banalities and getting up from her chair came to stand beside him. Sam
+turned slyly to look at her firm brown cheeks as he had looked on the
+morning when she had come to see him about Luella London and was struck
+by the thought that she in some faint way reminded him of Janet Eberly.
+In a moment, and rather to his own surprise, he burst into a long speech
+telling of Janet, of the tragedy of her loss and something of the beauty
+of her life and character.
+
+The nearness of his loss and the nearness also of what he thought might
+be a sympathetic listener spurred him and he found himself getting a
+kind of relief for the aching sense of loss for his dead comrade by
+heaping praises upon her life.
+
+When he had finished saying what was in his mind, he stood by the window
+feeling awkward and embarrassed. The man who climbed the flag pole
+having put the rope through the ring at the top slid suddenly down the
+pole and thinking for the moment that he had fallen Sam made a quick
+clutch at the air with his hand. His gripping fingers closed over Sue
+Rainey's hand.
+
+He turned, amused by the incident, and began making a halting
+explanation. There were tears in Sue Rainey's eyes.
+
+"I wish I had known her," she said and drew her hand from between his
+fingers. "I wish you had known me better that I also might have known
+your Janet. They are rare--such women. They are worth much to know. Most
+women like most men--"
+
+She made an impatient gesture with her hand and Sam, turning, walked
+toward the door. He felt that he might not trust himself to answer her.
+For the first time since coming to manhood he felt that tears might
+at any moment come into his eyes. Grief for the loss of Janet surged
+through him disconcerting and engulfing him.
+
+"I have been doing you an injustice," said Sue Rainey, looking at the
+floor. "I have thought of you as something different from what you are.
+There is a story I heard of you which gave me a wrong impression."
+
+Sam smiled. Having conquered the commotion within himself, he laughed
+and explained the incident of the man who had slid down the pole.
+
+"What was the story you heard?" he asked.
+
+"It was a story a young man told at our house," she explained
+hesitatingly, refusing to be carried away from her mood of seriousness.
+"It was about a little girl you saved from drowning and a purse made up
+and given you. Why did you take the money?"
+
+Sam looked at her squarely. The story was one that Jack Prince had
+delight in telling. It concerned an incident of his early business life
+in the city.
+
+One afternoon, when he was still in the employ of the commission firm,
+he had taken a party of men for a trip on an excursion steamer on the
+lake. He had a project into which he wanted them to go with him and
+had taken them aboard the steamer to get them together and present the
+merits of his scheme. During the trip a little girl had fallen overboard
+and Sam, springing after her, had brought her safely aboard the boat.
+
+On the excursion steamer a cheer had arisen. A young man in a
+broad-brimmed cowboy hat ran about taking up a collection. People
+crowded forward to grasp Sam's hand and he had accepted the money
+collected and had put it in his pocket.
+
+Among the men aboard the boat were several who, while they did not draw
+back from going into Sam's project, had thought his taking the money
+not manly. They had told the story, and it had come to the ears of Jack
+Prince, who never tired of repeating it and always ended the story with
+the request that the listener ask Sam why he had taken the money.
+
+Now in Colonel Tom's office facing Sue Rainey, Sam made the explanation
+that had so delighted Jack Prince.
+
+"The crowd wanted to give me the money," he said, slightly perplexed.
+"Why shouldn't I have taken it? I did not save the little girl for the
+money, but because she was a little girl; and the money paid for my
+ruined clothes and the expenses of the trip."
+
+With his hand on the doorknob he looked steadily at the woman before
+him.
+
+"And I wanted the money," he announced, a ring of defiance in his voice.
+"I have always wanted money, any money I could get."
+
+Sam went back to his own office and sat down at his desk. He had been
+surprised by the cordiality and friendliness Sue Rainey had shown toward
+him. On an impulse, he wrote a letter, defending his position in the
+matter of the money taken on the excursion steamer and setting forth
+something of the attitude of his mind toward money and business affairs.
+
+"I cannot see myself believing in the rot most business men talk," he
+wrote at the end of the letter. "They are full of sentiment and ideals
+which are not true. Having a thing to sell they always say it is the
+best, although it may be third rate. I do not object to that. What I do
+object to is the way they have of nursing a hope within themselves that
+the third rate thing is first rate until the hope becomes a belief. In
+the talk I had with that actress Luella London I told her that I myself
+flew the black flag. Well, I do. I would lie about goods to sell them,
+but I would not lie to myself. I will not stultify my own mind. If a man
+crosses swords with me in a business deal and I come out of the affair
+with the money, it is no sign that I am the greater rascal, rather it is
+a sign that I am the keener man."
+
+With the note lying before him on the desk Sam wondered why he had
+written it. It seemed to him an accurate and straightforward statement
+of the business creed he had adopted for himself, but a rather absurd
+note to write to a woman. And then, not allowing himself time to
+reconsider his action, he addressed an envelope and going out into the
+general offices dropped it into the mail chute.
+
+"It will let her know where I stand anyway," he thought, with a return
+of the defiant mood in which he had told her the motive of his action on
+the boat.
+
+Within the next ten days after the talk in Colonel Tom's office Sam saw
+Sue Rainey several times coming to or going from her father's office.
+Once, meeting in the little lobby by the office entrance, she stopped
+and put out her hand which Sam took awkwardly. He had a feeling that she
+would not have regretted an opportunity to continue the sudden little
+intimacy that had sprung up between them in the few minutes' talk of
+Janet Eberly. The feeling did not come from vanity but from a belief in
+Sam that she was in some way lonely and wanting companionship. Although
+she had been much courted she lacked, he thought, the talent for
+comradeship or quick friendliness. "Like Janet she is more than half
+intellect," he told himself, and felt a pang of regret for the slight
+disloyalty of the further thought that there was in Sue a something more
+substantial and solid than there had been in Janet.
+
+Suddenly Sam began wondering whether or not he would like to marry Sue
+Rainey. His mind played with the idea. He took it with him to bed, and
+it went with him all day in his hurried trips through offices and shops.
+The thought having come to him persisted, and he began seeing her in a
+new light. The odd half awkward little movements of her hands, and their
+expressiveness, the brown fine texture of her cheeks, the clearness and
+honesty of her grey eyes, the quick sympathy and understanding of his
+feeling for Janet, and the subtle flattery of the notion he had got that
+she was interested in him--all of these things came and went in his mind
+while he ran through columns of figures and laid plans for the expansion
+of the business of the Arms Company. Unconsciously he began to make her
+a part of his plans for the future.
+
+Later, Sam discovered that during the days after the first talk together
+the thought of a marriage between them was in Sue's mind also. After
+the talk she went home and stood for an hour before the glass studying
+herself and she once told Sam that in her bed that night she shed
+tears because she had never been able to arouse in a man the note of
+tenderness that had been in his voice when he talked to her of Janet.
+
+And then two months after the first talk they had another. Sam, who had
+not allowed his grief over the loss of Janet or his nightly efforts
+to drown the sting of it in hard drinking, to check the big forward
+movement that he felt he was getting into the work of the offices and
+shops, sat one afternoon deeply absorbed in a pile of factory cost
+sheets. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his white
+muscular forearms. He was absorbed, intent upon the sheets.
+
+"I stepped in," said a voice above his head.
+
+Glancing up quickly, Sam sprang to his feet. "She must have been there
+some minutes looking down at me," he thought, and had a thrill of
+pleasure in the thought.
+
+Into his mind came the contents of the letter he had written her, and he
+wondered if after all he had been a fool, and whether the thoughts of a
+marriage with her were but vagaries. "Perhaps it would not be attractive
+to either her or myself when we came up to it," he decided.
+
+"I stepped in," she began again. "I have been thinking. Some things
+you said--in the letter and when you talked of your friend Janet who
+died--some things of men and women and work. You may not remember them.
+I--I got interested. I--are you a socialist?"
+
+"I believe not," Sam answered, wondering what had given her that
+thought. "Are you?"
+
+She laughed and shook her head.
+
+"Just what are you?" she went on. "What do you believe? I am curious to
+know. I thought your note--you will pardon me--I thought it a kind of
+pretence."
+
+Sam winced. A shadow of doubt of the sincerity of his business
+philosophy crossed his mind accompanied by the swaggering figure of
+Windy McPherson. He came around the desk and leaning against it looked
+at her. His secretary had gone out of the room and they were alone
+together. Sam laughed.
+
+"There was a man in the town where I was raised used to say that I was a
+little mole working underground, intent upon worms," he said, and then,
+waving his arms toward the papers on the desk, added, "I am a business
+man. Isn't that enough? If you could go with me through some of these
+cost sheets you would agree they are needed."
+
+He turned and faced her again.
+
+"What should I be doing with beliefs?" he asked.
+
+"Well, I think you have them--some kind of beliefs," she insisted, "you
+must have them. You get things done. You should hear the men talk
+of you. Sometimes at the house they are quite foolish about what a
+wonderful fellow you are and what you are doing here. They say that you
+drive on and on. What drives you? I want to know."
+
+For the moment Sam half suspected that she was secretly laughing at
+him. Finding her quite serious he started to reply and then stopped,
+regarding her.
+
+The silence between them went on and on. A clock on the wall ticked
+loudly.
+
+Sam stepped nearer to her and stood looking down into the face she
+slowly turned up to his.
+
+"I want to have a talk with you," he said, and his voice broke. He had
+the illusion of a hand gripping at his throat.
+
+In a flash he had definitely decided that he would try to marry her.
+Her interest in the motives of his life had clinched the sort of half
+decision he had made. In an illuminating moment during the prolonged
+silence between them he had seen her in a new light. The feeling of
+vague intimacy brought to him by his thoughts of her became a fixed
+belief that she belonged to him--was a part of him--and he was charmed
+with her manner, and her person, standing there, as with a gift given
+him.
+
+And then into his mind came a hundred other thoughts, clamouring
+thoughts, come out of the hidden parts of him. He began to think that
+she could lead the way on a road he wanted to travel. He thought of her
+wealth and what it would mean to a man filled with his hunger for power.
+And through these thoughts shot others. Something in her had taken hold
+of him--something that had been also in Janet. He was curious concerning
+her curiosity about his beliefs, and wanted to question her concerning
+her own beliefs. He could see none of Colonel Tom's blustering
+incompetence in her and thought her filled with truth as a deep spring
+is filled with clear water. He believed she would give him something,
+something that all his life he had been wanting. An old aching hunger
+that had haunted his nights as a boy came back and he thought that at
+her hand it might be fed.
+
+"I--I must read a book about socialism," he said lamely.
+
+Again they stood in silence, she looking at the floor, he past her head
+and out at the window. He could not bring himself to speak again of the
+proposed talk. He had a boyish dread of having her notice the tremor in
+his voice.
+
+Colonel Tom came into the room, bursting with an idea Sam had given him
+at the lunch hour and which in working its way into his mind had
+become to the colonel's entirely honest belief an idea of his own. The
+interruption brought to Sam an intense feeling of relief and he began
+talking of the colonel's idea as though it had taken him unawares.
+
+Sue, walking to a window, began tying and untying the curtain cord. When
+Sam, raising his eyes, looked at her, he caught her eyes watching him
+intently and she smiled, continuing to look at him squarely. It was his
+eyes that first broke away.
+
+From that day Sam's mind was afire with thoughts of Sue Rainey. In his
+room he sat, or going into Grant Park stood by the lake, looking at the
+silent, moving water as he had looked in the days when he first came to
+the city. He did not dream of having her in his arms or of kissing her
+lips; he thought, instead, with a glowing heart, of a life lived with
+her. He wanted to walk beside her through the streets, to have her come
+suddenly in at his office door, to look into her eyes and to have her
+question him, as she had questioned, concerning his beliefs and his
+hopes. He thought that in the evening he would like to go to a house of
+his own and find her sitting there waiting for him. All the charm of his
+aimless, half-dissolute way of life died in him, and he believed that
+with her he could begin to live more fully and completely. From the
+moment when he had definitely decided that he wanted Sue as a wife, Sam
+stopped overdrinking, going to his room or walking through the streets
+or in the parks instead of seeking his old companions in the clubs and
+drinking places. Sometimes pushing his bed to the window overlooking the
+lake, he would undress immediately after dinner and opening the window
+would spend half the night watching the lights of boats far away over
+the water and thinking of her. He would imagine her in the room, moving
+here and there, and coming occasionally to put her hand in his hair and
+look down at him as Janet had done, helping by her sane talk and quiet
+ways to get his life straightened out for good living.
+
+And when he had fallen asleep the face of Sue Rainey came to visit his
+dreams. One night he thought she had become blind and sat in the room
+with sightless eyes saying over and over like one demented, "Truth,
+truth, give me back the truth that I may see," and he awoke sick with
+horror at the thought of the look of suffering that had been in her
+face. Never did Sam dream of having her in his arms or of raining kisses
+on her lips and neck as he had dreamed of other women who in the past
+had won his favour.
+
+For all that he thought of her so constantly and built so confidently
+his dream of a life to be spent with her, months passed before he saw
+her again. Through Colonel Tom he learned that she had gone for a visit
+to the East and he went earnestly about his work, keeping his mind on
+his business during the day and only in the evening allowing himself to
+become absorbed in thoughts of her. He had a feeling that although he
+had said nothing she knew of his desire for her and that she wanted time
+to think it over. Several times in the evening in his room he wrote her
+long letters filled with minute, boyish explanations of his thoughts and
+motives, letters which after writing he immediately destroyed. A woman
+of the west side, with whom he had once had an affair, met him one day
+on the street, and put her hand familiarly on his arm and for the moment
+reawakened in him an old desire. After leaving her he did not go back to
+the office, but taking a south-bound car, spent the afternoon walking
+in Jackson Park, watching the children at play on the grass, sitting
+on benches under the trees, getting out of his body and his mind the
+insistent call of the flesh that had come back to him.
+
+Then in the evening, he came suddenly upon Sue riding a spirited black
+horse in a bridle path at the upper end of the park. It was just at the
+grey beginning of night. Stopping the horse, she sat looking at him and
+going to her he put a hand on the bridle.
+
+"We might have that talk," he said.
+
+She smiled down at him and the colour began to rise in her brown cheeks.
+
+"I have been thinking of it," she said, the familiar serious look coming
+into her eyes. "After all what have we to say to each other?"
+
+Sam watched her steadily.
+
+"I have a lot of things to say to you," he announced. "That is to
+say--well--I have, if things are as I hope." She got off the horse and
+they stood together by the side of the path. Sam never forgot the few
+minutes of silence that followed. The wide prospects of green sward, the
+golf player trudging wearily toward them through the uncertain light,
+his bag upon his shoulder, the air of physical fatigue with which he
+walked, bending slightly forward, the faint, soft sound of waves washing
+over a low beach, and the intense waiting look on the face she turned
+up to him, made an impression on his mind that stayed with him through
+life. It seemed to him that he had arrived at a kind of culmination, a
+starting point, and that all the vague shadowy uncertainties that had,
+in reflective moments, flitted through his mind, were to be brushed
+away by some act, some word, from the lips of this woman. With a rush he
+realised how consistently he had been thinking of her and how enormously
+he had been counting on her falling in with his plans, and the
+realisation was followed by a sickening moment of fear. How little he
+actually knew of her and of her way of thought. What assurance had he
+that she would not laugh, jump back upon the horse, and ride away? He
+was afraid as he had never been afraid before. Dumbly his mind groped
+about for a way to begin. Expressions he had caught and noted in her
+strong serious little face when he had achieved but a mild curiosity
+concerning her came back to visit his mind and he tried desperately to
+build an instant idea of her from these. And then turning his face from
+her he plunged directly into his thoughts of the past months as though
+she had been sharing talking to the colonel.
+
+"I have been thinking we might marry, you and I," he said, and cursed
+himself for the blundering bluntness of the declaration.
+
+"You do get things done, don't you?" she replied, smiling.
+
+"Why should you have been thinking anything of the sort?"
+
+"Because I want to live with you," he said; "I have been talking to the
+colonel."
+
+"About marrying me?" She seemed about to begin laughing.
+
+He hurried on. "No, not that. We talked about you. I could not let him
+alone. He might have known. I kept making him talk. I made him tell me
+about your ideas. I felt I had to know."
+
+Sam faced her.
+
+"He thinks your ideas absurd. I do not. I like them. I like you. I think
+you are beautiful. I do not know whether I love you or not, but for
+weeks I have been thinking of you and clinging to you and saying over
+and over to myself, 'I want to live my life with Sue Rainey.' I did not
+expect to go at it this way. You know me. What you do not know I will
+tell you."
+
+"Sam McPherson, you are a wonder," she said, "and I do not know but that
+I will marry you in the end, but I can't tell now. I want to know a lot
+of things. I want to know if you are ready to believe what I believe and
+to live for what I want to live."
+
+The horse, growing restless, began tugging at the bridle and she spoke
+to him sharply. She plunged into a description of a man she had seen on
+the lecture platform during her visit to the East and Sam looked at her
+with puzzled eyes.
+
+"He was beautiful," she said. "He was past sixty but looked like a boy
+of twenty-five, not in his body, but in an air of youth that hung over
+him. He stood there before the people talking, quiet, able, efficient.
+He was clean. He had lived clean, body and mind. He had been companion
+and co-worker with William Morris, and once he had been a mine boy in
+Wales, but he had got hold of a vision and lived for it. I did not hear
+what he said, but I kept thinking, 'I want a man like that.'
+
+"Can you accept my beliefs and live for what I want to live?" she
+persisted.
+
+Sam looked at the ground. It seemed to him that he was going to lose
+her, that she would not marry him.
+
+"I am not accepting beliefs or ends in life blindly," he said stoutly,
+"but I want them. What are your beliefs? I want to know. I think I
+haven't any myself. When I reach for them they are gone. My mind shifts
+and changes. I want something solid. I like solid things. I want you."
+
+"When can we meet and talk everything over thoroughly?"
+
+"Now," answered Sam bluntly, some look in her face changing his whole
+viewpoint. Suddenly it seemed as though a door had been opened, letting
+in a strong light upon the darkness of his mind. His confidence had come
+back to him. He wanted to strike and keep on striking. The blood rushed
+through his body and his brain began working rapidly. He felt sure of
+ultimate success.
+
+Taking her hand, and leading the horse, he began walking with her along
+the path. Her hand trembled in his and as though answering a thought in
+his mind she looked up at him and said,
+
+"I am not different from other women, although I do not accept your
+offer. This is a big moment for me, perhaps the biggest moment of my
+life. I want you to know that I feel that, though I do want certain
+things more than I want you or any other man."
+
+There was a suggestion of tears in her voice and Sam had a feeling that
+the woman in her wanted him to take her into his arms, but something
+within him told him to wait and to help her by waiting. Like her he
+wanted something more than the feel of a woman in his arms. Ideas rushed
+through his head; he thought that she was going to give him some bigger
+idea than he had known. The figure she had drawn for him of the old man
+who stood on the platform, young and beautiful, the old boyish need of
+a purpose in life, the dreams of the last few weeks--all of these were a
+part of the eager curiosity in him. They were like hungry little animals
+waiting to be fed. "We must have it all out here and now," he told
+himself. "I must not let myself be swept away by a rush of feeling and I
+must not let her be.
+
+"Do not think," he said, "that I haven't tenderness for you. I am filled
+with it. But I want to have our talk. I want to know what you expect me
+to believe and how you want me to live."
+
+He felt her hand stiffen in his.
+
+"Whether or not we are worth while to each other," she added.
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+And then she began to talk, telling him in a quiet steady voice that
+steadied something in him what she wanted to make out of her life. Her
+idea was one of service to mankind through children. She had seen girl
+friends of hers, with whom she had gone to school, grow up and marry.
+They had wealth and education, fine well-trained bodies, and they had
+been married only to live lives more fully devoted to pleasure. One or
+two who had married poor men had only done so to satisfy a passion
+in themselves, and after marriage had joined the others in the hungry
+pursuit of pleasure.
+
+"They do nothing at all," she said, "to repay the world for the things
+given them, the wealth and well-trained bodies and the disciplined
+minds. They go through life day after day and year after year wasting
+themselves and come in the end to nothing but indolent, slovenly
+vanity."
+
+She had thought it all out and had tried to plan for herself a life with
+other ends, and wanted a husband in accord with her ideas.
+
+"That isn't so difficult," she said, "I can find a man whom I can
+control and who will believe as I believe. My money gives me that power.
+But I want him to be a real man, a man of ability, a man who does things
+for himself, one fitted by his life and his achievements to be the
+father of children who do things. And so I began thinking about you. I
+got the men who come to the house to talk of you."
+
+She hung her head and laughed like a bashful boy.
+
+"I know much of the story of your early life out in that Iowa town," she
+said. "I got the story of your life and your achievements out there from
+some one who knew you well."
+
+The idea seemed wonderfully simple and beautiful to Sam. It seemed to
+add tremendously to the dignity and nobility of his feeling for her. He
+stopped in the path and swung her about facing him. They were alone in
+that end of the park. The soft darkness of the summer night had settled
+over them. In the grass at their feet a cricket sang loudly. He made a
+movement to take her into his arms.
+
+"It is wonderful," he said.
+
+"Wait," she demanded, putting her hand against his shoulder. "It isn't
+so simple. I am wealthy. You are able and you have a kind of undying
+energy in you. I want to give both my wealth and your ability to
+children--our children. That will not be easy for you. It means giving
+up your dreams of power. Perhaps I shall lose courage. Women do after
+two or three have come. You will have to furnish that. You will have to
+make a mother of me and keep making a mother of me. You will have to be
+a new kind of father with something maternal in you. You will have to be
+patient and studious and kind. You will have to think of these things at
+night instead of thinking of your own advancement. You will have to live
+wholly for me because I am to be their mother, giving me your strength
+and courage and your good sane outlook on things. And then when they
+come you will have to give all these things to them day after day in a
+thousand little ways."
+
+Sam took her into his arms and for the first time in his memory the hot
+tears stood in his eyes.
+
+The horse, unattended, wheeled, threw up his head and trotted off down
+the path. They let him go, walking along after him hand in hand like two
+happy children. At the entrance to the park they came up to him, held by
+a park policeman. She got on the horse and Sam stood beside her looking
+up.
+
+"I'll tell the colonel in the morning," he said.
+
+"What will he say?" she murmured, musingly.
+
+"Damned ingrate," Sam mimicked the colonel's blustering throat tones.
+
+She laughed and picked up the reins. Sam laid his hand on hers.
+
+"How soon?" he asked.
+
+She put her head down near his.
+
+"We'll waste no time," she said, blushing.
+
+And then in the presence of a park policeman, in the street by the
+entrance to the park with the people passing up and down, Sam had his
+first kiss from Sue Rainey's lips.
+
+After she rode away Sam walked. He had no sense of the passing of time,
+wandering through street after street, rearranging and readjusting his
+outlook on life. What she had said had stirred every vestige of sleeping
+nobility in him. He thought that he had got hold of the thing he had
+unconsciously been seeking all his life. His dreams of control of the
+Rainey Arms Company and the other big things he had planned in business
+seemed, in the light of their talk, so much nonsense and vanity. "I will
+live for this! I will live for this!" he kept saying over and over to
+himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue's
+arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish
+together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting
+in the darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and
+thought they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the
+earth.
+
+At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame
+houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his
+boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving
+forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the
+arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.
+
+"I must go to her--I must go to her at her house--now--tonight--and tell
+her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me," he thought.
+
+And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.
+
+"It cleanses me! this cleanses me!" he said to himself.
+
+He remembered the men who had sat about the stove in Wildman's grocery
+when he was a boy and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered how
+he, as a boy in the city, had run through the crowded streets fleeing
+from the terror of lust. He began to understand how distorted, how
+strangely perverted, his whole attitude toward women and sex had been.
+"Sex is a solution, not a menace--it is wonderful," he told himself
+without knowing fully the meaning of the word that had sprung to his
+lips.
+
+When, at last, he turned into Michigan Avenue and went toward his
+apartment, the late moon was just mounting the sky and a clock in one of
+the sleeping houses was striking three.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+One evening, six weeks after the talk in the gathering darkness in
+Jackson Park, Sue Rainey and Sam McPherson sat on the deck of a Lake
+Michigan steamer watching the lights of Chicago blink out in the
+distance. They had been married that afternoon in Colonel Tom's big
+house on the south side; and now they sat on the deck of the boat, being
+carried out into darkness, vowed to motherhood and to fatherhood, each
+more or less afraid of the other. They sat in silence, looking at
+the blinking lights and listening to the low voices of their fellow
+passengers, also sitting in the chairs along the deck or strolling
+leisurely about, and to the wash of the water along the sides of the
+boat, eager to break down a little reserve that the solemnity of the
+marriage service had built up between them.
+
+A picture floated in Sam's mind. He saw Sue, all in white, radiant and
+wonderful, coming toward him down a broad stairway, toward him, the
+newsboy of Caxton, the smuggler of game, the roisterer, the greedy
+moneygetter. All during those six weeks he had been waiting for this
+hour when he should sit beside the little grey-clad figure, getting from
+her the help he wanted in the reconstruction of his life. Without being
+able to talk as he had thought of talking, he yet felt assured and easy
+in his mind. In the moment when she had come down the stairway he had
+been half overcome by a feeling of intense shame, a return of the shame
+that had swept over him that night when she had given her word and he
+had walked hour after hour through the streets. It had seemed to him
+that from among the guests standing about should arise a voice crying,
+"Stop! Do not go on! Let me tell you of this fellow--this McPherson!"
+And then he had seen her holding to the arm of swaggering, pretentious
+Colonel Tom and he had taken her hand to become one with her, two
+curious, feverish, strangely different human beings, taking a vow in the
+name of their God, with the flowers banked about them and the eyes of
+people upon them.
+
+When Sam had gone to Colonel Tom the morning after that evening in
+Jackson Park, there had been a scene. The old gun maker had blustered
+and roared and forbidden, pounding on his desk with his fist. When Sam
+remained cool and unimpressed, he had stormed out of the room slamming
+the door and shouting, "Upstart! Damned upstart!" and Sam had gone
+smiling back to his desk, mildly disappointed. "I told Sue he would say
+'Ingrate,'" he thought, "I am losing my skill at guessing just what he
+will do and say."
+
+The colonel's rage had been short-lived. Within a week he was boasting
+of Sam to chance callers as "the best business man in America," and
+in the face of a solemn promise given Sue was telling news of the
+approaching marriage to every newspaper man he knew. Sam suspected
+him of secretly calling on the telephone those newspapers whose
+representatives had not crossed his trail.
+
+During the six waiting weeks there had been little of love making
+between Sue and Sam. They had talked instead, or, going into the country
+or to the parks, had walked under the trees consumed with a curious
+eager passion of suspense. The idea she had given him in the park grew
+in Sam's brain. To live for the young things that would presently come
+to them, to be simple, direct, and natural, like the trees or the
+beasts of the field, and then to have the native honesty of such a life
+illuminated and ennobled by a mutual intelligent purpose to make their
+young something finer and better than the things in Nature by the
+intelligent use of their own good minds and bodies. In the shops and
+on the streets the hurrying men and women took on a new significance to
+him. He wondered what secret mighty purpose might be in their lives,
+and read a newspaper report of an engagement or a marriage with a little
+jump of the heart. He looked at the girls and the women at work over
+the typewriting machines in the office, with questioning eyes, asking
+himself why they did not seek marriage openly and determinedly, and
+saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material, as a machine
+for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in the great
+workshop of the universe. "Marriage is a port, a beginning, a point of
+departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage of
+life," he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. "All that
+goes before is but a preparation, a building. The pains and the triumphs
+of all unmarried people are but the good oak planks being driven into
+place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage." Or, again, one night
+when they were in a rowboat on the lagoon in the park and all about
+them in the darkness was the plash of oars in the water, the screams of
+excited girls, and the sound of voices calling, he let the boat float in
+against the shores of a little island and crept along the boat to kneel,
+with his head in her lap and whisper, "It is not the love of a woman
+that grips me, Sue, but the love of life. I have had a peep into the
+great mystery. This--this is why we are here--this justifies us."
+
+Now that she sat beside him, her shoulder against his own, being carried
+away with him into darkness and privacy, the personal side of his love
+for her ran through Sam like a flame and, turning, he drew her head down
+upon his shoulder.
+
+"Not yet, Sam," she whispered, "not with these hundreds of people
+sleeping and drinking and thinking and going about their affairs almost
+within touch of our hands."
+
+They got up and walked along the swaying deck. Out of the north the
+clean wind called to them, the stars looked down upon them, and in the
+darkness in the bow of the boat they parted for the night silently,
+speechless with happiness and with a dear, unmentioned secret between
+them.
+
+At dawn they landed at a little lumbering town, where boat, blankets,
+and camping kit had gone before. A river flowed down out of the woods
+passing the town, going under a bridge and turning the wheel of a
+sawmill that stood by the shore of the river facing the lake. The clean
+sweet smell of the new-cut logs, the song of the saws, the roar of
+the water tumbling over a dam, the cries of the blue-shirted lumbermen
+working among the floating logs above the dam, filled the morning air,
+and above the song of the saws sang another song, a breathless, waiting
+song, the song of love and of life singing in the hearts of husband and
+wife.
+
+In a little roughly-built lumberman's hotel they ate breakfast in a room
+overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced
+woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the
+breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing
+the door behind her. Through the open window they looked at the cold
+swiftly-flowing river and at a freckled-faced boy who carried packages
+wrapped in blankets and put them in a long canoe tied to a little
+wharf beside the hotel. They ate and sat staring at each other like two
+strange boys, saying nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his
+breast.
+
+On the river he sank his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the
+current. During the six weeks' waiting in Chicago she had taught him the
+essentials of the canoeist's art and, now, as he shot the canoe under
+the bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a
+superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the
+prow of the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and
+straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine
+trees, and piles of cut logs lay at the foot of the hills along the
+shore.
+
+At sunset they landed in a little cleared space at the foot of a hill
+and on the top of the hill, with the wind blowing across it, they
+made their first camp. Sam brought boughs and spread them, lapped like
+feathers in the wings of a bird, and carried blankets up the hill, while
+Sue, at the foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared
+their first cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out
+her rifle and gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness
+making the lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the
+young night, with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold
+wind blowing into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under
+the trees to where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the
+stormy waters of a great sea before their eyes, and lay down together
+for their first long tender embrace.
+
+There is a special kind of fine pleasure in getting one's first
+knowledge of the great outdoors in the company of a woman a man loves
+and to have that woman an expert, with a keen appetite for the life,
+adds point and flavour to the experience. In his busy striving,
+nickel-seeking boyhood in the town surrounded by hot cornfields, and in
+his young manhood of scheming and money hunger in the city, Sam had not
+thought of vacations and resting places. He had walked on country roads
+with John Telfer and Mary Underwood, listening to their talk, absorbing
+their ideas, blind and deaf to the little life in the grass, in the
+leafy branches of the trees and in the air about him. In clubs, and
+about hotels and barrooms in the city, he had heard men talk of life
+in the open, and had said to himself, "When my time comes I will taste
+these things."
+
+And now he did taste them, lying on his back on the grass along the
+river, floating down quiet little side streams in the moonlight,
+listening to the night call of birds, or watching the flight of
+frightened wild things as he pushed the canoe into the quiet depths of
+the great forest about them.
+
+At night, under the little tent they had brought, or beneath the
+blankets under the stars, he slept lightly, awakening often to look at
+Sue lying beside him. Perhaps the wind had blown a wisp of hair across
+her face and her breath played with it, tossing it about; perhaps just
+the quiet of her expressive little face charmed and held him, so that he
+turned reluctantly to sleep again thinking that he might, with pleasure,
+go on looking at her all night.
+
+For Sue the days also passed lightly. She also awoke in the night and
+lay looking at the man sleeping beside her, and once she told Sam that
+when he awoke she feigned sleep dreading to rob him of the pleasure that
+she knew these secret love passages gave to both.
+
+They were not alone in those northern woods. Everywhere along the rivers
+and on the shores of little lakes they found people, to Sam a new kind
+of people, who dropped all the ordinary things of life, and ran away
+to the woods and the streams to spend long happy months in the open.
+He discovered with surprise that these adventurers were men of modest
+fortunes, small manufacturers, skilled workingmen, retail merchants. One
+with whom he talked was a grocer from a town in Ohio, and when Sam asked
+him if the coming to the woods with his family for an eight-weeks stay
+did not endanger the success of his business he agreed with Sam that it
+did, nodding his head and laughing.
+
+"But there would be a lot more danger in not leaving it," he said, "the
+danger of having my boys grow up to be men without my having any real
+fun with them."
+
+Among all of the people they met Sue passed with a sort of happy freedom
+that confounded Sam, as he had formed a habit of thinking of her always
+as one shut within herself. Many of the people they saw she knew, and
+he came to believe that she had chosen the place for their love making
+because she admired and held in high favour the lives of these people of
+the out-of-doors and wanted her lover to be in some way like them. Out
+of the solitude of the woods, along the shores of little lakes, they
+called to her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show
+her husband, and among them she sat talking of other seasons and of the
+inroads of the lumber men upon their paradise. "The Burnhams were
+this year on the shores of Grant Lake, the two school teachers from
+Pittsburgh would come early in August, the Detroit man with the crippled
+son was building a cabin on the shores of Bone River."
+
+Sam sat among them in silence, renewing constantly his admiration for
+the wonder of Sue's past life. She, the daughter of Colonel Tom, the
+woman rich in her own right, to have made her friends among these
+people; she, who had been pronounced an enigma by the young men of
+Chicago, to have been secretly all of these years the companion and
+fellow spirit of these campers by the lakes.
+
+For six weeks they led a wandering, nomadic life in that half wild land,
+for Sue six weeks of tender love making, and of the expression of
+every thought and impulse of her fine nature, for Sam six weeks of
+readjustment and freedom, during which he learned to sail a boat, to
+shoot, and to get the fine taste of that life into his being.
+
+And then one morning they came again to the little lumber town at the
+mouth of the river and sat upon the pier waiting for the Chicago boat.
+They were bound once more into the world, and to that life together that
+was the foundation of their marriage and that was to be the end and aim
+of their two lives.
+
+If Sam's life from boyhood had been, on the whole, barren and empty of
+many of the sweeter things, his life during the next year was strikingly
+full and complete. In the office he had ceased being the pushing upstart
+tramping on the toes of tradition and had become the son of Colonel Tom,
+the voter of Sue's big stock holdings, the practical, directing head and
+genius of the destinies of the company. Jack Prince's loyalty had been
+rewarded, and a huge advertising campaign made the name and merits of
+the Rainey Arms Company's wares known to all reading Americans. The
+muzzles of Rainey-Whittaker rifles, revolvers, and shotguns looked
+threateningly out at one from the pages of the great popular magazines,
+brown fur-clad hunters did brave deeds before one's eyes, kneeling upon
+snow-topped crags preparing to speed winged death to waiting mountain
+sheep; huge open-mouthed bears rushed down from among the type at the
+top of the pages and seemed about to devour cool deliberate sportsmen
+who stood undaunted, swinging their trusty Rainey-Whittakers into place,
+and presidents, explorers, and Texas gun fighters loudly proclaimed the
+merits of Rainey-Whittakers to a gun-buying world. It was for Sam
+and for Colonel Tom a time of big dividends, mechanical progress, and
+contentment.
+
+Sam stayed diligently at work in the offices and in the shops, but kept
+within himself a reserve of strength and resolution that might have gone
+into the work. With Sue he took up golf and morning rides on horseback,
+and with Sue he sat during the long evenings, reading aloud, absorbing
+her ideas and her beliefs. Sometimes for days they were like two
+children, going off together to walk on country roads and to sleep in
+country hotels. On these walks they went hand in hand or, bantering each
+other, raced down long hills to lie panting in the grass by the roadside
+when they were out of breath.
+
+Near the end of the first year she told him one night of the realisation
+of their hopes and they sat through the evening alone by the fire in her
+room, filled with the white wonder of it, renewing to each other all the
+fine vows of their early love-making days.
+
+Sam never succeeded in recapturing the flavour of those days. Happiness
+is a thing so vague, so indefinite, so dependent on a thousand little
+turns of the events of the day, that it only visits the most fortunate
+and at rare intervals, but Sam thought that he and Sue touched almost
+ideal happiness constantly during that time. There were weeks and even
+months of their first year together that later passed out of Sam's
+memory entirely, leaving only a sense of completeness and well being.
+He could remember, perhaps, a winter walk in the moonlight by the frozen
+lake, or a visitor who sat and talked an evening away by their fire. But
+at the end he had to come back to this: that something sang in his
+heart all day long and that the air tasted better, the stars shone more
+brightly, and the wind and the rain and the hail upon the window panes
+sang more sweetly in his ears. He and the woman who lived with him had
+wealth, position, and infinite delight in the presence and the persons
+of each other, and a great idea burned like a lamp in a window at the
+end of the road they travelled.
+
+Meanwhile, in the world about him events came and went. A president
+was elected, the grey wolves were being hunted out of the Chicago city
+council, and a strong rival to his company flourished in his own
+city. In other days he would have been down upon this rival fighting,
+planning, working for its destruction. Now he sat at Sue's feet,
+dreaming and talking to her of the brood that under their care should
+grow into wonderful reliant men and women. When Lewis, the talented
+sales manager of the Edwards Arms Company, got the business of a
+Kansas City jobber, he smiled, wrote a sharp letter to his man in that
+territory, and went for an afternoon of golf with Sue. He had completely
+and wholly accepted Sue's conception of life. "We have wealth for any
+emergency," he said to himself, "and we will live our lives for service
+to mankind through the children that will presently come into our
+house."
+
+After their marriage Sam found that Sue, for all her apparent coldness
+and indifference, had in Chicago, as in the northern woods, her own
+little circle of men and women. Some of these people Sam had met during
+the engagement, and now they began gradually coming to the house for an
+evening with the McPhersons. Sometimes there would be several of them
+for a quiet dinner at which there was much good talk, and after which
+Sue and Sam sat for half the night, continuing some vein of thought
+brought to them. Among the people who came to them, Sam shone
+resplendent. In some indefinable way he thought they paid court to him
+and the thought flattered him immensely. The college professor who had
+talked brilliantly through an evening turned to Sam for approval of his
+conclusions, a writer of tales of cowboy life asked him to help him over
+a difficulty in the stock market, and a tall black-haired painter paid
+him the rare compliment of repeating one of Sam's remarks as his own. It
+was as though, in spite of their talk, they thought him the most gifted
+of them all, and for a time he was puzzled by their attitude. Jack
+Prince came, sat at one of the dinner parties, and explained.
+
+"You have got what they want and cannot get--the money," he said.
+
+After the evening when Sue told him the great news they gave a dinner.
+It was a sort of welcoming party for the coming guest, and, while the
+people at the table ate and talked, Sue and Sam, from opposite ends
+of the table, lifted high their glasses and, looking into each other's
+eyes, drank off the health of him who was to come, the first of the
+great family, the family that was to have two lives lived for its
+success.
+
+At the table sat Colonel Tom with his broad white shirt front, his
+white, pointed beard, and his grandiloquent flow of talk; at Sue's side
+sat Jack Prince, pausing in his open admiration of Sue to cast an eye
+on the handsome New York girl at Sam's end of the table or to puncture,
+with a flash of his terse common sense, some balloon of theory launched
+by Williams of the University, who sat on the other side of Sue; the
+artist, who hoped for a commission to paint Colonel Tom, sat opposite
+him bewailing the dying out of fine old American families; and a
+serious-faced little German scientist sat beside Colonel Tom smiling
+as the artist talked. The man, Sam fancied, was laughing at them both,
+perhaps at all of them. He did not mind. He looked at the scientist and
+at the other faces up and down the table and then at Sue. He saw her
+directing and leading the talk; he saw the play of muscles about her
+strong neck and the fine firmness of her straight little body, and his
+eyes grew moist and a lump came into his throat at the thought of the
+secret that lay between them.
+
+And then his mind ran back to another night in Caxton when first he sat
+eating among strange people at Freedom Smith's table. He saw again the
+tomboy girl and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom's
+hand in the close little stable; he saw the absurd housepainter trying
+to blow the bugle in the street; and the mother talking to her boy of
+death through the summer evening; the fat foreman making the record
+of his loves on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commission man
+rubbing his hands before a group of Greek hucksters, and then this--this
+home with its safety and its secret high aim and him sitting there at
+the head of it all. Like the novelist, it seemed to him that he should
+admire and bow his head before the romance of destiny. He thought his
+station, his wife, his country, his end in life, when rightly seen, the
+very apex of life on the earth, and to him in his pride it seemed that
+he was in some way the master and maker of it all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Late one evening, some weeks after the McPhersons had given the dinner
+party in secret celebration of the future arrival of what was to be the
+first of the great family, they came together down the steps of a north
+side house to their waiting carriage. They had spent, Sam thought, a
+delightful evening. The Grovers were people of whose friendship he was
+particularly proud and since his marriage with Sue he had taken her
+often for an evening to the house of the venerable surgeon. Doctor
+Grover was a scholar, a man of note in the medical world, and a rapid
+and absorbing talker and thinker on any subject that aroused his
+interest. A certain youthful enthusiasm in his outlook on life had
+attracted to him the devotion of Sue, who, since meeting him through
+Sam, had counted him a marked addition to their little group of friends.
+His wife, a white-haired, plump little woman, was, though apparently
+somewhat diffident, in reality his intellectual equal and companion,
+and Sue in a quiet way had taken her as a model in her own effort toward
+complete wifehood.
+
+During the evening, spent in a rapid exchange of opinions and ideas
+between the two men, Sue had sat in silence. Once when he looked at her
+Sam thought that he had surprised an annoyed look in her eyes and was
+puzzled by it. During the remainder of the evening her eyes refused
+to meet his and she looked instead at the floor, a flush mounting her
+cheeks.
+
+At the door of the carriage Frank, Sue's coachman, stepped on the hem
+of her gown and tore it. The tear was slight, the incident Sam thought
+entirely unavoidable, and as much due to a momentary clumsiness on the
+part of Sue as to the awkwardness of Frank. The man had for years been a
+loyal servant and a devoted admirer of Sue's.
+
+Sam laughed and taking Sue by the arm started to help her in at the
+carriage door.
+
+"Too much gown for an athlete," he said, pointlessly.
+
+In a flash Sue turned and faced the coachman.
+
+"Awkward brute," she said, through her teeth.
+
+Sam stood on the sidewalk dumb with astonishment as Frank turned and
+climbed to his seat without waiting to close the carriage door. He felt
+as he might have felt had he, as a boy, heard profanity from the lips
+of his mother. The look in Sue's eyes as she turned them on Frank struck
+him like a blow and in a moment his whole carefully built-up conception
+of her and of her character had been shaken. He had an impulse to slam
+the carriage door after her and walk home.
+
+They drove home in silence, Sam feeling as though he rode beside a new
+and strange being. In the light of passing street lamps he could see her
+face held straight ahead and her eyes staring stonily at the curtain in
+front. He didn't want to reproach her; he wanted to take hold of her arm
+and shake her. "I should like to take the whip from in front of Frank's
+seat and give her a sound beating," he told himself.
+
+At the house Sue jumped out of the carriage and, running past him in at
+the door, closed it after her. Frank drove off toward the stables and
+when Sam went into the house he found Sue standing half way up the
+stairs leading to her room and waiting for him.
+
+"I presume you do not know that you have been openly insulting me all
+evening," she cried. "Your beastly talk there at the Grovers--it was
+unbearable--who are these women? Why parade your past life before me?"
+
+Sam said nothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at
+her and then, turning, just as she, running up the stairs, slammed the
+door of her own room, he went into the library. A wood fire burned in
+the grate and he sat down and lighted his pipe. He did not try to think
+the thing out. He felt that he was in the presence of a lie and that the
+Sue who had lived in his mind and in his affections no longer existed,
+that in her place there was this other woman, this woman who had
+insulted her own servant and had perverted and distorted the meaning of
+his talk during the evening.
+
+Sitting by the fire filling and refilling his pipe, Sam went carefully
+over every word, gesture, and incident of the evening at the Grovers and
+could get hold of no part of it that he thought might in fairness serve
+as an excuse for the outburst. In the upper part of the house he could
+hear Sue moving restlessly about and he had satisfaction in the thought
+that her mind was punishing her for so strange a seizure. He and Grover
+had perhaps been somewhat carried away, he told himself; they had talked
+of marriage and its meaning and had both declared somewhat hotly against
+the idea that the loss of virginity in women was in any sense a bar to
+honourable marriage, but he had said nothing that he thought could have
+been twisted into an insult to Sue or to Mrs. Grover. He had thought the
+talk rather good and clearly thought out and had come out of the house
+exhilarated and secretly preening himself with the thought that he had
+talked unusually forcefully and well. In any event what had been said
+had been said before in Sue's presence and he thought that he could
+remember her having, in the past, expressed similar ideas with
+enthusiasm.
+
+Hour after hour he sat in the chair before the dying fire. He dozed and
+his pipe dropped from his hand and fell upon the stone hearth. A kind
+of dumb misery and anger was in him as over and over endlessly his mind
+kept reviewing the events of the evening.
+
+"What has made her think she can do that to me?" he kept asking himself.
+
+He remembered certain strange silences and hard looks from her eyes
+during the past weeks, silences and looks that in the light of the
+events of the evening became pregnant with meaning.
+
+"She has a temper, a beast of a temper. Why shouldn't she have been
+square and told me?" he asked himself.
+
+The clock had struck three when the library door opened quietly and Sue,
+clad in a dressing gown through which the new roundness of her lithe
+little figure was plainly apparent, came into the room. She ran across
+to him and putting her head down on his knee wept bitterly.
+
+"Oh, Sam!" she said, "I think I am going insane. I have been hating you
+as I have not hated since I was an evil-tempered child. A thing I worked
+years to suppress in me has come back. I have been hating myself and the
+baby. For days I have been fighting the feeling in me, and now it has
+come out and perhaps you have begun hating me. Can you love me again?
+Will you ever forget the meanness and the cheapness of it? You and poor
+innocent Frank--Oh, Sam, the devil was in me!"
+
+Reaching down, Sam took her into his arms and cuddled her like a child.
+A story he had heard of the vagaries of women at such times came back to
+him and was as a light illuminating the darkness of his mind.
+
+"I understand now," he said. "It is a part of the burden you carry for
+us both."
+
+For some weeks after the outbreak at the carriage door events ran
+smoothly in the McPherson house. One day as he stood in the stable door
+Frank came round the corner of the house and, looking up sheepishly from
+under his cap, said to Sam: "I understand about the missus. It is the
+baby coming. We have had four of them at our house," and Sam, nodding
+his head, turned and began talking rapidly of his plans to replace the
+carriages with automobiles.
+
+But in the house, in spite of the clearing up of the matter of Sue's
+ugliness at the Grovers, a subtle change had taken place in the
+relationship of the two. Although they were together facing the first
+of the events that were to be like ports-of-call in the great voyage of
+their lives, they were not facing it with the same mutual understanding
+and kindly tolerance with which they had faced smaller things in the
+past--a disagreement over the method of shooting a rapid in a river or
+the entertainment of an undesirable guest. The inclination to fits of
+temper loosens and disarranges all the little wires of life. The
+tune will not get itself played. One stands waiting for the discord,
+strained, missing the harmony. It was so with Sam. He began feeling that
+he must keep a check upon his tongue and that things of which they had
+talked with great freedom six months earlier now annoyed and irritated
+his wife when brought into an after-dinner discussion. To Sam, who,
+during his life with Sue, had learned the joy of free, open talk upon
+any subject that came into his mind and whose native interest in life
+and in the motives of men and women had blossomed in the large leisure
+and independence of the last year, this was trying. It was, he thought,
+like trying to hold free and open communion with the people of an
+orthodox family, and he fell into a habit of prolonged silences, a habit
+that later, he found, once formed, unbelievably hard to break.
+
+One day in the office a situation arose that seemed to demand Sam's
+presence in Boston on a certain date. For months he had been carrying
+on a trade war with some of the eastern manufacturers in his line and an
+opportunity for the settlement of the trouble in a way advantageous to
+himself had, he thought, arisen. He wanted to handle the matter himself
+and went home to explain to Sue. It was at the end of a day when nothing
+had occurred to irritate her and she agreed with him that he should not
+be compelled to trust so important a matter to another.
+
+"I am no child, Sam. I will take care of myself," she said, laughing.
+
+Sam wired his New York man asking him to make the arrangements for the
+meeting in Boston and picked up a book to spend the evening reading
+aloud to her.
+
+And then, coming home the next evening he found her in tears and when he
+tried to laugh away her fears she flew into a black fit of anger and ran
+out of the room.
+
+Sam went to the 'phone and called his New York man, thinking to instruct
+him in regard to the conference in Boston and to give up his own plans
+for the trip. When he had got his man on the wire, Sue, who had
+been standing outside the door, rushed in and put her hand over the
+mouthpiece of the 'phone.
+
+"Sam! Sam!" she cried. "Do not give up the trip! Scold me! Beat me! Do
+anything, but do not let me go on making a fool of myself and destroying
+your peace of mind! I shall be miserable if you stay at home because of
+what I have said!"
+
+Over the 'phone came the insistent voice of Central and putting her hand
+aside Sam talked to his man, letting the engagement stand and making
+some detail of the conference answer as his need of calling.
+
+Again Sue was repentant and again after her tears they sat before the
+fire until his train time, talking like lovers.
+
+To Buffalo in the morning came a wire from her.
+
+"Come back. Let business go. Cannot stand it," she had wired.
+
+While he sat reading the wire the porter brought another.
+
+"Please, Sam, pay no attention to any wire from me. I am all right and
+only half a fool."
+
+Sam was irritated. "It is deliberate pettiness and weakness," he
+thought, when an hour later the porter brought another wire demanding
+his immediate return. "The situation calls for drastic action and
+perhaps one good stinging reproof will stop it for all time."
+
+Going into the buffet car he wrote a long letter calling her attention
+to the fact that a certain amount of freedom of action was due him, and
+saying that he intended to act upon his own judgment in the future and
+not upon her impulses.
+
+Having begun to write Sam went on and on. He was not interrupted, no
+shadow crossed the face of his beloved to tell him he was hurting and
+he said all that was in his mind to say. Little sharp reproofs that had
+come into his mind but that had been left unsaid now got themselves said
+and when he had dumped his overloaded mind into the letter he sealed and
+mailed it at a passing station.
+
+Within an hour after the letter had left his hands Sam regretted it. He
+thought of the little woman bearing the burden for them both, and things
+Grover had told him of the unhappiness of women in her condition came
+back to haunt his mind so that he wrote and sent off to her a wire
+asking her not to read the letter he had mailed and assuring her that he
+would hurry through the Boston conference and get back to her at once.
+
+When Sam returned he knew that in an evil moment Sue had opened and
+read the letter sent from the train and was surprised and hurt by the
+knowledge. The act seemed like a betrayal. He said nothing, going about
+his work with a troubled mind and watching with growing anxiety her
+alternate fits of white anger and fearful remorse. He thought her
+growing worse daily and became alarmed for her health.
+
+And, then, after a talk with Grover he began to spend more and more time
+with her, forcing her to take with him daily, long walks in the open
+air. He tried valiantly to keep her mind fixed on cheerful things and
+went to bed happy and relieved when a day ended that did not bring a
+stormy passage between them.
+
+There were days during that period when Sam thought himself near
+insanity. With a light in her grey eyes that was maddening Sue would
+take up some minor thing, a remark he had made or a passage he had
+quoted from some book, and in a dead, level, complaining tone would talk
+of it until his head reeled and his fingers ached from the gripping of
+his hands to keep control of himself. After such a day he would steal
+off by himself and, walking rapidly, would try through pure physical
+fatigue to force his mind to give up the remembrance of the persistent,
+complaining voice. At times he would give way to fits of anger and
+strew impotent oaths along the silent street, or, in another mood, would
+mumble and talk to himself, praying for strength and courage to keep his
+own head during the ordeal through which he thought they were passing
+together. And when he returned from such a walk and from such a struggle
+with himself it often occurred that he would find her waiting in the arm
+chair before the fire in her room, her mind clear and her little face
+wet with the tears of her repentance.
+
+And then the struggle ended. With Doctor Grover it had been arranged
+that Sue should be taken to the hospital for the great event, and they
+drove there hurriedly one night through the quiet streets, the recurring
+pains gripping Sue and her hands clutching his. An exalted cheerfulness
+had hold of them. Face to face with the actual struggle for the new
+life Sue was transfigured. Her voice rang with triumph and her eyes
+glistened.
+
+"I am going to do it," she cried; "my black fear is gone. I shall give
+you a child--a man child. I shall succeed, my man Sam. You shall see. It
+will be beautiful."
+
+When the pain gripped she gripped at his hand, and a spasm of
+physical sympathy ran through him. He felt helpless and ashamed of his
+helplessness.
+
+At the entrance to the hospital grounds she put her face down upon his
+knees so that the hot tears ran through his hands.
+
+"Poor, poor old Sam, it has been horrible for you."
+
+At the hospital Sam walked up and down in the corridor through the
+swinging doors at the end of which she had been taken. Every vestige of
+regret for the trying months now lying behind had passed, and he paced
+up and down the corridor feeling that he had come to one of those huge
+moments when a man's brain, his grasp of affairs, his hopes and plans
+for the future, all of the little details and trivialities of his life,
+halt, and he waits anxious, breathless, expectant. He looked at a little
+clock on a table at the end of the corridor, half expecting it to stop
+also and wait with him. His marriage hour that had seemed so big and
+vital seemed now, in the quiet corridor, with the stone floor and the
+silent white-clad, rubber-shod nurses passing up and down and in the
+presence of this greater event, to have shrunk enormously. He walked up
+and down peering at the clock, looking at the swinging door and biting
+at the stem of his empty pipe.
+
+And then through the swinging door came Grover.
+
+"We can get the child, Sam, but to get it we shall have to take a chance
+with her. Do you want to do that? Do not wait. Decide."
+
+Sam sprang past him toward the door.
+
+"You bungler," he cried, and his voice rang through the long quiet
+corridor. "You do not know what this means. Let me go."
+
+Doctor Grover, catching him by the arm, swung him about. The two men
+stood facing each other.
+
+"You stay here," said the doctor, his voice remaining quiet and firm; "I
+will attend to things. Your going in there would be pure folly now. Now
+answer me--do you want to take the chance?"
+
+"No! No!" Sam shouted. "No! I want her--Sue--alive and well, back
+through that door."
+
+A cold gleam came into his eyes and he shook his fist before the
+doctor's face.
+
+"Do not try deceiving me about this. By God, I will----"
+
+Turning, Doctor Grover ran back through the swinging door leaving Sam
+staring blankly at his back. A nurse, one whom he had seen in Doctor
+Grover's office, came out of the door and taking his arm, walked beside
+him up and down the corridor. Sam put his arm around her shoulder and
+talked. An illusion that it was necessary to comfort her came to him.
+
+"Do not worry," he said. "She will be all right. Grover will take care
+of her. Nothing can happen to little Sue."
+
+The nurse, a small, sweet-faced, Scotch woman, who knew and admired Sue,
+wept. Some quality in his voice had touched the woman in her and the
+tears ran in a little stream down her cheeks. Sam continued talking, the
+woman's tears helping him to regain his grip upon himself.
+
+"My mother is dead," he said, an old sorrow revisiting him. "I wish that
+you, like Mary Underwood, would be a new mother to me."
+
+When the time came that he could be taken to the room where Sue lay, his
+self-possession had returned to him and his mind had begun blaming the
+little dead stranger for the unhappiness of the past months and for the
+long separation from what he thought was the real Sue. Outside the door
+of the room into which she had been taken he stopped, hearing her voice,
+thin and weak, talking to Grover.
+
+"Unfit--Sue McPherson unfit," said the voice, and Sam thought it was
+filled with an infinite weariness.
+
+He ran through the door and dropped on his knees by her bed. She turned
+her eyes to him smiling bravely.
+
+"The next time we'll make it," she said.
+
+The second child born to the young McPhersons arrived out of time. Again
+Sam walked, this time through the corridor of his own house and without
+the consoling presence of the sweet-faced Scotch woman, and again
+he shook his head at Doctor Grover who came to him consoling and
+reassuring.
+
+After the death of the second child Sue lay for months in bed. In his
+arms, in her own room, she wept openly in the presence of Grover and the
+nurses, crying out against her unfitness. For several days she refused
+to see Colonel Tom, harbouring in her mind the notion that he was in
+some way responsible for her physical inability to bear living children,
+and when she got up from her bed, she remained for months white and
+listless but grimly determined upon another attempt for the little life
+she so wanted to feel in her arms.
+
+During the days of her carrying the second baby she had again the fierce
+ugly attacks of temper that had shattered Sam's nerves, but having
+learned to understand, he went quietly about his work, trying as far
+as in him lay to close his ears to the stinging, hurtful things she
+sometimes said; and the third time, it was agreed between them that
+if they were again unsuccessful they would turn their minds to other
+things.
+
+"If we do not succeed this time we might as well count ourselves through
+with each other for good," she said one day in one of the fits of cold
+anger that were a part of child bearing with her.
+
+That second night when Sam walked in the hospital corridor he was beside
+himself. He felt like a young recruit called to face an unseen enemy and
+to stand motionless and inactive in the presence of the singing death
+that ran through the air. He remembered a story, told when he was a
+child by a fellow soldier who had come to visit his father, of the
+prisoners at Andersonville creeping in the darkness past armed sentries
+to a little pool of stagnant water beyond the dead line, and felt that
+he too was creeping unarmed and helpless in the neighbourhood of death.
+In a conference at his house between the three some weeks before, it had
+been decided, after tearful insistence on the part of Sue and a stand
+on the part of Grover, who declared that he would not remain on the case
+unless permitted to use his own judgment, that an operation should be
+performed.
+
+"Take the chances that need be taken," Sam had said to Grover after the
+conference; "she will never stand another defeat. Give her the child."
+
+In the corridor it seemed to Sam that hours had passed and still he
+stood motionless waiting. His feet felt cold and he had the impression
+that they were wet although the night was dry and a moon shone outside.
+When, from a distant part of the hospital, a groan reached his ears he
+shook with fright and had an inclination to cry out. Two young interns
+clad in white passed.
+
+"Old Grover is doing a Caesarian section," said one of them; "he is
+getting out of date. Hope he doesn't bungle it."
+
+In Sam's ears rang the remembrance of Sue's voice, the Sue who that
+first time had gone into the room behind the swinging doors with the
+determined smile on her face. He thought he could see again the white
+face looking up from the wheeled cot on which they had taken her through
+the door.
+
+"I am afraid, Dr. Grover--I am afraid I am unfit," he had heard her say
+as the door closed.
+
+And then Sam did a thing for which he cursed himself the rest of his
+life. On an impulse, and maddened by the intolerable waiting, he walked
+to the swinging doors and, pushing them open, stepped into the operating
+room where Grover was at work upon Sue.
+
+The room was long and narrow, with floors, walls and ceiling of white
+cement. A great glaring light, suspended from the ceiling, threw
+its rays directly down on a white-clad figure lying on a white metal
+operating table. On the walls of the room were other glaring lights set
+in shining glass reflectors. And, here and there through an intense,
+expectant atmosphere, moved and stood silently a group of men and women,
+faceless, hairless, with only their strangely vivid eyes showing through
+the white masks that covered their faces.
+
+Sam, standing motionless by the door, looked about with wild,
+half-seeing eyes. Grover worked rapidly and silently, taking from time
+to time little shining instruments from a swinging table close at his
+hand. The nurse standing beside him looked up toward the light and began
+calmly threading a needle. And in a white basin on a little stand at
+the side of the room lay the last of Sue's tremendous efforts toward new
+life, the last of their dreams of the great family.
+
+Sam closed his eyes and fell. His head, striking against the wall,
+aroused him and he struggled to his feet.
+
+Without stopping his work, Grover began swearing.
+
+"Damn it, man, get out of here."
+
+Sam groped with his hand for the door. One of the white-clad, ghoulish
+figures started toward him. And then with his head reeling and his eyes
+closed he backed through the door and, running along the corridor and
+down a flight of broad stairs, reached the open air and darkness. He had
+no doubt of Sue's death.
+
+"She is gone," he muttered, hurrying bareheaded along the deserted
+streets.
+
+Through street after street he ran. Twice he came out upon the shores
+of the lake, and, then turning, went back into the heart of the city
+through streets bathed in the warm moonlight. Once he turned quickly at
+a corner and stepping into a vacant lot stood behind a high board fence
+as a policeman strolled along the street. Into his head came the idea
+that he had killed Sue and that the blue-clad figure walking with heavy
+tread on the stone pavement was seeking him to take him back to where
+she lay white and lifeless. Again he stopped, before a little frame
+drugstore on a corner, and sitting down on the steps before it cursed
+God openly and defiantly like an angry boy defying his father. Some
+instinct led him to look at the sky through the tangle of telegraph
+wires overhead.
+
+"Go on and do what you dare!" he cried. "I will not follow you now. I
+shall never try to find you after this."
+
+Presently he began laughing at himself for the instinct that had led
+him to look at the sky and to shout out his defiance and, getting up,
+wandered on. In his wanderings he came to a railroad track where a
+freight train groaned and rattled over a crossing. When he came up to it
+he jumped upon an empty coal car, falling as he climbed, and cutting his
+face upon the sharp pieces of coal that lay scattered about the bottom
+of the car.
+
+The train ground along slowly, stopping occasionally, the engine
+shrieking hysterically.
+
+After a time he got out of the car and dropped to the ground. On all
+sides of him were marshes, the long rank marsh grasses rolling and
+tossing in the moonlight. When the train had passed he followed it,
+walking stumblingly along. As he walked, following the blinking lights
+at the end of the train, he thought of the scene in the hospital and
+of Sue lying dead for that--that ping livid and shapeless on the table
+under the lights.
+
+Where the solid ground ran up to the tracks Sam sat down under a tree.
+Peace came over him. "This is the end of things," he thought, and
+was like a tired child comforted by its mother. He thought of the
+sweet-faced nurse who had walked with him that other time in the
+corridor of the hospital and who had wept because of his fears, and
+then of the night when he had felt the throat of his father between
+his fingers in the squalid little kitchen. He ran his hands along
+the ground. "Good old ground," he said. A sentence came into his mind
+followed by the figure of John Telfer striding, stick in hand, along a
+dusty road. "Here is spring come and time to plant out flowers in the
+grass," he said aloud. His face felt swollen and sore from the fall in
+the freight car and he lay down on the ground under a tree and slept.
+
+When he woke it was morning and grey clouds were drifting across the
+sky. Within sight, down a road, a trolley car went past into the city.
+Before him, in the midst of the marsh, lay a low lake, and a raised
+walk, with boats tied to the posts on which it stood, ran down to the
+water. He went down the walk, bathed his bruised face in the water, and
+boarding a car went back into the city.
+
+In the morning air a new thought took possession of him. The wind ran
+along a dusty road beside the car track, picking up little handfuls of
+dust and playfully throwing them about. He had a strained, eager feeling
+like some one listening for a faint call out of the distance.
+
+"To be sure," he thought, "I know what it is, it is my wedding day. I am
+to marry Sue Rainey to-day."
+
+At the house he found Grover and Colonel Tom standing in the breakfast
+room. Grover looked at his swollen, distorted face. His voice trembled.
+
+"Poor devil!" he said. "You have had a night!"
+
+Sam laughed and slapped Colonel Tom on the shoulder.
+
+"We will have to begin getting ready," he said. "The wedding is at ten.
+Sue will be getting anxious."
+
+Grover and Colonel Tom took him by the arm and began leading him up the
+stairs, Colonel Tom weeping like a woman.
+
+"Silly old fool," thought Sam.
+
+When, two weeks later, he again opened his eyes to consciousness Sue sat
+beside his bed in a reclining chair, her little thin white hand in his.
+
+"Get the baby!" he cried, believing anything possible. "I want to see
+the baby!"
+
+She laid her head down on the pillow.
+
+"It was gone when you saw it," she said, and put an arm about his neck.
+
+When the nurse came back she found them, their heads together upon the
+pillow, crying weakly like two tired children.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The blow given the plan of life so carefully thought out and so eagerly
+accepted by the young McPhersons threw them back upon themselves. For
+several years they had been living upon a hill top, taking themselves
+very seriously and more than a little preening themselves with the
+thought that they were two very unusual and thoughtful people engaged
+upon a worthy and ennobling enterprise. Sitting in their corner immersed
+in admiration of their own purposes and in the thoughts of the vigorous,
+disciplined, new life they were to give the world by the combined
+efficiency of their two bodies and minds they were, at a word and a
+shake of the head from Doctor Grover, compelled to remake the outline of
+their future together.
+
+All about them the rush of life went on, vast changes were impending
+in the industrial life of the people, cities were doubling and tripling
+their population, a war was being fought, and the flag of their country
+flew in the ports of strange seas, while American boys pushed their way
+through the tangled jungles of strange lands carrying in their hands
+Rainey-Whittaker rifles. And in a huge stone house, set in a broad
+expanse of green lawns near the shores of Lake Michigan, Sam McPherson
+sat looking at his wife, who in turn looked at him. He was trying, as
+she also was trying, to adjust himself to the cheerful acceptance of
+their new prospect of a childless life.
+
+Looking at Sue across the dinner table or seeing her straight, wiry body
+astride a horse riding beside him through the parks, it seemed to Sam
+unbelievable that a childless womanhood was ever to be her portion, and
+more than once he had an inclination to venture again upon an effort for
+the success of their hopes. But when he remembered her still white
+face that night in the hospital, her bitter, haunting cry of defeat,
+he turned with a shudder from the thought, feeling that he could not go
+with her again through that ordeal; that he could not again allow her to
+look forward through weeks and months toward the little life that never
+came to lie upon her breast or to laugh up into her face.
+
+And yet Sam, son of that Jane McPherson who had won the admiration of
+the men of Caxton by her ceaseless efforts to keep her family afloat and
+clean handed, could not sit idly by, living upon the income of his own
+and Sue's money. The stirring, forward-moving world called to him; he
+looked about him at the broad, significant movements in business and
+finance, at the new men coming into prominence and apparently finding a
+way for the expression of new big ideas, and felt his youth stirring in
+him and his mind reaching out to new projects and new ambitions.
+
+Given the necessity for economy and a hard long-drawn-out struggle for
+a livelihood and competence, Sam could conceive of living his life
+with Sue and deriving something like gratification from just her
+companionship, and her partnership in his efforts--here and there during
+the waiting years he had met men who had found such gratification--a
+foreman in the shops or a tobacconist from whom he bought his
+cigars--but for himself he felt that he had gone with Sue too far upon
+another road to turn that way now with anything like mutual zeal or
+interest. At bottom, his mind did not run strongly toward the idea of
+the love of women as an end in life; he had loved, and did love, Sue
+with something approaching religious fervour, but the fervour was more
+than half due to the ideas she had given him and to the fact that with
+him she was to have been the instrument for the realisation of those
+ideas. He was a man with children in his loins and he had given up his
+struggles for business eminence for the sake of preparing himself for
+a kind of noble fatherhood of children, many children, strong children,
+fit gifts to the world for two exceptionally favoured lives. In all
+of his talks with Sue this idea had been present and dominant. He had
+looked about him and in the arrogance of his youth and in the pride
+of his good body and mind had condemned all childless marriages as a
+selfish waste of good lives. With her he had agreed that such lives were
+without point and purpose. Now he remembered that in the days of her
+audacity and daring she had more than once expressed the hope that in
+case of a childless issue to their marriage one or the other of them
+would have the courage to cut the knot that tied them and venture into
+another effort at right living at any cost.
+
+In the months after Sue's last recovery, and during the long evenings,
+as they sat together or walked under the stars in the park, the thought
+of these talks was often in Sam's mind and he found himself beginning
+to speculate on her present attitude and to wonder how bravely she
+would meet the idea of a separation. In the end he decided that no such
+thought was in her mind, that face to face with the tremendous
+actuality she clung to him with a new dependence, and a new need of his
+companionship. The conviction of the absolute necessity of children as
+a justification for a man and woman living together had, he thought,
+burned itself more deeply into his brain than into hers; to him it
+clung, coming back again and again to his mind, causing him to turn here
+and there restlessly, making readjustments, seeking new light. The old
+gods being dead he sought new gods.
+
+In the meantime he sat in his house facing his wife, losing himself in
+the books recommended to him years before by Janet, thinking his own
+thoughts. Often in the evening he would look up from his book or from
+his preoccupied staring at the fire to find her eyes looking at him.
+
+"Talk, Sam; talk," she would say; "do not sit there thinking."
+
+Or at another time she would come to his room at night and putting her
+head down on the pillow beside his would spend hours planning, weeping,
+begging him to give her again his love, his old fervent, devoted love.
+
+This Sam tried earnestly and honestly to do, going with her for long
+walks when the new call, the business had begun to make to him, would
+have kept him at his desk, reading aloud to her in the evening, urging
+her to shake off her old dreams and to busy herself with new work and
+new interests.
+
+Through the days in the office he went in a kind of half stupor. An old
+feeling of his boyhood coming back to him, it seemed to him, as it had
+seemed when he walked aimlessly through the streets of Caxton after
+the death of his mother, that there remained something to be done, an
+accounting to be made. Even at his desk with the clatter of typewriters
+in his ears and the piles of letters demanding his attention, his mind
+slipped back to the days of his courtship with Sue and to those days in
+the north woods when life had beat strong within him, and every young,
+wild thing, every new growth renewed the dream that filled his being.
+Sometimes on the street, or walking in the park with Sue, the cries of
+children at play cut across the sombre dulness of his mind and he shrank
+from the sound and a kind of bitter resentment took possession of him.
+When he looked covertly at Sue she talked of other things, apparently
+unconscious of his thoughts.
+
+Then a new phase of life presented itself. To his surprise he found
+himself looking with more than passing interest at women in the streets,
+and an old hunger for the companionship of strange women came back to
+him, in some way coarsened and materialised. One evening at the theatre
+a woman, a friend of Sue's and the childless wife of a business friend
+of his own, sat beside him. In the darkness of the playhouse her
+shoulder nestled down against his. In the excitement of a crisis on the
+stage her hand slipped into his and her fingers clutched and held his
+fingers.
+
+Animal desire seized and shook him, a feeling without sweetness, brutal,
+making his eyes burn. When between the acts the theatre was again
+flooded with light he looked up guiltily to meet another pair of eyes
+equally filled with guilty hunger. A challenge had been given and
+received.
+
+In their car, homeward bound, Sam put the thoughts of the woman away
+from him and taking Sue in his arms prayed silently for some help
+against he knew not what.
+
+"I think I will go to Caxton in the morning and have a talk with Mary
+Underwood," he said.
+
+After his return from Caxton Sam set about finding some new interest to
+occupy Sue's mind. He had spent an afternoon talking to Valmore, Freedom
+Smith, and Telfer and thought there was a kind of flatness in their
+jokes and in their ageing comments on each other. Then he had gone from
+them for his talk with Mary. Half through the night they had talked,
+Sam getting forgiveness for not writing and getting also a long friendly
+lecture on his duty toward Sue. He thought she had in some way missed
+the point. She had seemed to suppose that the loss of the children
+had fallen singly upon Sue. She had not counted upon him, and he had
+depended upon her doing just that. He had come as a boy to his mother
+wanting to talk of himself and she had wept at the thought of the
+childless wife and had told him how to set about making her happy.
+
+"Well, I will set about it," he thought on the train coming home; "I
+will find for her this new interest and make her less dependent upon me.
+Then I also will take hold anew and work out for myself a programme for
+a way of life."
+
+One afternoon when he came home from the office he found Sue filled
+indeed with a new idea. With glowing cheeks she sat beside him through
+the evening and talked of the beauties of a life devoted to social
+service.
+
+"I have been thinking things out," she said, her eyes shining. "We must
+not allow ourselves to become sordid. We must keep to the vision. We
+must together give the best in our lives and our fortunes to mankind.
+We must make ourselves units in the great modern movements for social
+uplift."
+
+Sam looked at the fire and a chill feeling of doubt ran through him. He
+could not see himself as a unit in anything. His mind did not run out
+toward the thought of being one of the army of philanthropists or rich
+social uplifters he had met talking and explaining in the reading rooms
+of clubs. No answering flame burned in his heart as it had burned
+that evening by the bridle path in Jackson Park when she had expounded
+another idea. But the thought of a need of new interest for her coming
+to him, he turned to her smiling.
+
+"It sounds all right but I know nothing of such things," he said.
+
+After that evening Sue began to get a hold upon herself. The old fire
+came back into her eyes and she went about the house with a smile
+upon her face and talked through the evenings to her silent, attentive
+husband of the life of usefulness, the full life. One day she told him
+of her election to the presidency of a society for the rescue of fallen
+women, and he began seeing her name in the newspapers in connection with
+various charity and civic movements. At the house a new sort of men
+and women began appearing at the dinner table; a strangely earnest,
+feverish, half fanatical people, Sam thought, with an inclination toward
+corsetless dresses and uncut hair, who talked far into the night and
+worked themselves into a sort of religious zeal over what they called
+their movement. Sam found them likely to run to startling statements,
+noticed that they sat on the edges of their chairs when they talked,
+and was puzzled by their tendency toward making the most revolutionary
+statements without pausing to back them up. When he questioned a
+statement made by one of these people, he came down upon him with a rush
+that quite carried him away and then, turning to the others, looked
+at them wisely like a cat that has swallowed a mouse. "Ask us another
+question if you dare," their faces seemed to be saying, while their
+tongues declared that they were but students of the great problem of
+right living.
+
+With these new people Sam never made any progress toward real
+understanding and friendship. For a time he tried honestly to get some
+of their own fervent devotions to their ideas and to be impressed by
+what they said of their love of man, even going with them to some of
+their meetings, at one of which he sat among the fallen women gathered
+in, and listened to a speech by Sue.
+
+The speech did not make much of a hit, the fallen women moving
+restlessly about. A large woman, with an immense nose, did better.
+She talked with a swift, contagious zeal that was very stirring, and,
+listening to her, Sam was reminded of the evening when he sat before
+another zealous talker in the church at Caxton and Jim Williams, the
+barber, tried to stampede him into the fold with the lambs. While the
+woman talked a plump little member of the _demi monde_ who sat beside
+Sam wept copiously, but at the end of the speech he could remember
+nothing of what had been said and he wondered if the weeping woman would
+remember.
+
+To express his determination to continue being Sue's companion and
+partner, Sam during one winter taught a class of young men at a
+settlement house in the factory district of the west side. The class in
+his hands was unsuccessful. He found the young men heavy and stupid with
+fatigue after the day of labour in the shops and more inclined to fall
+asleep in their chairs, or wander away, one at a time, to loaf and
+smoke on a nearby corner, than to stay in the room listening to the man
+reading or talking before them.
+
+When one of the young women workers came into the room, they sat up and
+seemed for the moment interested. Once Sam heard a group of them
+talking of these women workers on a landing in a darkened stairway. The
+experience startled Sam and he dropped the class, admitting to Sue
+his failure and his lack of interest and bowing his head before her
+accusation of a lack of the love of men.
+
+Later by the fire in his own room he tried to draw for himself a moral
+from the experience.
+
+"Why should I love these men?" he asked himself. "They are what I might
+have been. Few of the men I have known have loved me and some of the
+best and cleanest of them have worked vigorously for my defeat. Life is
+a battle in which few men win and many are defeated and in which hate
+and fear play their part with love and generosity. These heavy-featured
+young men are a part of the world as men have made it. Why this protest
+against their fate when we are all of us making more and more of them
+with every turn of the clock?"
+
+During the next year, after the fiasco of the settlement house class,
+Sam found himself drifting more and more rapidly away from Sue and her
+new viewpoint of life. The growing gulf between them showed itself in a
+thousand little household acts and impulses, and every time he looked at
+her he thought her more apart from him and less a part of the real
+life that went on within him. In the old days there had been something
+intimate and familiar in her person and in her presence. She had seemed
+like a part of him, like the room in which he slept or the coat he wore
+on his back, and he had looked into her eyes as thoughtlessly and with
+as little fear of what he might find there as he looked at his own
+hands. Now when his eyes met hers they dropped, and one or the other of
+them began talking hurriedly like a person who has a consciousness of
+something he must conceal.
+
+Down town Sam took up anew his old friendship and intimacy with Jack
+Prince, going with him to clubs and drinking places and often spending
+evenings among the clever, money-wasting young men who laughed and made
+deals and talked their way through life at Jack's side. Among these
+young men a business associate of Jack's caught his attention and in a
+few weeks an intimacy had sprung up between Sam and this man.
+
+Maurice Morrison, Sam's new friend, had been discovered by Jack Prince
+working as a sub-editor on a country daily down the state. There was,
+Sam thought, something of the Caxton dandy, Mike McCarthy, in the man,
+combined with prolonged and fervent, although somewhat periodic attacks
+of industry. In his youth he had written poetry and at one time had
+studied for the ministry, and in Chicago, under Jack Prince, he had
+developed into a money maker and led the life of a talented, rather
+unscrupulous man of the world. He kept a mistress, often overdrank, and
+Sam thought him the most brilliant and convincing talker he had ever
+heard. As Jack Prince's assistant he had charge of the Rainey Company's
+large advertising expenditure, and the two men being thrown often
+together a mutual regard grew up between them. Sam believed him to be
+without moral sense; he knew him to be able and honest and he found in
+the association with him a fund of odd little sweetnesses of character
+and action that lent an inexpressible charm to the person of his friend.
+
+It was through Morrison that Sam had his first serious misunderstanding
+with Sue. One evening the brilliant young advertising man dined at the
+McPhersons'. The table, as usual, was filled with Sue's new friends,
+among them a tall, gaunt man who, with the arrival of the coffee,
+began in a high-pitched, earnest voice to talk of the coming social
+revolution. Sam looked across the table and saw a light dancing in
+Morrison's eyes. Like a hound unleashed he sprang among Sue's friends,
+tearing the rich to pieces, calling for the onward advance of the
+masses, quoting odds and ends of Shelley and Carlyle, peering earnestly
+up and down the table, and at the end quite winning the hearts of the
+women by a defence of fallen women that stirred the blood of even his
+friend and host.
+
+Sam was amused and a trifle annoyed. The whole thing was, he knew, no
+more than a piece of downright acting with just the touch of sincerity
+in it that was characteristic of the man but that had no depth or real
+meaning. During the rest of the evening he watched Sue, wondering if she
+too had fathomed Morrison and what she thought of his having taken the
+role of star from the long gaunt man, who had evidently been booked
+for that part and who sat at the table and wandered afterward among the
+guests, annoyed and disconcerted.
+
+Late that night Sue came into his room and found him reading and smoking
+by the fire.
+
+"Cheeky of Morrison, dimming your star," he said, looking at her and
+laughing apologetically.
+
+Sue looked at him doubtfully.
+
+"I came in to thank you for bringing him," she said; "I thought him
+splendid."
+
+Sam looked at her and for a moment was tempted to let the matter pass.
+And then his old inclination to be always open and frank with her
+asserted itself and he closed the book and rising stood looking down at
+her.
+
+"The little beast was guying your crowd," he said, "but I do not want
+him to guy you. Not that he wouldn't try. He has the audacity for
+anything."
+
+A flush arose to her cheeks and her eyes gleamed.
+
+"That is not true, Sam," she said coldly. "You say that because you are
+becoming hard and cold and cynical. Your friend Morrison talked from his
+heart. It was beautiful. Men like you, who have a strong influence over
+him, may lead him away, but in the end a man like that will come to give
+his life to the service of society. You should help him; not assume an
+attitude of unbelief and laugh at him."
+
+Sam stood upon the hearth smoking his pipe and looking at her. He was
+thinking how easy it would have been in the first year after their
+marriage to have explained Morrison. Now he felt that he was but making
+a bad matter worse, but went on determined to stick to his policy of
+being entirely honest with her.
+
+"Look here, Sue," he began quietly, "be a good sport. Morrison was
+joking. I know the man. He is the friend of men like me because he
+wants to be and because it pays him to be. He is a talker, a writer, a
+talented, unscrupulous word-monger. He is making a big salary by
+taking the ideas of men like me and expressing them better than we can
+ourselves. He is a good workman and a generous, open-hearted fellow with
+a lot of nameless charm in him, but a man of convictions he is not. He
+could talk tears into the eyes of your fallen women, but he would be a
+lot more likely to talk good women into their state."
+
+Sam put a hand upon her shoulder.
+
+"Be sensible and do not be offended," he went on: "take the fellow for
+what he is and be glad for him. He hurts little and cheers a lot. He
+could make a convincing argument in favour of civilisation's return to
+cannibalism, but really, you know, he spends most of his time thinking
+and writing of washing machines and ladies' hats and liver pills, and
+most of his eloquence after all only comes down to 'Send for catalogue,
+Department K' in the end."
+
+Sue's voice was colourless with passion when she replied.
+
+"This is unbearable. Why did you bring the fellow here?"
+
+Sam sat down and picked up his book. In his impatience he lied to her
+for the first time since their marriage.
+
+"First, because I like him and second, because I wanted to see if
+I couldn't produce a man who could outsentimentalise your socialist
+friends," he said quietly.
+
+Sue turned and walked out of the room. In a way the action was final and
+marked the end of understanding between them. Putting down his book
+Sam watched her go and some feeling he had kept for her and that had
+differentiated her from all other women died in him as the door closed
+between them. Throwing the book aside he sprang to his feet and stood
+looking at the door.
+
+"The old goodfellowship appeal is dead," he thought. "From now on we
+will have to explain and apologise like two strangers. No more taking
+each other for granted."
+
+Turning out the light he sat again before the fire to think his way
+through the situation that faced him. He had no thought that she would
+return. That last shot of his own had crushed the possibility of that.
+
+The fire was getting low in the grate and he did not renew it. He looked
+past it toward the darkened windows and heard the hum of motor cars
+along the boulevard below. Again he was the boy of Caxton hungrily
+seeking an end in life. The flushed face of the woman in the theatre
+danced before his eyes. He remembered with shame how he had, a few days
+before, stood in a doorway and followed with his eyes the figure of a
+woman who had lifted her eyes to him as they passed in the street. He
+wished that he might go out of the house for a walk with John Telfer and
+have his mind filled with eloquence of the standing corn, or sit at the
+feet of Janet Eberly as she talked of books and of life. He got up and
+turning on the lights began preparing for bed.
+
+"I know what I will do," he said, "I will go to work. I will do some
+real work and make some more money. That's the place for me."
+
+And to work he went, real work, the most sustained and clearly
+thought-out work he had done. For two years he was out of the house at
+dawn for a long bracing walk in the fresh morning air, to be followed
+by eight, ten and even fifteen hours in the office and shops; hours in
+which he drove the Rainey Arms Company's organisation mercilessly
+and, taking openly every vestige of the management out of the hands
+of Colonel Tom, began the plans for the consolidation of the American
+firearms companies that later put his name on the front pages of the
+newspapers and got him the title of a Captain of Finance.
+
+There is a widespread misunderstanding abroad regarding the motives
+of many of the American millionaires who sprang into prominence and
+affluence in the days of change and sudden bewildering growth that
+followed the close of the Spanish War. They were, many of them, not
+of the brute trader type, but were, instead, men who thought and acted
+quickly and with a daring and audacity impossible to the average mind.
+They wanted power and were, many of them, entirely unscrupulous, but
+for the most part they were men with a fire burning within them, men who
+became what they were because the world offered them no better outlet
+for their vast energies.
+
+Sam McPherson had been untiring and without scruples in the first hard,
+quick struggle to get his head above the great unknown body of men there
+in the city. He had turned aside from money getting when he heard what
+he took to be a call to a better way of life. Now with the fires of
+youth still in him and with the training and discipline that had come
+from two years of reading, of comparative leisure and of thought, he was
+prepared to give the Chicago business world a display of that tremendous
+energy that was to write his name in the industrial history of the city
+as one of the first of the western giants of finance.
+
+Going to Sue, Sam told her frankly of his plans.
+
+"I want a free hand in the handling of your stock in the company," he
+said. "I cannot lead this new life of yours. It may help and sustain you
+but it gets no hold on me. I want to be myself now and lead my own life
+in my own way. I want to run the company, really run it. I cannot stand
+idly by and let life go past. I am hurting myself and you standing here
+looking on. Also I am in a kind of danger of another kind that I want to
+avoid by throwing myself into hard, constructive work."
+
+Without question Sue signed the papers he brought her. A flash of her
+old frankness toward him came back.
+
+"I do not blame you, Sam," she said, smiling bravely. "Things have not
+gone right, as we both know, but if we cannot work together at least let
+us not hurt each other."
+
+When Sam returned to give himself again to affairs, the country was just
+at the beginning of the great wave of consolidation which was finally
+to sweep all of the financial power of the country into a dozen pairs
+of competent and entirely efficient hands. With the sure instinct of the
+born trader Sam had seen this movement coming and had studied it. Now he
+began to act. Going to that same swarthy-faced lawyer who had drawn
+the contract for him to secure control of the medical student's twenty
+thousand dollars and who had jokingly invited him to become one of a
+band of train robbers, he told him of his plans to begin working toward
+a consolidation of all the firearms companies of the country.
+
+Webster wasted no time in joking now. He laid out the plans, adjusted
+and readjusted them to suit Sam's shrewd suggestions, and when a fee was
+mentioned shook his head.
+
+"I want in on this," he said. "You will need me. I am made for this game
+and have been waiting for a chance to get at it. Just count me in as one
+of the promoters if you will."
+
+Sam nodded his head. Within a week he had formed a pool of his own
+company's stock controlling, as he thought, a safe majority and had
+begun working to form a similar pool in the stock of his only big
+western rival.
+
+This last job was not an easy one. Lewis, the Jew, had been making
+constant headway in that company just as Sam had made headway in the
+Rainey Company. He was a money maker, a sales manager of rare ability,
+and, as Sam knew, a planner and executor of business coups of the first
+class.
+
+Sam did not want to deal with Lewis. He had respect for the man's
+ability in driving sharp bargains and felt that he would like to have
+the whip in his own hands when it came to the point of dealing with him.
+To this end he began visiting bankers and the men who were head of big
+western trust companies in Chicago and St. Louis. He went about his work
+slowly, feeling his way and trying to get at each man by some effective
+appeal, buying the use of vast sums of money by a promise of common
+stock, the bait of a big active bank account, and, here and there, by
+the hint of a directorship in the big new consolidated company.
+
+For a time the project moved slowly; indeed there were weeks and months
+when it did not appear to move at all. Working in secret and with
+extreme caution Sam encountered many discouragements and went home in
+the evening day after day to sit among Sue's guests with a mind filled
+with his own plans and with an indifferent ear turned to the talk
+of revolution, social unrest, and the new class consciousness of the
+masses, that rattled and crackled up and down his dinner table.
+He thought that it must be trying to Sue. He was so evidently not
+interested in her interests. At the same time he thought that he was
+working toward what he wanted out of life and went to bed at night
+believing that he was finding, and would find, a kind of peace in just
+thinking clearly along one line day after day.
+
+One day Webster, who had wanted to be in on the deal, came to Sam's
+office and gave his project its first great boost toward success. He,
+like Sam, thought he saw clearly the tendencies of the times, and was
+greedy for the block of common stock that Sam had promised should come
+to him with the completion of the enterprise.
+
+"You are not using me," he said, sitting down before Sam's desk. "What
+is blocking the deal?"
+
+Sam began to explain and when he had finished Webster laughed.
+
+"Let's get at Tom Edwards of the Edward Arms Company direct," he said,
+and then, leaning over the desk, "Edwards is a vain little peacock and a
+second rate business man," he declared emphatically. "Get him afraid and
+then flatter his vanity. He has a new wife with blonde hair and big soft
+blue eyes. He wants prominence. He is afraid to venture upon big things
+himself but is hungry for the reputation and gain that comes through big
+deals. Use the method the Jew has used; show him what it means to
+the yellow-haired woman to be the wife of the president of the big
+consolidated Arms Company. THE EDWARDS CONSOLIDATED, eh? Get at Edwards.
+Bluff him and flatter him and he is your man."
+
+Sam wondered. Edwards was a small grey-haired man of sixty with
+something dry and unresponsive about him. Being a silent man, he had
+created an impression of remarkable shrewdness and ability. After a
+lifetime spent in hard labour and in the practice of the most rigid
+economy he had come up to wealth, and had got into the firearms business
+through Lewis, and it was counted one of the brightest stars in that
+brilliant Hebrew's crown that he had been able to lead Edwards with him
+in his daring and audacious handling of the company's affairs.
+
+Sam looked at Webster across the desk and thought of Tom Edwards as the
+figurehead of the firearms trust.
+
+"I was saving the frosting on the cake for my own Tom," he said; "it was
+a thing I wanted to hand the colonel."
+
+"Let us see Edwards this evening," said Webster dryly.
+
+Sam nodded, and late that night made the deal that gave him control of
+the two important western companies and put him in position to move
+on the eastern companies with every prospect of complete success. To
+Edwards he went with an exaggerated report of the support he had
+already got for his project, and having frightened him offered him
+the presidency of the new company and promised that it should be
+incorporated under the name of The Edwards Consolidated Firearms Company
+of America.
+
+The eastern companies fell quickly. With Webster Sam tried on them the
+old dodge of telling each that the other two had agreed to come in, and
+it worked.
+
+With the coming in of Edwards and the options given by the eastern
+companies Sam began to get also the support of the LaSalle Street
+bankers. The firearms trust was one of the few big consolidations
+managed wholly in the west, and after two or three of the bankers had
+agreed to help finance Sam's plan the others began asking to be taken
+into the underwriting syndicate he and Webster had formed. Within thirty
+days after the closing of the deal with Tom Edwards Sam felt that he was
+ready to act.
+
+For several months Colonel Tom had known something of the plans Sam had
+on foot, and had made no protest. He had in fact given Sam to understand
+that his stock would be voted with Sue's, controlled by Sam, and with
+the stock of the other directors who knew of and hoped to share in the
+profits of Sam's deal. The old gunmaker had all of his life believed
+that the other American firearms companies were but shadows destined to
+disappear before the rising sun of the Rainey Company, and thought of
+Sam's project as an act of providence to further this desirable end.
+
+At the moment of his acquiescence in Webster's plan, for landing Tom
+Edwards, Sam had a moment of doubt, and now, with the success of his
+project in sight, he began to wonder how the blustering old man would
+look upon Edwards as the titular head of the big company and upon the
+name of Edwards in the title of the company.
+
+For two years Sam had seen little of the colonel, who had given up all
+pretence to an active part in the management of the business and who,
+finding Sue's new friends disconcerting, seldom appeared at the house,
+living at the clubs, playing billiards all day long, or sitting in the
+club windows boasting to chance listeners of his part in the building of
+the Rainey Arms Company.
+
+With a mind filled with doubt Sam went home and put the matter before
+Sue. She was dressed and ready for an evening at the theatre with a
+party of friends and the talk was brief.
+
+"He will not mind," she said indifferently. "Go ahead and do what you
+want to do."
+
+Sam rode back to the office and called his lieutenants about him. He
+felt that the thing might as well be done and over, and with the options
+in his hands, and the ability he thought he had to control his own
+company, he was ready to come out into the open and get the deal cleaned
+up.
+
+The morning papers that carried the story of the proposed big new
+consolidation of firearms companies carried also an almost life-size
+halftone of Colonel Tom Rainey, a slightly smaller one of Tom Edwards,
+and grouped about these, small pictures of Sam, Lewis, Prince, Webster,
+and several of the eastern men. By the size of the half-tone, Sam,
+Prince, and Morrison had tried to reconcile Colonel Tom to Edwards'
+name in the title of the new company and to Edwards' coming election
+as president. The story also played up the past glories of the Rainey
+Company and its directing genius, Colonel Tom. One phrase, written by
+Morrison, brought a smile to Sam's lips.
+
+"This grand old patriarch of American business, retired now from active
+service, is like a tired giant, who, having raised a brood of young
+giants, goes into his castle to rest and reflect and to count the scars
+won in many a hard-fought battle."
+
+Morrison laughed as he read it aloud.
+
+"It ought to get the colonel," he said, "but the newspaper man who
+prints it should be hung."
+
+"They will print it all right," said Jack Prince.
+
+And they did print it; going from newspaper office to newspaper office
+Prince and Morrison saw to that, using their influence as big buyers
+of advertising space and even insisting upon reading proof on their own
+masterpiece.
+
+But it did not work. Early the next morning Colonel Tom appeared at the
+offices of the arms company with blood in his eye, and swore that the
+consolidation should not be put through. For an hour he stormed up
+and down in Sam's office, his outbursts of wrath varied by periods
+of childlike pleading for the retention of the name and glory of the
+Raineys. When Sam shook his head and went with the old man to the
+meeting that was to pass upon his action and sell the Rainey Company, he
+knew that he had a fight on his hands.
+
+The meeting was a stormy one. Sam made a talk telling what had been
+done and Webster, voting some of Sam's proxies, made a motion that Sam's
+offer for the old company be accepted.
+
+And then Colonel Tom fired his guns. Walking up and down in the room
+before the men, sitting at a long table or in chairs tilted against the
+walls, he began talking with all of his old flamboyant pomposity of the
+past glories of the Rainey Company. Sam watched him quietly thinking of
+the exhibition as something detached and apart from the business of the
+meeting. He remembered a question that had come into his head when he
+was a schoolboy and had got his first peep into a school history. There
+had been a picture of Indians at the war dance and he had wondered why
+they danced before rather than after battle. Now his mind answered the
+question.
+
+"If they had not danced before they might never have got the chance," he
+thought, and smiled to himself.
+
+"I call upon you men here to stick to the old colours," roared the
+colonel, turning and making a direct attack upon Sam. "Do not let this
+ungrateful upstart, this son of a drunken village housepainter, that I
+picked up from among the cabbages of South Water Street, win you away
+from your loyalty to the old leader. Do not let him steal by trickery
+what we have won only by years of effort."
+
+The colonel, leaning on the table, glared about the room. Sam felt
+relieved and glad of the direct attack.
+
+"It justifies what I am going to do," he thought.
+
+When Colonel Tom had finished Sam gave a careless glance at the old
+man's red face and trembling fingers. He had no doubt that the outburst
+of eloquence had fallen upon deaf ears and without comment put Webster's
+motion to the vote.
+
+To his surprise two of the new employe directors voted their stock with
+Colonel Tom's, and a third man, voting his own stock as well as that of
+a wealthy southside real estate man, did not vote. On a count the stock
+represented stood deadlocked and Sam, looking down the table, raised his
+eyebrows to Webster.
+
+"Move we adjourn for twenty-four hours," snapped Webster, and the motion
+carried.
+
+Sam looked at a paper lying before him on the table. During the count
+of the vote he had been writing over and over on the sheet of paper this
+sentence.
+
+"The best men spend their lives seeking truth."
+
+Colonel Tom walked out of the room like a conqueror, declining to speak
+to Sam as he passed, and Sam looked down the table at Webster and made a
+motion with his head toward the man who had not voted.
+
+Within an hour Sam's fight was won. Pouncing upon the man representing
+the stock of the south-side investor, he and Webster did not go out of
+the room until they had secured absolute control of the Rainey Company
+and the man who had refused to vote had put twenty-five thousand dollars
+into his pocket. The two employee directors Sam marked for slaughter.
+Then after spending the afternoon and early evening with the
+representatives of the eastern companies and their attorneys he drove
+home to Sue.
+
+It was past nine o'clock when his car stopped before the house and,
+going at once to his room, he found Sue sitting before his fire, her
+arms thrown above her head and her eyes staring at the burning coals.
+
+As Sam stood in the doorway looking at her a wave of resentment swept
+over him.
+
+"The old coward," he thought, "he has brought our fight here to her."
+
+Hanging up his coat he filled his pipe and drawing up a chair sat beside
+her. For five minutes Sue sat staring into the fire. When she spoke
+there was a touch of hardness in her voice.
+
+"When everything is said, Sam, you do owe a lot to father," she
+observed, refusing to look at him.
+
+Sam said nothing and she went on.
+
+"Not that I think we made you, father and I. You are not the kind of man
+that people make or unmake. But, Sam, Sam, think what you are doing. He
+has always been a fool in your hands. He used to come home here when you
+were new with the company and talk of what he was doing. He had a whole
+new set of ideas and phrases; all that about waste and efficiency and
+orderly working toward a definite end. It did not fool me. I knew the
+ideas, and even the phrases he used to express them, were not his and
+I was not long finding out they were yours, that it was simply you
+expressing yourself through him. He is a big helpless child, Sam, and
+he is old. He hasn't much longer to live. Do not be hard, Sam. Be
+merciful."
+
+Her voice did not tremble but tears ran down her rigid face and her
+expressive hands clutched at her dress.
+
+"Can nothing change you? Must you always have your own way?" she added,
+still refusing to look at him.
+
+"It is not true, Sue, that I always want my own way, and people do
+change me; you have changed me," he said.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No, I have not changed you. I found you hungry for something and you
+thought I could feed it. I gave you an idea that you took hold of and
+made your own. I do not know where I got it, from some book or hearing
+some one talk, I suppose. But it belonged to you. You built it and
+fostered it in me and coloured it with your own personality. It is your
+idea to-day. It means more to you than all this firearms trust that the
+papers are full of."
+
+She turned to look at him, and put out her hand and laid it in his.
+
+"I have not been brave," she said. "I am standing in your way. I have
+had a hope that we would get back to each other. I should have freed you
+but I hadn't the courage, I hadn't the courage. I could not give up the
+dream that some day you would really take me back to you."
+
+Getting out of her chair she dropped to her knees and putting her head
+in his lap, shook with sobs. Sam sat stroking her hair. Her agitation
+was so great that her muscular little back shook with it.
+
+Sam looked past her at the fire and tried to think clearly. He was not
+greatly moved by her agitation, but with all his heart he wanted to
+think things out and get at the right and the honest thing to do.
+
+"It is a time of big things," he said slowly and with an air of one
+explaining to a child. "As your socialists say, vast changes are going
+on. I do not believe that your socialists really sense what these
+changes mean, and I am not sure that I do or that any man does, but
+I know they mean something big and I want to be in them and a part of
+them; all big men do; they are struggling like chicks in the shell. Why,
+look here! What I am doing has to be done and if I do not do it another
+man will. The colonel has to go. He will be swept aside. He belongs to
+something old and outworn. Your socialists, I believe, call it the age
+of competition."
+
+"But not by us, not by you, Sam," she plead. "After all, he is my
+father."
+
+A stern look came into Sam's eyes.
+
+"It does not ring right, Sue," he said coldly; "fathers do not mean much
+to me. I choked my own father and threw him into the street when I was
+only a boy. You knew about that. You heard of it when you went to find
+out about me that time in Caxton. Mary Underwood told you. I did it
+because he lied and believed in lies. Do not your friends say that the
+individual who stands in the way should be crushed?"
+
+She sprang to her feet and stood before him.
+
+"Do not quote that crowd," she burst out. "They are not the real thing.
+Do you suppose I do not know that? Do I not know that they come here
+because they hope to get hold of you? Haven't I watched them and seen
+the look on their faces when you have not come or have not listened to
+their talk? They are afraid of you, all of them. That's why they talk so
+bitterly. They are afraid and ashamed that they are afraid."
+
+"Like the workers in the shop?" he asked, musingly.
+
+"Yes, like that, and like me since I failed in my part of our lives and
+had not the courage to get out of the way. You are worth all of us and
+for all our talk we shall never succeed or begin to succeed until we
+make men like you want what we want. They know that and I know it."
+
+"And what do you want?"
+
+"I want you to be big and generous. You can be. Failure cannot hurt you.
+You and men like you can do anything. You can even fail. I cannot. None
+of us can. I cannot put my father to that shame. I want you to accept
+failure."
+
+Sam got up and taking her by the arm led her to the door. At the door he
+turned her about and kissed her on the lips like a lover.
+
+"All right, Sue girl, I will do it," he said, and pushed her through the
+door. "Now let me sit down by myself and think things out."
+
+It was a night in September and a whisper of the coming frost was in the
+air. He threw up the window and took long breaths of the sharp air and
+listened to the rumble of the elevated road in the distance. Looking
+up the boulevard he saw the lights of the cyclists making a glistening
+stream that flowed past the house. A thought of his new motor car and
+of all of the wonder of the mechanical progress of the world ran through
+his mind.
+
+"The men who make machines do not hesitate," he said to himself; "even
+though a thousand fat-hearted men stood in their way they would go on."
+
+A line of Tennyson's came into his mind.
+
+"And the nation's airy navies grappling in the central blue," he quoted,
+thinking of an article he had read predicting the coming of airships.
+
+He thought of the lives of the workers in steel and iron and of the
+things they had done and would do.
+
+"They have," he thought, "freedom. Steel and iron do not run home to
+carry the struggle to women sitting by the fire."
+
+He walked up and down the room.
+
+"Fat old coward. Damned fat old coward," he muttered over and over to
+himself.
+
+It was past midnight when he got into bed and began trying to quiet
+himself for sleep. In his dreams he saw a fat man with a chorus girl
+hanging to his arm kicking his head about a bridge above a swiftly
+flowing stream.
+
+When he got down to the breakfast room the next morning Sue had gone. By
+his plate he found a note saying that she had gone for Colonel Tom
+and would take him to the country for the day. He walked to the office
+thinking of the incapable old man who, in the name of sentiment, had
+beaten him in what he thought the big enterprise of his life.
+
+At his desk he found a message from Webster. "The old turkey cock has
+fled," it said; "we should have saved the twenty-five thousand."
+
+On the phone Webster told Sam of an early visit to the club to see
+Colonel Tom and that the old man had left the city, going to the country
+for the day. It was on Sam's lips to tell of his changed plans but he
+hesitated.
+
+"I will see you at your office in an hour," he said.
+
+Outside again in the open air Sam walked and thought of his promise.
+Down by the lake he went to where the railroad with the lake beyond
+stopped him. Upon the old wooden bridge looking over the track and down
+to the water he stood as he had stood at other crises in his life and
+thought over the struggle of the night before. In the clear morning air,
+with the roar of the city behind him and the still waters of the lake
+in front, the tears, and the talk with Sue seemed but a part of the
+ridiculous and sentimental attitude of her father, and the promise given
+her insignificant and unfairly won. He reviewed the scene carefully, the
+talk and the tears and the promise given as he led her to the door. It
+all seemed far away and unreal like some promise made to a girl in his
+boyhood.
+
+"It was never a part of all this," he said, turning and looking at the
+towering city before him.
+
+For an hour he stood on the wooden bridge. He thought of Windy McPherson
+putting the bugle to his lips in the streets of Caxton and again there
+sounded in his ears the roaring laugh of the crowd; again he lay in the
+bed beside Colonel Tom in that northern city and saw the moon rising
+over the round paunch and heard the empty chattering talk of love.
+
+"Love," he said, still looking toward the city, "is a matter of truth,
+not lies and pretence."
+
+Suddenly it seemed to him that if he went forward truthfully he should
+get even Sue back again some time. His mind lingered over the thoughts
+of the loves that come to a man in the world, of Sue in the wind-swept
+northern woods and of Janet in her wheel-chair in the little room where
+the cable cars ran rumbling under the window. And he thought of other
+things, of Sue reading papers culled out of books before the fallen
+women in the little State Street hall, of Tom Edwards with his new wife
+and his little watery eyes, of Morrison and the long-fingered socialist
+fighting over words at his table. And then pulling on his gloves he
+lighted a cigar and went back through the crowded streets to his office
+to do the thing he had determined on.
+
+At the meeting that afternoon the project went through without a
+dissenting voice. Colonel Tom being absent, the two employe directors
+voted with Sam with almost panicky haste as Sam looking across at the
+well-dressed, cool-headed Webster, laughed and lighted a fresh cigar.
+And then he voted the stock Sue had intrusted to him for the project,
+feeling that in doing so he was cutting, perhaps for all time, the knot
+that bound them.
+
+With the completion of the deal Sam stood to win five million dollars,
+more money than Colonel Tom or any of the Raineys had ever controlled,
+and had placed himself in the eyes of the business men of Chicago and
+New York where before he had placed himself in the eyes of Caxton and
+South Water Street. Instead of another Windy McPherson failing to blow
+his bugle before the waiting crowd, he was still the man who made good,
+the man who achieved, the kind of man of whom America boasts before the
+world.
+
+He did not see Sue again. When the news of his betrayal reached her she
+went off east taking Colonel Tom with her, and Sam closed the house,
+even sending a man there for his clothes. To her eastern address, got
+from her attorney, he wrote a brief note offering to make over to her or
+to Colonel Tom his entire winnings from the deal and closed it with the
+brutal declaration, "At the end I could not be an ass, even for you."
+
+To this note Sam got a cold, brief reply telling him to dispose of her
+stock in the company and of that belonging to Colonel Tom, and naming an
+eastern trust company to receive the money. With Colonel Tom's help she
+had made a careful estimate of the values of their holdings at the
+time of consolidation and refused flatly to accept a penny beyond that
+amount.
+
+Sam felt that another chapter of his life was closed. Webster, Edwards,
+Prince, and the eastern men met and elected him chairman of the board of
+directors of the new company and the public bought eagerly the river
+of common stock he turned upon the market, Prince and Morrison doing
+masterful work in the moulding of public opinion through the press. The
+first board meeting ended with a dinner at which wine flowed in rivulets
+and Edwards, getting drunk, stood up at his place and boasted of the
+beauty of his young wife. And Sam, at his desk in his new offices in the
+Rookery, settled down grimly to the playing of his role as one of the
+new kings of American business.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The story of Sam's life there in Chicago for the next several years
+ceases to be the story of a man and becomes the story of a type, a
+crowd, a gang. What he and the group of men surrounding him and making
+money with him did in Chicago, other men and other groups of men have
+done in New York, in Paris, in London. Coming into power with the
+great expansive wave of prosperity that attended the first McKinley
+administration, these men went mad of money making. They played
+with great industrial institutions and railroad systems like excited
+children, and a man of Chicago won the notice and something of the
+admiration of the world by his willingness to bet a million dollars on
+the turn of the weather. In the years of criticism and readjustment that
+followed this period of sporadic growth, writers have told with great
+clearness how the thing was done, and some of the participants, captains
+of industry turned penmen, Caesars become ink-slingers, have bruited the
+story to an admiring world.
+
+Given the time, the inclination, the power of the press, and the
+unscrupulousness, the thing that Sam McPherson and his followers did in
+Chicago in not difficult. Advised by Webster and the talented Prince
+and Morrison to handle his publicity work, he rapidly unloaded his huge
+holdings of common stock upon an eager public, keeping for himself the
+bonds which he hypothecated at the banks to increase his working capital
+while continuing to control the company. When the common stock was
+unloaded, he, with a group of fellow spirits, began an attack upon it
+through the stock market and in the press, and bought it again at a
+low figure, holding it ready to unload when the public should have
+forgotten.
+
+The annual advertising expenditure of the firearms trust ran into
+millions and Sam's hold upon the press of the country was almost
+unbelievably strong. Morrison rapidly developed unusual daring and
+audacity in using this instrument and making it serve Sam's ends. He
+suppressed facts, created illusions, and used the newspapers as a whip
+to crack at the heels of congressmen, senators, and legislators, of the
+various states, when such matters as appropriation for firearms came
+before them.
+
+And Sam, who had undertaken the consolidation of the firearms companies,
+having a dream of himself as a great master in that field, a sort of
+American Krupp, rapidly awoke from the dream to take the bigger chances
+for gain in the world of speculation. Within a year he dropped Edwards
+as head of the firearms trust and in his place put Lewis, with Morrison
+as secretary and manager of sales. Guided by Sam these two, like the
+little drygoods merchant of the old Rainey Company, went from capital
+to capital and from city to city making contracts, influencing news,
+placing advertising contracts where they would do the most good, fixing
+men.
+
+And in the meantime Sam, with Webster, a banker named Crofts who had
+profited largely in the firearms merger, and sometimes Morrison or
+Prince, began a series of stock raids, speculations, and manipulations
+that attracted country-wide attention, and became known to the newspaper
+reading world as the McPherson Chicago crowd. They were in oil,
+railroads, coal, western land, mining, timber, and street railways. One
+summer Sam, with Prince, built, ran to a profit, and sold to advantage
+a huge amusement park. Through his head day after day marched columns
+of figures, ideas, schemes, more and more spectacular opportunities
+for gain. Some of the enterprises in which he engaged, while because of
+their size they seemed more dignified, were of reality of a type with
+the game smuggling of his South Water Street days, and in all of his
+operations it was his old instinct for bargains and for the finding of
+buyers together with Webster's ability for carrying through questionable
+deals that made him and his followers almost constantly successful in
+the face of opposition from the more conservative business and financial
+men of the city.
+
+Again Sam led a new life, owning running horses at the tracks,
+memberships in many clubs, a country house in Wisconsin, and shooting
+preserves in Texas. He drank steadily, played poker for big stakes, kept
+in the public prints, and day after day led his crew upon the high seas
+of finance. He did not dare think and in his heart he was sick of it.
+Sick to the soul, so that when thought came to him he got out of his bed
+to seek roistering companions or, getting pen and paper, sat for hours
+figuring out new and more daring schemes for money making. The great
+forward movement in modern industry of which he had dreamed of being a
+part had for him turned out to be a huge meaningless gamble with loaded
+dice against a credulous public. With his followers he went on day after
+day doing deeds without thought. Industries were organised and launched,
+men employed and thrown out of employment, towns wrecked by the
+destruction of an industry and other towns made by the building of other
+industries. At a whim of his a thousand men began building a city on an
+Indiana sand hill, and at a wave of his hand another thousand men of an
+Indiana town sold their homes, with the chicken houses in the back-yards
+and vines trained by the kitchen doors, and rushed to buy sections
+of the hill plotted off for them. He did not stop to discuss with his
+followers the meaning of the things he did. He told them of the profits
+to be made and then, having done the thing, he went with them to drink
+in bar rooms and to spend the evening or afternoon singing songs,
+visiting his stable of runners or, more often, sitting silently about
+the card table playing for high stakes. Making millions through the
+manipulation of the public during the day, he sometimes sat half the
+night struggling with his companions for the possession of thousands.
+
+Lewis, the Jew, the only one of Sam's companions who had not followed
+him in his spectacular money making, stayed in the office of the
+firearms company and ran it like the scientific able man of business he
+was. While Sam remained chairman of the board of the company and had an
+office, a desk, and the name of leadership there, he let Lewis run the
+place, and spent his own time upon the stock exchange or in some corner
+with Webster and Crofts planning some new money making raid.
+
+"You have the better of it, Lewis," he said one day in a reflective
+mood; "you thought I had cut the ground from under you when I got Tom
+Edwards, but I only set you more firmly in a larger place."
+
+He made a movement with his hand toward the large general offices with
+the rows of busy clerks and the substantial look of work being done.
+
+"I might have had the work you are doing. I planned and schemed with
+that end in view," he added, lighting a cigar and going out at the door.
+
+"And the money hunger got you," laughed Lewis, looking after him, "the
+hunger that gets Jews and Gentiles and all who feed it."
+
+One might have come upon the McPherson Chicago crowd about the old
+Chicago stock exchange on any day during those years, Crofts, tall,
+abrupt, and dogmatic; Morrison, slender, dandified, and gracious;
+Webster, well-dressed, suave, gentlemanly, and Sam, silent, restless,
+and often morose and ugly. Sometimes it seemed to Sam that they were
+all unreal, himself and the men with him. He watched his companions
+cunningly. They were constantly posing before the passing crowd of
+brokers and small speculators. Webster, coming up to him on the floor of
+the exchange, would tell him of a snowstorm raging outside with the air
+of a man parting with a long-cherished secret. His companions went from
+one to the other vowing eternal friendships, and then, keeping spies
+upon each other, they hurried to Sam with tales of secret betrayals.
+Into any deal proposed by him they went eagerly, although sometimes
+fearfully, and almost always they won. And with Sam they made millions
+through the manipulation of the firearms company, and the Chicago and
+Northern Lake Railroad which he controlled.
+
+In later years Sam looked back upon it all as a kind of nightmare. It
+seemed to him that never during that period had he lived or thought
+sanely. The great financial leaders that he saw were not, he thought,
+great men. Some of them, like Webster, were masters of craft, or, like
+Morrison, of words, but for the most part they were but shrewd, greedy
+vultures feeding upon the public or upon each other.
+
+In the meantime Sam was rapidly degenerating. His paunch became
+distended, and his hands trembled in the morning. Being a man of
+strong appetites, and having a determination to avoid women, he almost
+constantly overdrank and overate, and in the leisure hours that came to
+him he hurried eagerly from place to place, avoiding thought, avoiding
+sane quiet talk, avoiding himself.
+
+All of his companions did not suffer equally. Webster seemed made for
+the life, thriving and expanding under it, putting his winnings steadily
+aside, going on Sunday to a suburban church, avoiding the publicity
+connecting his name with race horses and big sporting events that Crofts
+sought and to which Sam submitted. One day Sam and Crofts caught him in
+an effort to sell them out to a group of New York bankers in a mining
+deal and turned the trick on him instead, whereupon he went off to New
+York to become a respectable big business man and the friend of senators
+and philanthropists.
+
+Crofts was a man with chronic domestic troubles, one of those men who
+begin each day by cursing their wives before their associates and yet
+continue living with them year after year. There was a kind of rough
+squareness in the man, and after the completion of a successful deal
+he would be as happy as a boy, pounding men on the back, shaking with
+laughter, throwing money about, making crude jokes. After Sam left
+Chicago he finally divorced his wife and married an actress from the
+vaudeville stage and after losing two-thirds of his fortune in an effort
+to capture control of a southern railroad, went to England and, coached
+by the actress wife, developed into an English country gentleman.
+
+And Sam was a man sick. Day after day he went on drinking more and more
+heavily, playing for bigger and bigger stakes, allowing himself less
+and less thought of himself. One day he received a long letter from John
+Telfer telling of the sudden death of Mary Underwood and berating him
+for his neglect of her.
+
+"She was ill for a year and without an income," wrote Telfer. Sam
+noticed that the man's hand had begun to tremble. "She lied to me and
+told me you had sent her money, but now that she is dead I find that
+though she wrote you she got no answer. Her old aunt told me."
+
+Sam put the letter into his pocket and going into one of his clubs began
+drinking with a crowd of men he found idling there. He had paid little
+attention to his correspondence for months. No doubt the letter from
+Mary had been received by his secretary and thrown aside with the
+letters of thousands of other women, begging letters, amorous letters,
+letters directed at him because of his wealth and the prominence given
+his exploits by the newspapers.
+
+After wiring an explanation and mailing a check the size of which filled
+John Telfer with admiration, Sam with a half dozen fellow roisterers
+spent the late afternoon and evening going from saloon to saloon through
+the south side. When he got to his apartments late that night, his head
+was reeling and his mind filled with distorted memories of drinking men
+and women and of himself standing on a table in some obscure drinking
+place and calling upon the shouting, laughing hangers-on of his crowd of
+rich money spenders to think and to work and to seek Truth.
+
+He went to sleep in his chair, his mind filled with the dancing faces of
+dead women, Mary Underwood and Janet and Sue, tear-stained faces calling
+to him. When he awoke and shaved he went out into the street and to
+another down-town club.
+
+"I wonder if Sue is dead, too," he muttered, remembering his dream.
+
+At the club he was called to the telephone by Lewis, who asked him to
+come at once to his office at the Edwards Consolidated. When he
+got there he found a wire from Sue. In a moment of loneliness and
+despondency over the loss of his old business standing and reputation,
+Colonel Tom had shot himself in a New York hotel.
+
+Sam sat at his desk, fingering the yellow paper lying before him and
+fighting to get his head clear.
+
+"The old coward. The damned old coward," he muttered; "any one could
+have done that."
+
+When Lewis came into Sam's office he found his chief sitting at his desk
+fingering the telegram and muttering to himself. When Sam handed him the
+wire he came around and stood beside Sam, his hand upon his shoulder.
+
+"Well, do not blame yourself for that," he said, with quick
+understanding.
+
+"I don't," Sam muttered; "I do not blame myself for anything. I am a
+result, not a cause. I am trying to think. I am not through yet. I am
+going to begin again when I get things thought out."
+
+Lewis went out of the room leaving him to his thoughts. For an hour
+he sat there reviewing his life. When he came to the day that he had
+humiliated Colonel Tom, there came back to his mind the sentence he had
+written on the sheet of paper while the vote was being counted. "The
+best men spend their lives seeking truth."
+
+Suddenly he came to a decision and, calling Lewis, began laying out a
+plan of action. His head cleared and the ring came back into his
+voice. To Lewis he gave an option on his entire holdings of Edwards
+Consolidated stocks and bonds and to him also he entrusted the clearing
+up of deal after deal in which he was interested. Then, calling a
+broker, he began throwing a mass of stock on the market. When Lewis told
+him that Crofts was 'phoning wildly about town to find him, and was with
+the help of another banker supporting the market and taking Sam's stocks
+as fast as offered, he laughed and giving Lewis instructions regarding
+the disposal of his monies walked out of the office, again a free man
+and again seeking the answer to his problem.
+
+He made no attempt to answer Sue's wire. He was restless to get at
+something he had in his mind. He went to his apartments and packed a bag
+and from there disappeared saying goodbye to no one. In his mind was no
+definite idea of where he was going or what he was going to do. He knew
+only that he would follow the message his hand had written. He would try
+to spend his life seeking truth.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+One day when the youth Sam McPherson was new in the city he went on a
+Sunday afternoon to a down-town theatre to hear a sermon. The sermon was
+delivered by a small dark-skinned Boston man, and seemed to the young
+McPherson scholarly and well thought out.
+
+"The greatest man is he whose deeds affect the greatest number of
+lives," the speaker had said, and the thought had stuck in Sam's mind.
+Now walking along the street carrying his travelling bag, he remembered
+the sermon and the thought and shook his head in doubt.
+
+"What I have done here in this city must have affected thousands of
+lives," he mused, and felt a quickening of his blood at just letting go
+of his thoughts as he had not dared do since that day when, by breaking
+his word to Sue, he had started on his career as a business giant.
+
+He began to think of the quest on which he had started and had keen
+satisfaction in the thought of what he should do.
+
+"I will begin all over and come up to Truth through work," he told
+himself. "I will leave the money hunger behind me, and if it returns I
+will come back here to Chicago and see my fortune piled up and the men
+rushing about the banks and the stock exchange and the court they pay to
+such fools and brutes as I have been, and that will cure me."
+
+Into the Illinois Central Station he went, a strange spectacle. A
+smile came to his lips as he sat on a bench along the wall between an
+immigrant from Russia and a small plump farmer's wife who held a banana
+in her hand and gave bites of it to a rosy-cheeked babe lying in her
+arms. He, an American multimillionaire, a man in the midst of his
+money-making, one who had realised the American dream, to have sickened
+at the feast and to have wandered out of a fashionable club with a bag
+in his hand and a roll of bills in his pocket and to have come on this
+strange quest--to seek Truth, to seek God. A few years of the fast
+greedy living in the city, that had seemed so splendid to the Iowa boy
+and to the men and women who had lived in his town, and then a woman had
+died lonely and in want in that Iowa town, and half across the continent
+a fat blustering old man had shot himself in a New York hotel, and here
+he sat.
+
+Leaving his bag in the care of the farmer's wife, he walked across the
+room to the ticket window and standing there watched the people with
+definite destinations in mind come up, lay down money, and taking their
+tickets go briskly away. He had no fear of being known. Although his
+name and his picture had been upon the front pages of Chicago newspapers
+for years, he felt so great a change within himself from just the
+resolution he had taken that he had no doubt of passing unnoticed.
+
+A thought struck him. Looking up and down the long room filled with
+its strangely assorted clusters of men and women a sense of the great
+toiling masses of people, the labourers, the small merchants, the
+skilled mechanics, came over him.
+
+"These are the Americans," he began telling himself, "these people with
+children beside them and with hard daily work to be done, and many
+of them with stunted or imperfectly developed bodies, not Crofts, not
+Morrison and I, but these others who toil without hope of luxury and
+wealth, who make up the armies in times of war and raise up boys and
+girls to do the work of the world in their turn."
+
+He fell into the line moving toward the ticket window behind a
+sturdy-looking old man who carried a box of carpenter tools in one hand
+and a bag in the other, and bought a ticket to the same Illinois town to
+which the old man was bound.
+
+In the train he sat beside the old man and the two fell into quiet
+talk--the old man talking of his family. He had a son, married and
+living in the Illinois town to which he was going, of whom he began
+boasting. The son, he said, had gone to that town and had prospered
+there, owning a hotel which his wife managed while he worked as a
+builder.
+
+"Ed," he said, "keeps fifty or sixty men going all summer. He has sent
+for me to come and take charge of a gang. He knows well enough I will
+get the work out of them."
+
+From Ed the old man drifted into talk of himself and his life, telling
+bare facts with directness and simplicity and making no effort to
+disguise a slight turn of vanity in his success.
+
+"I have raised seven sons and made them all good workmen and they are
+all doing well," he said.
+
+He told of each in detail. One, who had taken to books, was a mechanical
+engineer in a manufacturing town in New England. The mother of his
+children had died the year before and of his three daughters two had
+married mechanics. The third, Sam gathered, had not done well and from
+something the old man said he thought she had perhaps gone the wrong way
+there in Chicago.
+
+To the old man Sam talked of God and of a man's effort to get truth out
+of life.
+
+"I have thought of it a lot," he said.
+
+The old man was interested. He looked at Sam and then out at the car
+window and began talking of his own beliefs, the substance of which Sam
+could not get.
+
+"God is a spirit and lives in the growing corn," said the old man,
+pointing out the window at the passing fields.
+
+He began talking of churches and of ministers, against whom he was
+filled with bitterness.
+
+"They are dodgers. They do not get at things. They are damned dodgers,
+pretending to be good," he declared.
+
+Sam talked of himself, saying that he was alone in the world and had
+money. He said that he wanted work in the open air, not for the money it
+would bring him, but because his paunch was large and his hand trembled
+in the morning.
+
+"I've been drinking," he said, "and I want to work hard day after day so
+that my muscles may become firm and sleep come to me at night."
+
+The old man thought that his son could find Sam a place.
+
+"He's a driver--Ed is," he said, laughing, "and he won't pay you much.
+Ed don't let go of money. He's a tight one."
+
+Night had come when they reached the town where Ed lived, and the three
+men walked over a bridge, beneath which roared a waterfall, toward the
+long poorly-lighted main street of the town and Ed's hotel. Ed, a young,
+broad-shouldered man, with a dry cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth,
+led the way. He had engaged Sam standing in the darkness on the station
+platform, accepting his story without comment.
+
+"I'll let you carry timbers and drive nails," he said, "that will harden
+you up."
+
+On the way over the bridge he talked of the town.
+
+"It's a live place," he said, "we are getting people in here."
+
+"Look at that!" he exclaimed, chewing at the cigar and pointing to the
+waterfall that foamed and roared almost under the bridge. "There's a lot
+of power there and where there's power there will be a city."
+
+At Ed's hotel some twenty men sat about a long low office. They were,
+for the most part, middle-aged working men and sat in silence reading
+and smoking pipes. At a table pushed against the wall a bald-headed
+young man with a scar on his cheek played solitaire with a greasy pack
+of cards, and in front of him and sitting in a chair tilted against the
+wall a sullen-faced boy idly watched the game. When the three men came
+into the office the boy dropped his chair to the floor and stared at Ed
+who stared back at him. It was as though a contest of some sort went on
+between them. A tall neatly-dressed woman, with a brisk manner and pale,
+inexpressive, hard blue eyes, stood back of a little combined desk and
+cigar case at the end of the room, and as the three walked toward her
+she looked from Ed to the sullen-faced boy and then again at Ed. Sam
+concluded she was a woman bent on having her own way. She had that air.
+
+"This is my wife," said Ed, introducing Sam with a wave of his hand and
+passing around the end of the desk to stand by her side.
+
+Ed's wife twirled the hotel register about facing Sam, nodded her head,
+and then, leaning over the desk, bestowed a quick kiss upon the leathery
+cheek of the old carpenter.
+
+Sam and the old man found a place in chairs along the wall and sat down
+among the silent men. The old man pointed to the boy in the chair beside
+the card players.
+
+"Their son," he whispered cautiously.
+
+The boy looked at his mother, who in turn looked steadily at him, and
+got up from his chair. Back of the desk Ed talked in low tones to his
+wife. The boy, stopping before Sam and the old man and still looking
+toward the woman, put out his hand which the old man took. Then, without
+speaking, he went past the desk and through a doorway, and began noisily
+climbing a flight of stairs, followed by his mother. As they climbed
+they berated each other, their voices rising to a high pitch and echoing
+through the upper part of the house.
+
+Ed, coming across to them, talked to Sam about the assignment of a room,
+and the men began looking at the stranger; noting his fine clothes,
+their eyes filled with curiosity.
+
+"Selling something?" asked a large red-haired young man, rolling a quid
+of tobacco in his mouth.
+
+"No," replied Sam shortly, "going to work for Ed."
+
+The silent men in chairs along the wall dropped their newspapers and
+stared, and the bald-headed young man at the table sat with open mouth,
+a card held suspended in the air. Sam had become, for the moment, a
+centre of interest and the men stirred in their chairs and began to
+whisper and point to him.
+
+A large, watery-eyed man, with florid cheeks, clad in a long overcoat
+with spots down the front, came in at the door and passed through the
+room bowing and smiling to the men. Taking Ed by the arm he disappeared
+into a little barroom, where Sam could hear him talking in low tones.
+
+After a little while the florid-faced man came and put his head through
+the barroom door into the office.
+
+"Come on, boys," he said, smiling and nodding right and left, "the
+drinks are on me."
+
+The men got up and filed into the bar, the old man and Sam remaining
+seated in their chairs. They began talking in undertones.
+
+"I'll start 'em thinking--these men," said the old man.
+
+From his pocket he took a pamphlet and gave it to Sam. It was a crudely
+written attack upon rich men and corporations.
+
+"Some brains in the fellow who wrote that," said the old carpenter,
+rubbing his hands together and smiling.
+
+Sam did not think so. He sat reading it and listening to the loud,
+boisterous voices of the men in the barroom. The florid-faced man was
+explaining the details of a proposed town bond issue. Sam gathered that
+the water power in the river was to be developed.
+
+"We want to make this a live town," said the voice of Ed, earnestly.
+
+The old man, leaning over and putting his hand beside his mouth, began
+whispering to Sam.
+
+"I'll bet there is a capitalist deal back of that power scheme," he
+said.
+
+He nodded his head up and down and smiled knowingly.
+
+"If there is Ed will be in on it," he added. "You can't lose Ed. He's a
+slick one."
+
+He took the pamphlet from Sam's hand and put it in his pocket.
+
+"I'm a socialist," he explained, "but don't say anything. Ed's against
+'em."
+
+The men filed back into the room, each with a freshly-lighted cigar in
+his mouth, and the florid-faced man followed them and went out at the
+office door.
+
+"Well, so long, boys," he shouted heartily.
+
+Ed went silently up the stairs to join the mother and boy, whose voices
+could still be heard raised in outbursts of wrath from above as the men
+took their former chairs along the wall.
+
+"Well, Bill's sure all right," said the red-haired young man, evidently
+expressing the opinion of the men in regard to the florid-faced man.
+
+A small bent old man with sunken cheeks got up and walking across the
+room leaned against the cigar case.
+
+"Did you ever hear this one?" he asked, looking about.
+
+Obviously no answer could be given and the bent old man launched into
+a vile pointless anecdote of a woman, a miner, and a mule, the crowd
+giving close attention and laughing uproariously when he had finished.
+The socialist rubbed his hands together and joined in the applause.
+
+"That was a good one, eh?" he commented, turning to Sam.
+
+Sam, picking up his bag, climbed the stairway as the red-haired young
+man launched into another tale, slightly less vile. In his room to which
+Ed, meeting him at the top of the stairs, led him, still chewing at the
+unlighted cigar, he turned out the light and sat on the edge of the bed.
+He was as homesick as a boy.
+
+"Truth," he muttered, looking through the window to the dimly-lighted
+street. "Do these men seek truth?"
+
+The next day he went to work, wearing a suit of clothes bought from
+Ed. He worked with Ed's father, carrying timbers and driving nails as
+directed by him. In the gang with him were four men, boarders at Ed's
+hotel, and four other men who lived in the town with their families. At
+the noon hour he asked the old carpenter how the men from the hotel, who
+did not live in the town, could vote on the question of the power bonds.
+The old man grinned and rubbed his hands together.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "I suppose Ed tends to that. He's a slick one,
+Ed is."
+
+At work, the men who had been so silent in the office of the hotel were
+alert and wonderfully busy, hurrying here and there at a word from the
+old man and sawing and nailing furiously. They seemed bent upon outdoing
+each other and when one fell behind they laughed and shouted at him,
+asking him if he had decided to quit for the day. But though they seemed
+determined to outdo him the old man kept ahead of them all, his hammer
+beating a rattling tattoo upon the boards all day. At the noon hour he
+had given each of the men one of the pamphlets from his pocket and on
+the way back to his hotel in the evening he told Sam that the others had
+tried to show him up.
+
+"They wanted to see if I had juice in me," he explained, strutting
+beside Sam with an amusing little swagger of his shoulders.
+
+Sam was sick with fatigue. His hands were blistered, his legs felt weak,
+and a terrible thirst burned in his throat. All day he had gone grimly
+ahead, thankful for every physical discomfort, every throb of his
+strained, tired muscles. In his weariness and in his efforts to keep
+pace with the others he had forgotten Colonel Tom and Mary Underwood.
+
+All during that month and into the next Sam stayed with the old man's
+gang. He ceased thinking, and only worked desperately. An odd feeling
+of loyalty and devotion to the old man came over him and he felt that he
+too must prove that he had the juice in him. At the hotel he went to bed
+immediately after the silent dinner, slept, awoke aching, and went to
+work again.
+
+One Sunday one of the men of his gang came to Sam's room and invited him
+to go with a party of the workers into the country. They went in boats,
+carrying with them kegs of beer, to a deep ravine clothed on both sides
+by heavy woods. In the boat with Sam sat the red-haired young man, who
+was called Jake and who talked loudly of the time they would have in the
+woods, and boasted that he was the instigator of the trip.
+
+"I thought of it," he said over and over again.
+
+Sam wondered why he had been invited. It was a soft October day and
+in the ravine he sat looking at the trees splashed with colour and
+breathing deeply of the air, his whole body relaxed, grateful for the
+day of rest. Jake came and sat beside him.
+
+"What are you?" he asked bluntly. "We know you are no working man."
+
+Sam told him a half-truth.
+
+"You are right enough about that; I have money enough not to have to
+work. I used to be a business man. I sold guns. But I have a disease and
+the doctors have told me that if I do not work out of doors part of me
+will die."
+
+The man from his own gang who had invited him on the trip came up to
+them, bringing Sam a foaming glass of beer. He shook his head.
+
+"The doctor says it will not do," he explained to the two men.
+
+The red-haired man called Jake began talking.
+
+"We are going to have a fight with Ed," he said. "That's what we came up
+here to talk about. We want to know where you stand. We are going to see
+if we can't make him pay as well for the work here as men are paid for
+the same work in Chicago."
+
+Sam lay back upon the grass.
+
+"All right," he said. "Go ahead. If I can help I will. I'm not so fond
+of Ed."
+
+The men began talking among themselves. Jake, standing among them, read
+aloud a list of names among which was the name Sam had written on the
+register at Ed's hotel.
+
+"It's a list of the names of men we think will stick together and vote
+together on the bond issue," he explained, turning to Sam. "Ed's in that
+and we want to use our votes to scare him into giving us what we want.
+Will you stay with us? You look like a fighter."
+
+Sam nodded and getting up joined the men about the beer kegs. They began
+talking of Ed and of the money he had made in the town.
+
+"He's done a lot of town work here and there's been graft in all of
+it," explained Jake emphatically. "It's time he was being made to do the
+right thing."
+
+While they talked Sam sat watching the men's faces. They did not seem
+vile to him now as they had seemed that first evening in the hotel
+office. He began thinking of them silently and alertly at work all day
+long, surrounded by such influences as Ed and Bill, and the thought
+sweetened his opinion of them.
+
+"Look here," he said, "tell me of this matter. I was a business man
+before I came here and I may be able to help you fellows get what you
+want."
+
+Getting up, Jake took Sam's arm and they walked down the ravine, Jake
+explaining the situation in the town.
+
+"The game," he said, "is to make the taxpayers pay for a millrace to be
+built for the development of the water power in the river and then, by a
+trick, to turn it over to a private company. Bill and Ed are both in the
+deal and they are working for a Chicago man named Crofts. He's been up
+here at the hotel with Bill talking to Ed. I've figured out what they
+are up to." Sam sat down upon a log and laughed heartily.
+
+"Crofts, eh?" he exclaimed. "Say, we will fight this thing. If Crofts
+has been up here you can depend upon it there is some size to the deal.
+We will just smash the whole crooked gang for the good of the town."
+
+"How would you do that?" asked Jake.
+
+Sam sat down on a log and looked at the river flowing past the mouth of
+the ravine.
+
+"Just fight," he said. "Let me show you something."
+
+He took a pencil and slip of paper from his pocket, and, with the
+voices of the men about the beer kegs in his ears and the red-haired man
+peering over his shoulder, began writing his first political pamphlet.
+He wrote and erased and changed words and phrases. The pamphlet was a
+statement of facts as to the value of water power, and was addressed to
+the taxpayers of the community. He warmed to the subject, saying that a
+fortune lay sleeping in the river, and that the town, by the exercise of
+a little discretion now, could build with that fortune a beautiful city
+belonging to the people.
+
+"This fortune in the river rightly managed will pay the expenses of
+government and give you control of a great source of revenue forever,"
+he wrote. "Build your millrace, but look out for a trick of the
+politicians. They are trying to steal it. Reject the offer of the
+Chicago banker named Crofts. Demand an investigation. A capitalist has
+been found who will take the water power bonds at four per cent and back
+the people in this fight for a free American city." Across the head
+of the pamphlet Sam wrote the caption, "A River Paved With Gold," and
+handed it to Jake, who read it and whistled softly.
+
+"Good!" he said. "I will take this and have it printed. It will make
+Bill and Ed sit up."
+
+Sam took a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to the man.
+
+"To pay for the printing," he said. "And when we have them licked I am
+the man who will take the four per cent bonds."
+
+Jake scratched his head. "How much do you suppose the deal is worth to
+Crofts?"
+
+"A million, or he would not bother," Sam answered.
+
+Jake folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
+
+"This would make Bill and Ed squirm, eh?" he laughed.
+
+Going home down the river the men, filled with beer, sang and shouted
+as the boats, guided by Sam and Jake, floated along. The night fell
+warm and still and Sam thought he had never seen the sky so filled
+with stars. His brain was busy with the idea of doing something for the
+people.
+
+"Perhaps here in this town I shall make a start toward what I am after,"
+he thought, his heart filled with happiness and the songs of the tipsy
+workmen ringing in his ears.
+
+All through the next few weeks there was an air of something astir among
+the men of Sam's gang and about Ed's hotel. During the evening Jake
+went among the men talking in low tones, and once he took a three days'
+vacation, telling Ed that he did not feel well and spending the time
+among the men employed in the plough works up the river. From time to
+time he came to Sam for money.
+
+"For the campaign," he said, winking and hurrying away.
+
+Suddenly a speaker appeared and began talking nightly from a box before
+a drug store on Main Street, and after dinner the office of Ed's hotel
+was deserted. The man on the box had a blackboard hung on a pole, on
+which he drew figures estimating the value of the power in the river,
+and as he talked he grew more and more excited, waving his arms and
+inveighing against certain leasing clauses in the bond proposal. He
+declared himself a follower of Karl Marx and delighted the old carpenter
+who danced up and down in the road and rubbed his hands.
+
+"It will come to something--this will--you'll see," he declared to Sam.
+
+One day Ed appeared, riding in a buggy, at the job where Sam worked,
+and called the old man into the road. He sat pounding one hand upon the
+other and talking in a low voice. Sam thought the old man had perhaps
+been indiscreet in the distribution of the socialistic pamphlets. He
+seemed nervous, dancing up and down beside the buggy and shaking his
+head. Then hurrying back to where the men worked he pointed over his
+shoulder with his thumb.
+
+"Ed wants you," he said, and Sam noticed that his voice trembled and his
+hand shook.
+
+In the buggy Ed and Sam rode in silence. Again Ed chewed at an unlighted
+cigar.
+
+"I want to talk with you," he had said as Sam climbed into the buggy.
+
+At the hotel the two men got out of the buggy and went into the office.
+Inside the door Ed, who came behind, sprang forward and pinioned Sam's
+arms with his own. He was as powerful as a bear. His wife, the tall
+woman with the inexpressive eyes, came running into the room, her face
+drawn with hatred. In her hand she carried a broom and with the
+handle of this she struck Sam several swinging blows across the face,
+accompanying each blow with a half scream of rage and a volley of vile
+names. The sullen-faced boy, alive now and with eyes burning with zeal,
+came running down the stairs and pushed the woman aside. He struck Sam
+time after time in the face with his fist, laughing each time as Sam
+winced under the blows.
+
+Sam struggled furiously to escape Ed's powerful grasp. It was the first
+time he had ever been beaten and the first time he had faced hopeless
+defeat. The wrath within him was so intense that the jolting impact
+of the blows seemed a secondary matter to the need of escaping Ed's
+vice-like grasp.
+
+Suddenly Ed turned and, pushing Sam before him, threw him through the
+office door and into the street. In falling his head struck against a
+hitching post and he lay stunned. When he partially recovered from the
+fall Sam got up and walked along the street. His face was swollen and
+bruised and his nose bled. The street was deserted and the assault upon
+him had been unnoticed.
+
+He went to a hotel on Main Street--a more pretentious place than Ed's,
+near the bridge leading to the station--and as he passed in he saw,
+through an open door, Jake, the red-haired man, leaning against the bar
+and talking to Bill, the man with the florid face. Sam, paying for a
+room, went upstairs and to bed.
+
+In the bed, with cold bandages on his bruised face, he tried to get
+the situation in hand. Hatred for Ed ran through his veins. His hands
+clenched, his brain whirled, and the brutal, passionate faces of the
+woman and the boy danced before his eyes.
+
+"I'll fix them, the brutal bullies," he muttered aloud.
+
+And then the thought of his quest came back to his mind and quieted him.
+Through the window came the roar of the waterfall, broken by noises of
+the street. As he fell asleep they mingled with his dreams, sounding
+soft and quiet like the low talk of a family about the fire of an
+evening.
+
+He was awakened by a noise of pounding on his door. At his call the door
+opened and the face of the old carpenter appeared. Sam laughed and sat
+up in bed. Already the cold bandages had soothed the throbbing of his
+bruised face.
+
+"Go away," begged the old man, rubbing his hands together nervously.
+"Get out of town."
+
+He put his hand to his mouth and talked in a hoarse whisper, looking
+back over his shoulder through the open door. Sam, getting out of bed,
+began filling his pipe.
+
+"You can't beat Ed, you fellows," added the old man, backing out at the
+door. "He's a slick one, Ed is. You better get out of town."
+
+Sam called a boy and gave him a note to Ed asking for his clothes and
+for the bag in his room, and to the boy he gave a large bill, asking him
+to pay anything due. When the boy came back bringing the clothes and the
+bag he returned the bill unbroken.
+
+"They're scared about something up there," he said, looking at Sam's
+bruised face.
+
+Sam dressed carefully and went down into the street. He remembered that
+he had never seen a printed copy of the political pamphlet written in
+the ravine and realised that Jake had used it to make money for himself.
+
+"Now I shall try something else," he thought.
+
+It was early evening and crowds of men coming down the railroad track
+from the plough works turned to right and left as they reached Main
+Street. Sam walked among them, climbing a little hilly side street to
+a number he had got from a clerk at the drug store before which the
+socialist had talked. He stopped at a little frame house and a moment
+after knocking was in the presence of the man who had talked night after
+night from the box in the street. Sam had decided to see what could be
+done through him. The socialist was a short, fat man, with curly grey
+hair, shiny round cheeks, and black broken teeth. He sat on the edge of
+his bed and looked as if he had slept in his clothes. A corncob pipe lay
+smoking among the covers of the bed, and during most of the talk he sat
+with one shoe held in his hand as though about to put it on. About the
+room in orderly piles lay stack after stack of paper-covered books. Sam
+sat down in a chair by the window and told his mission.
+
+"It is a big thing, this power steal that is going on here," he
+explained. "I know the man back of it and he would not bother with a
+small affair. I know they are going to make the city build the millrace
+and then steal it. It will be a big thing for your party about here if
+you take hold and stop them. Let me tell you how it can be done."
+
+He explained his plan, and told of Crofts and of his wealth and dogged,
+bullying determination. The socialist seemed beside himself. He pulled
+on the shoe and began running hurriedly about the room.
+
+"The time for the election," Sam went on, "is almost here. I have looked
+into this thing. We must beat this bond issue and then put through a
+square one. There is a train out of Chicago at seven o'clock, a fast
+train. You get fifty speakers out here. I will pay for a special train
+if necessary and I will hire a band and help stir things up. I can give
+you facts enough to shake this town to the bottom. You come with me and
+'phone to Chicago. I will pay everything. I am McPherson, Sam McPherson
+of Chicago."
+
+The socialist ran to a closet and began pulling on his coat. The name
+affected him so that his hand trembled and he could scarcely get his arm
+into the coat sleeve. He began to apologise for the appearance of the
+room and kept looking at Sam with the air of one not able to believe
+what he had heard. As the two men walked out of the house he ran ahead
+holding doors open for Sam's passage.
+
+"And you will help us, Mr. McPherson?" he exclaimed. "You, a man of
+millions, will help us in this fight?"
+
+Sam had a feeling that the man was going to kiss his hand or do
+something equally ridiculous. He had the air of a club door man gone off
+his head.
+
+At the hotel Sam stood in the lobby while the fat man waited in a
+telephone booth.
+
+"I will have to 'phone Chicago, I will simply have to 'phone Chicago. We
+socialists don't do anything like this offhand, Mr. McPherson," he had
+explained as they walked along the street.
+
+When the socialist came out of the booth he stood before Sam shaking his
+head. His whole attitude had changed, and he looked like a man caught
+doing a foolish or absurd thing.
+
+"Nothing doing, nothing doing, Mr. McPherson," he said, starting for the
+hotel door.
+
+At the door he stopped and shook his finger at Sam.
+
+"It won't work," he said, emphatically. "Chicago is too wise."
+
+Sam turned and went back to his room. His name had killed his only
+chance to beat Crofts, Jake, Bill and Ed. In his room he sat looking out
+of the window into the street.
+
+"Where shall I take hold now?" he asked himself.
+
+Turning out the lights he sat listening to the roar of the waterfall and
+thinking of the events of the last week.
+
+"I have had a time," he thought. "I have tried something and even though
+it did not work it has been the best fun I have had for years."
+
+The hours slipped away and night came on. He could hear men shouting and
+laughing in the street, and going downstairs he stood in a hallway at
+the edge of the crowd that gathered about the socialist. The orator
+shouted and waved his hand. He seemed as proud as a young recruit who
+has just passed through his first baptism of fire.
+
+"He tried to make a fool of me--McPherson of Chicago--the
+millionaire--one of the capitalist kings--he tried to bribe me and my
+party."
+
+In the crowd the old carpenter was dancing in the road and rubbing his
+hands together. With the feeling of a man who had finished a piece of
+work or turned the last leaf of a book, Sam went back to his hotel.
+
+"In the morning I shall be on my way," he thought.
+
+A knock came at the door and the red-haired man came in. He closed the
+door softly and winked at Sam.
+
+"Ed made a mistake," he said, and laughed. "The old man told him you
+were a socialist and he thought you were trying to spoil the graft.
+He is scared about that beating you got and mighty sorry. He's all
+right--Ed is--and he and Bill and I have got the votes. What made you
+stay under cover so long? Why didn't you tell us you were McPherson?"
+
+Sam saw the hopelessness of any attempt to explain. Jake had evidently
+sold out the men. Sam wondered how.
+
+"How do you know you can deliver the votes?'" he asked, trying to lead
+Jake on.
+
+Jake rolled the quid in his mouth and winked again.
+
+"It was easy enough to fix the men when Ed, Bill and I got together," he
+said. "You know about the other. There's a clause in the act authorising
+the bond issue, a sleeper, Bill calls it. You know more about that than
+I do. Anyway the power will be turned over to the man we say."
+
+"But how do I know you can deliver the votes?"
+
+Jake threw out his hand impatiently.
+
+"What do they know?" he asked sharply. "What they want is more wages.
+There's a million in the power deal and they can't any more realise a
+million than they can tell what they want to do in Heaven. I promised
+Ed's fellows the city scale. Ed can't kick. He'll make a hundred
+thousand as it stands. Then I promised the plough works gang a ten per
+cent raise. We'll get it for them if we can, but if we can't, they won't
+know it till the deal is put through."
+
+Sam walked over and held open the door.
+
+"Good night," he said.
+
+Jake looked annoyed.
+
+"Ain't you even going to make a bid against Crofts?" he asked. "We ain't
+tied to him if you do better by us. I'm in this thing because you put me
+in. That piece you wrote up the river scared 'em stiff. I want to do
+the right thing by you. Don't be sore about Ed. He wouldn't a done it if
+he'd known."
+
+Sam shook his head and stood with his hand still on the door.
+
+"Good night," he said again. "I am not in it. I have dropped it. No use
+trying to explain."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+For weeks and months Sam led a wandering vagabond life, and surely a
+stranger or more restless vagabond never went upon the road. In his
+pocket he had at almost any time from one to five thousand dollars, his
+bag went on from place to place ahead of him, and now and then he caught
+up with it, unpacked it, and wore a suit of his former Chicago clothes
+upon the streets of some town. For the most part, however, he wore the
+rough clothes bought from Ed, and, when these were gone, others like
+them, with a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a pair of
+heavy boots lacing half way up the legs. Among the people, he passed for
+a rather well-set-up workman with money in his pocket going his own way.
+
+During all those months of wandering, and even when he had returned to
+something nearer his former way of life, his mind was unsettled and his
+outlook on life disturbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that he, among
+all men, was a unique, an innovation. Day after day his mind ground away
+upon his problem and he was determined to seek and to keep on seeking
+until he found for himself a way of peace. In the towns and in the
+country through which he passed he saw the clerks in the stores,
+the merchants with worried faces hurrying into banks, the farmers,
+brutalised by toil, dragging their weary bodies homeward at the coming
+of night, and told himself that all life was abortive, that on all sides
+of him it wore itself out in little futile efforts or ran away in side
+currents, that nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward giving
+point to the tremendous sacrifice involved in just living and working in
+the world. He thought of Christ going about seeing the world and talking
+to men, and thought that he too would go and talk to them, not as a
+teacher, but as one seeking eagerly to be taught. At times he was filled
+with longing and inexpressible hopes and, like the boy of Caxton, would
+get out of bed, not now to stand in Miller's pasture watching the rain
+on the surface of the water, but to walk endless miles through the
+darkness getting the blessed relief of fatigue into his body and often
+paying for and occupying two beds in one night.
+
+Sam wanted to go back to Sue; he wanted peace and something like
+happiness, but most of all he wanted work, real work, work that would
+demand of him day after day the best and finest in him so that he would
+be held to the need of renewing constantly the better impulses of his
+mind. He was at the top of his life, and the few weeks of hard physical
+exertion as a driver of nails and a bearer of timbers had begun to
+restore his body to shapeliness and strength, so that he was filled anew
+with all of his native restlessness and energy; but he was determined
+that he would not again pour himself out in work that would react upon
+him as had his money making, his dream of beautiful children, and this
+last half-formed dream of a kind of financial fatherhood to the Illinois
+town.
+
+The incident with Ed and the red-haired man had been his first serious
+effort at anything like social service achieved through controlling or
+attempting to influence the public mind, for his was the type of mind
+that runs to the concrete, the actual. As he sat in the ravine talking
+to Jake, and, later, coming home in the boat under the multitude of
+stars, he had looked up from among the drunken workmen and his mind had
+seen a city built for a people, a city independent, beautiful, strong,
+and free, but a glimpse of a red head through a barroom door and a
+socialist trembling before a name had dispelled the vision. After his
+return from hearing the socialist, who in his turn was hedged about by
+complicated influences, and in those November days when he walked south
+through Illinois, seeing the late glory of the trees and breathing the
+fine air, he laughed at himself for having had the vision. It was not
+that the red-haired man had sold him out, it was not the beating given
+him by Ed's sullen-faced son or the blows across the face at the hands
+of his vigorous wife--it was just that at bottom he did not believe the
+people wanted reform; they wanted a ten per cent raise in wages. The
+public mind was a thing too big, too complicated and inert for a vision
+or an ideal to get at and move deeply.
+
+And then, walking on the road and struggling to find truth even within
+himself, Sam had to come to something else. At bottom he was no leader,
+no reformer. He had not wanted the free city for a free people, but as a
+work to be done by his own hand. He was McPherson, the money maker, the
+man who loved himself. The fact, not the sight of Jake hobnobbing with
+Bill or the timidity of the socialist, had blocked his way to work as a
+political reformer and builder.
+
+Tramping south between the rows of shocked corn he laughed at himself.
+"The experience with Ed and Jake has done something for me," he thought.
+"They bullied me. I have been a kind of bully myself and what has
+happened has been good medicine for me."
+
+Sam walked the roads of Illinois, Ohio, New York, and other states,
+through hill country and flat country, in the snow drifts of winter and
+through the storms of spring, talking to people, asking their way of
+life and the end toward which they worked. At night he dreamed of Sue,
+of his boyhood struggles in Caxton, of Janet Eberly sitting in her chair
+and talking of writers of books, or, visualising the stock exchange or
+some garish drinking place, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster,
+Morrison, and Prince intent and eager as he laid before them some scheme
+of money making. Sometimes at night he awoke, seized with horror, seeing
+Colonel Tom with the revolver pressed against his head; and sitting in
+his bed, and all through the next day he talked aloud to himself.
+
+"The damned old coward," he shouted into the darkness of his room or
+into the wide peaceful prospect of the countryside.
+
+The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible.
+It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing
+to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent,
+so completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose.
+
+"And yet," thought Sam, "he has found strength to whip me, the man of
+ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight
+I put upon the little play world in which he had been king."
+
+In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed
+beard sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead,
+and into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance
+of a thought he had got from a book of Janet's or from some talk he had
+heard, perhaps at his own dinner table.
+
+"It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying
+dead."
+
+At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving
+past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that
+issued from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam,
+hurrying and seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to
+the old commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his
+forces to withstand an attack.
+
+"I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth," he said.
+
+Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping
+night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and
+daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction
+from the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed
+feet on the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon
+his body and subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind,
+chilled by the winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun.
+In the spring he swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the
+cattle grazing in the fields and the white clouds floating across the
+sky, and constantly his legs became harder and his body more flat and
+sinewy. Once he slept for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a
+woods and in the morning was awakened by a farmer's dog licking his
+face.
+
+Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other
+roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no
+incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or
+on the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he
+talked and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in
+life, sought no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the
+romance went out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and
+stupid, they were, almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they
+wanted passionately to get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding
+life with its problems and responsibilities. They always talked of
+the big cities, of "Chi" and "Cinci" and "Frisco," and were bent upon
+getting to one of these places. They condemned the rich and begged and
+stole from the poor, talked swaggeringly of their personal courage and
+ran whimpering and begging before country constables. One of them, a
+tall, leering youth in a grey cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the
+edge of a village in Indiana, tried to rob him. Full of his new strength
+and with the thought of Ed's wife and the sullen-faced son in his mind,
+Sam sprang upon him and had revenge for the beating received in the
+office of Ed's hotel by beating this fellow in his turn. When the tall
+youth had partially recovered from the beating and had staggered to his
+feet, he ran off into the darkness, stopping when well out of reach to
+hurl a stone that splashed in the mud of the road at Sam's feet.
+
+Everywhere Sam sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He
+had a kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of
+some simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman,
+with whom he talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana,
+interested him so that he went into a train with her and travelled all
+night in the day coach, listening to her talk of her three sons, one
+of whom had weak lungs and had, with two younger brothers, taken up
+government land in the west. The woman had been with them for some
+months, helping them to get a start.
+
+"I was raised on a farm and knew things they could not know," she told
+Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of
+fellow passengers.
+
+She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had
+driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a
+house, and had grown brown and strong at the work.
+
+"And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has
+gained eleven pounds," she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her
+heavy, muscular forearms.
+
+She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle
+factory in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods
+store, with her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her
+hearer's interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the
+west and the loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they
+sometimes made her heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved
+success, although he did not see how her experience could serve as a
+guide to him.
+
+"You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth," he said, taking
+her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.
+
+At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through
+southern Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse,
+asked, "Where are you going?" adding genially, "I may be able to give
+you a lift."
+
+Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man's manner or in his
+dress suggesting the man of God, he assumed a bantering air.
+
+"I am on my way to the New Jerusalem," he said seriously. "I am one who
+seeks God."
+
+The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when
+he saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam's mouth, he turned the
+wheels of his buggy.
+
+"Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem,"
+he said.
+
+On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road,
+told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward
+which he might work.
+
+"It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard
+necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will
+bring me bread and butter, but because I need to be doing something that
+will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to
+serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I
+got at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me,
+and I want to find that way."
+
+The young minister, who was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary at
+Springfield, Ohio, and had come out of college with a very serious
+outlook on life, took Sam to his house and together they sat talking
+half the night. He had a wife, a country girl with a babe lying at
+her breast, who got supper for them, and who, after supper, sat in the
+shadows in a corner of the living-room listening to their talk.
+
+The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe and the minister poked at
+a coal fire that burned in a stove. They talked of God and of what the
+thought of God meant to men; but the young minister did not try to give
+Sam an answer to his problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly
+dissatisfied and unhappy in his way of life.
+
+"There is no spirit of God here," he said, poking viciously at the coals
+in the stove. "The people here do not want me to talk to them of God.
+They have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has
+put them here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind
+of glorified Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished
+this life of work and of putting money in the savings bank."
+
+For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the
+country with him and talking of God. In the evening they sat in the
+house, continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man
+preach in his church.
+
+The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked
+vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and
+unnatural.
+
+"The man," thought Sam, "has no feeling for public address and is not
+treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation,
+the ideas he has expounded to me in his house." He decided there was
+something to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week
+after week and who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an
+effort.
+
+One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came
+to him as he stood on the little porch before the house.
+
+"I wish you would go away," she said, standing with her babe in her
+arms and looking at the porch floor. "You stir him up and make him
+dissatisfied."
+
+Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness.
+There had been tears in the wife's eyes.
+
+In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and
+eating with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses
+where they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked
+in a new place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and
+several of his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the
+men of the threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot
+of them day after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk,
+crept into the loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began
+another day of heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a
+swim in some creek and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees
+of an orchard sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of
+talk, talk that never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they
+would try to settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at
+some farm during the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man
+in the crew never talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long
+Sunday afternoons and whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.
+
+The threshing outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe,
+who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the
+men all day, drove about the country half the night making deals
+with farmers for other days of threshing. Sam thought that he looked
+constantly on the point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one
+of the men, who had been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that
+at the end of the season their employer did not have enough money left
+from his season of work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines
+and that he continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them.
+
+"One has to keep going," said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him
+on the matter.
+
+When told to keep Sam's wage until the end of the season he looked
+relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried
+and said that he had no money.
+
+"I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a
+little time," he said.
+
+Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him
+from the shadows at the back of the barn.
+
+"Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one
+else?" he asked.
+
+Joe looked indignant.
+
+"A man wants independence," he said.
+
+When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a
+stream, and tearing up Joe's note watched the torn pieces of it float
+away upon the brown water.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The
+days on which something happened or on which something outside himself
+interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours
+of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in
+a kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get
+at people who came into his way and to discover something of their way
+of life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed,
+staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the
+sidewalks of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an
+idea came into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once
+the practicability of living by following the idea, and although
+the practice brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the
+difficulties of the problem he was striving to work out, it brought him
+many strange experiences.
+
+At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town
+in eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a
+railroad track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the
+sidewalk. It was a stormy night in September at the end of his first
+year of wandering and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after
+buying drinks for the labourer and cigars for himself, several men came
+in and stood by the bar drinking together. As they drank they became
+more and more friendly, slapping each other on the back, singing songs
+and boasting. One of them got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The
+proprietor, a round-faced man with one dead eye, who had himself been
+drinking freely, put a bottle upon the bar and coming up to Sam, began
+complaining that he had no bartender and had to work long hours.
+
+"Drink what you want, boys, and then I'll tell you what you owe," he
+said to the men standing along the bar.
+
+Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room,
+and looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had
+for the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen,
+Sam said to himself, "I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At
+least I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with
+this tramping on the road and thinking."
+
+The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an
+obscure place had made its proprietor what is called "well fixed." It
+had a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the
+main street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks
+was but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men
+from the freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand
+about drinking beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at
+the side door was prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door,
+took drinks and hurried out again, looking up the alley and running
+quickly when they found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and
+when Sam had worked for a few days in the place he once made the mistake
+of reaching for the bottle when he heard the door open.
+
+"Let them ask for it," said the proprietor gruffly. "Do you want to
+insult a man?"
+
+On Saturday the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and
+at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks.
+When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these
+men and put the bottle before them, saying, "Drink all you want of the
+stuff."
+
+When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment
+by the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat
+pockets and looking at the floor.
+
+"Bar flies," the proprietor explained laconically.
+
+The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it
+into stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into
+bottles as they became empty. He kept on display in glass cases bottles
+of well known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for
+one of these brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from
+beneath the bar, a bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of
+his own mixture. As Al sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know
+nothing the bartender's art and stood all day handing out Al's poisonous
+stuff and the foaming glasses of beer the workingmen drank in the
+evening.
+
+Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the
+proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam
+most. Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over
+their shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at
+Sam apologetically.
+
+"Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold," they would say,
+as though repeating a formula.
+
+At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre
+notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life's
+unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day's duty, and his
+curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in
+at the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked
+them why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the
+telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam's question an
+impertinence.
+
+"You fool, don't you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?"
+Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in
+the centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and
+women going through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to
+overcome a feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening
+before. He had come into town over a poorly made clay road running
+through barren hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores
+of a river, swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges
+of the town.
+
+Before him in the distance he had looked into the windows of a huge
+factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene that
+lay before him. Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers
+ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the glare of the furnace
+fire lighting now one, now another of them, sharply. At his feet the
+tumbling waters that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated
+him. Looking closely at the racing waters his head, light from physical
+weariness, reeled, and in fear of falling he had been compelled to grip
+firmly the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a
+house across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens
+sat on a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly
+fitting accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard
+itself two bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they
+sprang into the fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming
+exhausted, they fell to picking and scratching among the rubbish in the
+yard, and when they had a little recovered renewed the struggle. For an
+hour Sam had looked at the scene, letting his eyes wander from the river
+to the grey sky and to the factory belching forth its black smoke. He
+had thought that the two feebly struggling fowls, immersed in their
+pointless struggle in the midst of such mighty force, epitomised much of
+man's struggle in the world, and, turning, had gone along the sidewalks
+and to the village hotel, feeling old and tired. Now on the bench in
+the little park, with the early morning sun shining down through the
+glistening rain drops clinging to the red leaves of the trees, he began
+to lose the sense of depression that had clung to him through the night.
+
+A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying
+workers, and stopped to sit beside him.
+
+"On the road, brother?" he asked.
+
+Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.
+
+"Fools and slaves," he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women
+passing on the sidewalk. "See them going like beasts to their bondage?
+What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of
+dogs."
+
+He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced.
+
+"We are all fools and slaves," said Sam, stoutly.
+
+Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about.
+
+"There, you talk sense," he cried. "Welcome to our town, stranger. We
+have no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity
+among them. Come and have breakfast with me."
+
+In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a
+graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he
+was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of
+which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud
+of the fact.
+
+"I refuse to work! I scorn it!" he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in
+the air.
+
+Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the
+socialist party in his native town, and boasted of the leadership he
+had already achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried
+because of his connection with the movement.
+
+"She wants me to be respectable," he said sadly, and added, "What's the
+use trying to explain to a woman? I can't get her to see the difference
+between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I've given up
+trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by
+getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police."
+
+He talked of a strike going on among some girl employes of a Jewish
+shirtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began
+asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to
+the scene of the strike.
+
+The shirtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and
+on the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up
+and down. A flashily dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his
+hands in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft
+and looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came
+a stream of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the
+empty air. When Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs,
+shouting oaths over his shoulder.
+
+Sam joined the three girls, and began talking to them, walking up and
+down with them before the grocery store.
+
+"What are you doing to win?" he asked when they had told him of their
+grievances.
+
+"We do what we can!" said a Jewish girl with broad hips, great motherly
+breasts, and fine, soft, brown eyes, who appeared to be a leader and
+spokesman among the strikers. "We walk up and down here and try to get
+a word with the strikebreakers the boss has brought in from other towns,
+when they go in and come out."
+
+Frank, the University man, spoke up. "We are putting up stickers
+everywhere," he said. "I myself have put up hundreds of them."
+
+He took from his coat pocket a printed slip, gummed on one side, and
+told Sam that he had been putting them on walls and telegraph poles
+about town. The thing was vilely written. "Down with the dirty scabs"
+was the heading in bold, black letters across the top.
+
+Sam was shocked at the vileness of the caption and at the crude
+brutality of the text printed on the slip.
+
+"Do you call women workers names like that?" he asked.
+
+"They have taken our work from us," the Jewish girl answered simply and
+began again, telling the story of her sister strikers and of what the
+low wage had meant to them and to their families. "To me it does not so
+much matter; I have a brother who works in a clothing store and he can
+support me, but many of the women in our union have only their wage here
+with which to feed their families."
+
+Sam's mind began working on the problem.
+
+"Here," he declared, "is something definite to do, a battle in which I
+will pit myself against this employer for the sake of these women."
+
+He put away from him his experience in the Illinois town, telling
+himself that the young woman walking beside him would have a sense of
+honour unknown to the red-haired young workman who had sold him out to
+Bill and Ed.
+
+"I failed with my money," he thought, "now I will try to help these
+girls with my energy."
+
+Turning to the Jewish girl he made a quick decision.
+
+"I will help you get your places back," he said.
+
+Leaving the girls he went across the street to a barber shop where he
+could watch the entrance to the factory. He wanted to think out a method
+of procedure and wanted also to look at the girl strikebreakers as
+they came to work. After a time several girls came along the street and
+turned in at the stairway. The flashily dressed Hebrew with the cigar
+still in his mouth was again by the stairway entrance. The three pickets
+running forward accosted the file of girls going up the stairs, one
+of whom, a young American girl with yellow hair, turned and shouted
+something over her shoulder. The man called Frank shouted back and the
+Hebrew took the cigar out of his mouth and laughed heartily. Sam filled
+and lighted his pipe, a dozen plans for helping the striking girls
+running through his mind.
+
+During the morning he went into the grocery store on the corner, a
+saloon in the neighbourhood, and returned to the barber shop talking to
+men of the strike. He ate his lunch alone, still thinking of the three
+girls patiently walking up and down before the stairway. Their ceaseless
+walking seemed to him a useless waste of energy.
+
+"They should be doing something more definite," he thought.
+
+After lunch he joined the soft-eyed Jewish girl and together they walked
+along the street talking of the strike.
+
+"You cannot win this strike by just calling nasty names," he said. "I
+do not like that 'dirty scab' sticker Frank had in his pocket. It cannot
+help you and only antagonises the girls who have taken your places. Here
+in this part of town the people want to see you win. I have talked to
+the men who come into the saloon and the barber shop across the street
+and you already have their sympathy. You want to get the sympathy of the
+girls who have taken your places. Calling them dirty scabs only makes
+martyrs of them. Did the yellow-haired girl call you a name this
+morning?"
+
+The Jewish girl looked at Sam and laughed bitterly.
+
+"Rather; she called me a loud-mouthed street walker."
+
+They continued their walk along the street, across the railroad track
+and a bridge, and into a quiet residence street. Carriages stood at
+the curb before the houses, and pointing to these and to the well-kept
+houses Sam said, "Men have bought these things for their women."
+
+A shadow fell across the girl's face.
+
+"I suppose all of us want what these women have," she answered. "We do
+not really want to fight and to stand on our own feet, not when we know
+the world. What a woman really wants is a man," she added shortly.
+
+Sam began talking and told her of a plan that had come into his mind.
+He had remembered how Jack Prince and Morrison used to talk about the
+appeal of the direct personal letter and how effectively it was used by
+mail order houses.
+
+"We will have a mail order strike here," he said and went on to lay
+before her the details of his plan. He proposed that she, Frank, and
+some others of the striking girls, should go about town getting the
+names and the mail addresses of the girl strikebreakers.
+
+"Get also the names of the keepers of the boarding houses at which
+these girls live and the names of the men and women who live in the
+same houses," he suggested. "Then you get the striking girls and women
+together and have them tell me their stories. We will write letters day
+after day to the girl strikebreakers, to the women who keep the boarding
+houses, and to the people who live in the houses and sit at table with
+them. We won't call names. We will tell the story of what being beaten
+in this fight means to the women in your union, tell it simply and
+truthfully as you told it to me this morning."
+
+"It will cost such a lot," said the Jewish girl, shaking her head.
+
+Sam took a roll of bills from his pocket and showed it to her.
+
+"I will pay," he said.
+
+"Why?" she asked, looking at him sharply.
+
+"Because I am a man wanting work just as you want work," he replied, and
+then went on hurriedly, "It is a long story. I am a rich man wandering
+about the world seeking Truth. I will not want that known. Take me for
+granted. You won't be sorry."
+
+Within an hour he had engaged a large room, paying a month's rent in
+advance, and into the room chairs and table and typewriters had
+been brought. He put an advertisement in the evening paper for girl
+stenographers, and a printer, hurried by a promise of extra pay, ran out
+for him several thousand letter heads across the top of which in bold,
+black type ran the words, "The Girl Strikers."
+
+That night Sam held, in the room he had engaged, a meeting of the girl
+strikers, explaining to them his plan and offering to pay all expenses
+of the fight he proposed to make for them. They clapped their hands and
+shouted approvingly, and Sam began laying out his campaign.
+
+One of the girls he told off to stand in front of the factory morning
+and evening.
+
+"I will have other help for you there," he said. "Before you go home
+to-night there will be a printer here with a bundle of pamphlets I am
+having printed for you."
+
+Advised by the soft-eyed Jewish girl, he told off others to get
+additional names for the mailing list he wanted, getting many important
+ones from girls in the room. Six of the girls he asked to come in the
+morning to help him with addressing and mailing letters. The Jewish girl
+he told to take charge of the girls at work in the room--on the morrow
+to become also an office--and to superintend getting the names.
+
+Frank rose at the back of the room.
+
+"Who are you anyway?" he asked.
+
+"A man with money and the ability to win this strike," Sam told him.
+
+"What are you doing it for?" demanded Frank.
+
+The Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
+
+"Because he believes in these women and wants to help," she explained.
+
+"Rot," said Frank, going out at the door.
+
+It was snowing when the meeting ended, and Sam and the Jewish girl
+finished their talk in the hallway leading to her room.
+
+"I don't know what Harrigan, the union leader from Pittsburgh, will
+say to this," she told him. "He appointed Frank to lead and direct the
+strike here. He doesn't like interference and he may not like your plan.
+But we working women need men, men like you who can plan and do things.
+There are too many men living on us. We need men who will work for all
+of us as the men work for the women in the carriages and automobiles."
+She laughed and put out a hand to him. "See what you have got yourself
+into? I want you to be a husband to our entire union."
+
+The next morning four girl stenographers went to work in Sam's strike
+headquarters, and he wrote his first strike letter, a letter telling
+the story of a striking girl named Hadaway, whose young brother was sick
+with tuberculosis. Sam did not put any flourishes in the letter; he
+felt that he did not need to. He thought that with twenty or thirty such
+letters, each telling briefly and truthfully the story of one of the
+striking girls, he should be able to show one American town how its
+other half lived. He gave the letter to the four girl stenographers with
+the mailing list he already had and started them writing it to each of
+the names.
+
+At eight o'clock a man came in to install a telephone and girl strikers
+began bringing in new names for the mailing list. At nine o'clock three
+more stenographers appeared and were put to work, and girls who had been
+in began sending more names over the 'phone. The Jewish girl walked up
+and down, giving orders, making suggestions. From time to time she ran
+to Sam's desk and suggested other sources of names for the mailing list.
+Sam thought that if the other working girls were timid and embarrassed
+before him this one was not. She was like a general on the field of
+battle. Her soft brown eyes glowed, her mind worked rapidly, and her
+voice had a ring in it. At her suggestion Sam gave the girls at the
+typewriters lists bearing the names of town officials, bankers and
+prominent business men, and the wives of all these, also presidents of
+various women's clubs, society women, and charitable organizations. She
+called reporters from the town's two daily papers and had them interview
+Sam, and at her suggestion he gave them copies of the Hadaway girl
+letter to print.
+
+"Print it," he said, "and if you cannot use it as news, make it an
+advertisement and bring the bill to me."
+
+At eleven o'clock Frank came into the room bringing a tall Irishman,
+with sunken cheeks, black, unclean teeth, and an overcoat too small for
+him. Leaving him standing by the door, Frank walked across the room to
+Sam.
+
+"Come to lunch with us," he said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder
+toward the tall Irishman. "I picked him up," he said. "Best brain that's
+been in town for years. He's a wonder. Used to be a Catholic priest.
+He doesn't believe in God or love or anything. Come on out and hear him
+talk. He's great."
+
+Sam shook his head.
+
+"I am too busy. There is work to be done here. We are going to win this
+strike."
+
+Frank looked at him doubtfully and then about the room at the busy
+girls.
+
+"I don't know what Harrigan will think of all this," he said. "He
+doesn't like interferences. I never do anything without writing him.
+I wrote and told him what you were doing here. I had to, you know. I'm
+responsible to headquarters."
+
+In the afternoon the Hebrew owner of the shirtwaist factory came in to
+strike headquarters and, walking through the room took off his hat and
+sat down by Sam's desk.
+
+"What do you want here?" he asked. "The newspaper boys told me of what
+you had planned to do. What's your game?"
+
+"I want to whip you," Sam answered quietly, "to whip you good. You might
+as well get into line. You are going to lose this strike."
+
+"I'm only one," said the Hebrew. "There is an association of us
+manufacturers of shirtwaists. We are all in this. We all have a strike
+on our hands. What will you gain if you do beat me here? I'm only a
+little fellow after all."
+
+Sam laughed and picking up his pen began writing.
+
+"You are unlucky," he said. "I just happened to take hold here. When I
+have you beaten I will go on and beat the others. There is more money
+back of me than back of you all, and I am going to beat every one of
+you."
+
+The next morning a crowd stood before the stairway leading to the
+factory when the strikebreaking girls came to work. The letters and
+the newspaper interview had been effective and more than half the
+strikebreakers did not appear. The others hurried along the street and
+turned in at the stairway without looking at the crowd. The girl,
+told off by Sam, stood on the sidewalk passing out pamphlets to the
+strikebreakers. The pamphlets were headed, "The Story of Ten Girls," and
+told briefly and pointedly the stories of ten striking girls and what
+the loss of the strike meant to them and to their families.
+
+After a while there drove up two carriages and a large automobile, and
+out of the automobile climbed a well-dressed woman who took a bundle of
+the pamphlets from the girl picket and began passing them about among
+the people. Two policemen who stood in front of the crowd took off their
+helmets and accompanied her. The crowd cheered. Frank came hurrying
+across the street to where Sam stood in front of the barber shop and
+slapped him on the back.
+
+"You're a wonder," he said.
+
+Sam hurried back to the room and prepared the second letter for the
+mailing list. Two more stenographers had come to work. He had to send
+out for more machines. A reporter for the town's evening paper ran up
+the stairway.
+
+"Who are you?" he asked. "The town wants to know."
+
+From his pocket he took a telegram from a Pittsburgh daily.
+
+"What about mail-order strike plan? Give name and story new strike
+leader there."
+
+At ten o'clock Frank returned.
+
+"There's a wire from Harrigan," he said. "He's coming here. He wants a
+mass meeting of the girls for to-night. I've got to get them together.
+We'll meet here in this room."
+
+In the room the work went on. The list of names for the mailing had
+doubled. The picket at the shirtwaist factory reported that three more
+of the strikebreakers had left the plant. The Jewish girl was excited.
+She went hurrying about the room, her eyes glowing.
+
+"It's great," she said. "The plan is working. The whole town is aroused
+and for us. We'll win in another twenty-four hours."
+
+And then at seven o'clock that night Harrigan came into the room where
+Sam sat with the assembled girls, bolting the door behind him. He was a
+short, strongly built man with blue eyes and red hair. He walked about
+the room in silence, followed by Frank. Suddenly he stopped and, picking
+up one of the typewriting machines rented by Sam for the letter writing,
+raised it above his head and sent it smashing to the floor.
+
+"A hell of a strike leader," he roared. "Look at this. Scab machines!
+
+"Scab stenographers!" he said through his teeth. "Scab printing! Scab
+everything!"
+
+Picking up a bundle of the letterheads, he tore them across, and walking
+to the front of the room, shook his fist before Sam's face.
+
+"Scab leader!" he shouted, turning and facing the girls.
+
+The soft-eyed Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
+
+"He's winning for us," she said.
+
+Harrigan walked toward her threateningly.
+
+"Better lose than win a scab victory," he bellowed.
+
+"Who are you anyway? What grafter sent you here?" he demanded, turning
+to Sam.
+
+He launched into a speech. "I have been watching this fellow, I know
+him. He has a scheme to break down the union and is being paid by the
+capitalists."
+
+Sam waited to hear no more. Getting up he pulled on his canvas jacket
+and started for the door. He saw that already he had involved himself
+in a dozen violations of the unionist code and the idea of trying to
+convince Harrigan of his disinterestedness did not occur to him.
+
+"Do not mind me," he said, "I am going."
+
+He walked between the rows of frightened, white-faced girls and unbolted
+the door, the Jewish girl following. At the head of the stairway leading
+to the street he stopped and pointed back into the room.
+
+"Go back," he said, handing her a roll of bills. "Carry on the work
+if you can. Get other machines and new printing. I will help you in
+secret."
+
+Turning he ran down the stairs, hurried through the curious crowd
+standing at the foot, and walked rapidly along in front of the lighted
+stores. A cold rain, half snow, was falling. Beside him walked a young
+man with a brown pointed beard, one of the newspaper reporters who had
+interviewed him the day before.
+
+"Did Harrigan trim you?" asked the young man, and then added, laughing,
+"He told us he intended to throw you down stairs."
+
+Sam walked on in silence, filled with wrath. He turned into a side
+street and stopped when his companion put a hand upon his arm.
+
+"This is our dump," said the young man, pointing to a long low frame
+building facing the side street. "Come in and let us have your story. It
+should be a good one."
+
+Inside the newspaper office another young man sat with his head lying
+on a flat-top desk. He was clad in a strikingly flashy plaid coat, had a
+little wizened, good-natured face and seemed to have been drinking. The
+young man with the beard explained Sam's identity, taking the sleeping
+man by the shoulder and shaking him vigorously.
+
+"Wake up, Skipper! There's a good story here!" he shouted. "The union
+has thrown out the mail-order strike leader!"
+
+The Skipper got to his feet and began shaking his head.
+
+"Of course, of course, Old Top, they would throw you out. You've got
+some brains. No man with brains can lead a strike. It's against the laws
+of Nature. Something was bound to hit you. Did Roughneck come out from
+Pittsburgh?" he asked, turning to the young man of the brown beard.
+
+Then reaching above his head and taking a cap that matched his plaid
+coat from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. "Come on, Old Top. I've
+got to get a drink."
+
+The two men went through a side door and down a dark alley, going in
+at the back door of a saloon. Mud lay deep in the alley and The Skipper
+sloshed through it, splattering Sam's clothes and face. In the saloon at
+a table facing Sam, with a bottle of French wine between them, he began
+explaining.
+
+"I've a note coming due at the bank in the morning and no money to pay
+it," he said. "When I have a note coming due I always have no money and
+I always get drunk. Then next morning I pay the note. I don't know how
+I do it, but I always come out all right. It's a system--Now about this
+strike." He plunged into a discussion of the strike while men came in
+and out, laughing and drinking. At ten o'clock the proprietor locked
+the front door, drew the curtain, and coming to the back of the room sat
+down at the table with Sam and The Skipper, bringing another bottle of
+the French wine from which the two men continued drinking.
+
+"That man from Pittsburgh busted up your place, eh?" he said, turning
+to Sam. "A man came in here to-night and told me. He sent for the
+typewriter people and made them take away the machines."
+
+When they were ready to leave, Sam took money from his pocket and
+offered to pay for the bottle of French wine ordered by The Skipper, who
+arose and stood unsteadily on his feet.
+
+"Do you mean to insult me?" he demanded indignantly, throwing a
+twenty-dollar bill on the table. The proprietor gave him back only
+fourteen dollars.
+
+"I might as well wipe off the slate while you're flush," he observed,
+winking at Sam.
+
+The Skipper sat down again, taking a pencil and pad of paper from his
+pocket, and throwing them on the table.
+
+"I want an editorial on the strike for the Old Rag," he said to Sam. "Do
+one for me. Do something strong. Get a punch into it. I want to talk to
+my friend here."
+
+Putting the pad of paper on the table Sam began writing his newspaper
+editorial. His head seemed wonderfully clear, his command of words
+unusually good. He called the attention of the public to the situation,
+the struggles of the striking girls and the intelligent fight they had
+been making to win a just cause, following this with paragraphs pointing
+out how the effectiveness of the work done had been annulled by the
+position taken by the labour and socialist leaders.
+
+"These fellows at bottom care nothing for results," he wrote. "They are
+not thinking of the unemployed women with families to support, they are
+thinking only of themselves and their puny leadership which they fear
+is threatened. Now we shall have the usual exhibition of all the old
+things, struggle, and hatred and defeat."
+
+When he had finished The Skipper and Sam went back through the alley
+to the newspaper office. The Skipper sloshed again through the mud
+and carried in his hand a bottle of red gin. At his desk he took the
+editorial from Sam's hands and read it.
+
+"Perfect! Perfect to the thousandth part of an inch, Old Top," he said,
+pounding Sam on the shoulder. "Just what the Old Rag wanted to say about
+the strike." Then climbing upon the desk and putting the plaid coat
+under his head he went peacefully to sleep, and Sam, sitting beside the
+desk in a shaky office chair, slept also. At daybreak a black man with a
+broom in his hand woke them, and going into a long low room filled with
+presses The Skipper put his head under a water tap and came back waving
+a soiled towel and with water dripping from his hair.
+
+"Now for the day and the labours thereof," he said, grinning at Sam and
+taking a long drink out of the gin bottle.
+
+After breakfast he and Sam took up their stand in front of the barber
+shop opposite the stairway leading to the shirtwaist factory. Sam's girl
+with the pamphlets was gone as was also the soft-eyed Jewish girl, and
+in their places Frank and the Pittsburgh leader named Harrigan walked up
+and down. Again carriages and automobiles stood by the curb, and again
+a well-dressed woman got out of a machine and went toward three striking
+girls approaching along the sidewalk. The woman was met by Harrigan,
+shaking his fist and shouting, and getting back into the machine she
+drove off. From the stairway the flashily-dressed Hebrew looked at the
+crowd and laughed.
+
+"Where is the new strike leader--the mail-order strike leader?" he
+called to Frank.
+
+With the words, a working man with a dinner pail on his arm ran out of
+the crowd and knocked the Jew back into the stairway.
+
+"Punch him! Punch the dirty scab leader!" yelled Frank, dancing up and
+down on the sidewalk.
+
+Two policemen running forward began leading the workingman up the
+street, his dinner pail still clutched in one hand.
+
+"I know something," The Skipper shouted, pounding Sam on the shoulder.
+"I know who will sign that note with me. The woman Harrigan drove back
+into her machine is the richest woman in town. I will show her your
+editorial. She will think I wrote it and it will get her. You'll see."
+He ran off up the street, shouting back over his shoulder, "Come over to
+the dump, I want to see you again."
+
+Sam returned to the newspaper office and sat down waiting for The
+Skipper who, after a time, came in, took off his coat and began writing
+furiously. From time to time he took long drinks out of the bottle of
+red gin, and after silently offering it to Sam, continued reeling off
+sheet after sheet of loosely-written matter.
+
+"I got her to sign the note," he called over his shoulder to Sam. "She
+was furious at Harrigan and when I told her we were going to attack him
+and defend you she fell for it quick. I won out by following my system.
+I always get drunk and it always wins."
+
+At ten o'clock the newspaper office was in a ferment. The little man
+with the brown pointed beard, and another, kept running to The Skipper
+asking advice, laying typewritten sheets before him, talking as he
+wrote.
+
+"Give me a lead. I want one more front page lead," The Skipper kept
+bawling at them, working like mad.
+
+At ten thirty the door opened and Harrigan, accompanied by Frank, came
+in. Seeing Sam they stopped, looking at him uncertainly, and at the man
+at work at the desk.
+
+"Well, speak up. This is no ladies' reception room. What do you fellows
+want?" snapped The Skipper, glaring at them.
+
+Frank, coming forward, laid a typewritten sheet on the desk, which the
+newspaper man read hurriedly.
+
+"Will you use it?" asked Frank.
+
+The Skipper laughed.
+
+"Wouldn't change a word of it," he shouted. "Sure I'll use it. It's what
+I wanted to make my point. You fellows watch me."
+
+Frank and Harrigan went out and The Skipper, rushing to the door, began
+yelling into the room beyond.
+
+"Hey, you Shorty and Tom, I've got that last lead."
+
+Coming back to his desk he began writing again, grinning as he worked.
+To Sam he handed the typewritten sheet prepared by Frank.
+
+"Dastardly attempt to win the cause of the working girls by dirty scab
+leaders and butter-fingered capitalist class," it began, and after
+this followed a wild jumble of words, words without meaning, sentences
+without point in which Sam was called a mealy-mouthed mail-order musser
+and The Skipper was mentioned incidentally as a pusillanimous ink
+slinger.
+
+"I'll run the stuff and comment on it," declared The Skipper, handing
+Sam what he had written. It was an editorial inviting the public to
+read the article prepared for publication by the strike leaders and
+sympathising with the striking girls that their cause had to be lost
+because of the incompetence and lack of intelligence of their leaders.
+
+"Hurrah for Roughhouse, the brave man who leads working girls to defeat
+in order that he may retain leadership and drive intelligent effort out
+of the cause of labour," wrote The Skipper.
+
+Sam looked at the sheets and out of the window where a snow storm
+raged. It seemed to him that a crime was being done and he was sick and
+disgusted at his own inability to stop it. The Skipper lighted a short
+black pipe and took his cap from a nail on the wall.
+
+"I'm the smoothest little newspaper thing in town and some financier as
+well," he declared. "Let's go have a drink."
+
+After the drink Sam walked through the town toward the country. At the
+edge of town where the houses became scattered and the road started to
+drop away into a deep valley some one helloed behind him. Turning, he
+saw the soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.
+
+"Where are you going?" he asked, stopping to lean against a board fence,
+the snow falling upon his face.
+
+"I'm going with you," said the girl. "You're the best and the strongest
+man I've ever seen and I'm not going to let you get away. If you've got
+a wife it don't matter. She isn't what she should be or you wouldn't be
+walking about the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you're crazy,
+but I know better. I am going with you and I'm going to help you find
+what you want."
+
+Sam wondered. She took a roll of bills from a pocket in her dress and
+gave it to him.
+
+"I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars," she said.
+
+They stood looking at each other. She put out a hand and laid it on his
+arm. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with eager light looked into his.
+Her round breasts rose and fell.
+
+"Anywhere you say. I'll be your servant if you ask it of me."
+
+A wave of hot desire ran through Sam followed by a quick reaction. He
+thought of his months of weary seeking and his universal failure.
+
+"You are going back to town if I have to drive you there with stones,"
+he told her, and turning ran down the valley leaving her standing by the
+board fence, her head buried in her arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in
+Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying
+or loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed
+to be a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women
+who met at the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away
+together. Sam found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings.
+In the year since he had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had
+grown more and more reflective. Little things--a smile on the lips of
+an ill-clad old man mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the
+flutter of a child's hand from the doorway of a farmhouse--had furnished
+him food for hours of thought. Now he watched with interest the little
+incidents; the nods, the hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances
+around of the men and women who met for a moment at the corner. On the
+sidewalk near his doorway several middle-aged men, evidently from a
+large hotel around the corner, were eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry,
+furtive eyes the women in the crowd.
+
+A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. "Waiting for
+some one?" she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with
+the harried, uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the
+middle-aged men upon the sidewalk.
+
+"What are you doing here with your husband at work?" he ventured.
+
+She looked startled and then laughed.
+
+"Why don't you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?"
+she demanded, adding, "I don't know who you are, but whoever you are I
+want to tell you that I've quit my husband."
+
+"Why?" asked Sam.
+
+She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.
+
+"I guess you're bluffing," she said. "I don't believe you know Alf at
+all. And I'm glad you don't. I've quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just
+the same, if he saw me out here hustling."
+
+Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a
+lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and
+beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered,
+"Hello, Sport!"
+
+Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in
+the eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of
+the lives of great numbers of people in the cities--of the men and
+women on the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe
+marriage had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together
+in the theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of
+all modern city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching
+hunger stood in the way of men's getting hold of life and living it
+earnestly and purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all
+men and women wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in
+Caxton he was more than once startled by the flashes of brutality and
+coarseness in the speech and actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now
+as he walked in the streets of the city he thought that he had got past
+being startled. "It is a quality of our lives," he decided. "American
+men and women have not learned to be clean and noble and natural, like
+their forests and their wide, clean plains."
+
+He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other
+cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his
+lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.
+
+"We are no finer nor cleaner than these," he said, "and we sprang from
+the big clean new land through which I have been walking all these
+months. Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly
+expressed hunger in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will
+it never shrive itself and understand itself, and turn fiercely and
+energetically toward the building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?"
+
+"It won't unless you help," came the answer from some hidden part of
+him.
+
+Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and
+he wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of
+vice, and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in
+futile attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward
+human betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or
+stopping the playing of baseball on Sunday.
+
+As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously
+in league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as
+something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague
+charm.
+
+"For me," he reflected, "there have been no Francois Villons or Sapphos
+in the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only
+heart-breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces
+and torn, greasy finery."
+
+He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how
+he, as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly's
+suggestion and had been helped by him--helped and frightened and made
+to see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of
+a second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed
+across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of "Nana's Brother,"
+saying with a smirk, "That's some sporty stuff." And he wondered what he
+should have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the
+bookseller's comment was intended to arouse.
+
+In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in
+which he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to
+sleep sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman's saloon
+in Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting
+that it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.
+
+"Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth," he thought, coming to
+a street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a
+dingy poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. "It gets
+into all modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears
+lewd stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men
+from the cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the
+stove in village stores."
+
+Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things
+were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and
+daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of
+Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could
+but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the
+glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in
+that city and in every city he had known.
+
+Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far
+gone in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam's mind leaped back to
+those first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man
+he had left behind him in Caxton.
+
+"You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than
+that painter's son of Caxton," he reminded himself, "and yet he embraced
+vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading
+talk and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part
+with able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was
+too rare a thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the
+lips-that-touch-liquor-shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was
+reserved for the lips that did not invite."
+
+He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business
+men of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of
+himself, quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and
+to shout the innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in
+Chicago barrooms. Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one
+to keep himself to himself. But on these carouses he let himself go,
+and got a reputation for daring audacity by slapping men on the back and
+singing songs with them. A glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for
+a time he had really believed there was such a thing as high flying vice
+that glistens in the sun.
+
+Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city's
+streets, he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.
+
+He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted
+questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained
+unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they
+walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at
+the windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams,
+and cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the
+place; men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their
+faces; sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were
+locked out.
+
+He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from
+farms and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men
+believers in the golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and
+women of the town laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked
+in that way. He also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible
+mistress that lurked at the bottom of men's tales of the submerged
+world. He wanted his golden girl. He was like the naive German lad in
+the South Water Street warehouses who had once said to him--he was a
+frugal soul--"I would like to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and
+modest and who will be my mistress and not charge anything."
+
+Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He
+had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and
+now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not
+be made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks
+of vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no
+housecleaning days in the tenderloin?
+
+During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this
+matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the
+scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary
+decent social life could not go on without it. Often during the past
+year Sam had thought of the man's talk and his brain had reeled before
+the thought. In towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little
+girls come laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered
+which of them would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in
+his hour of depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his
+dinner table might be made to walk with him and to share with him his
+thoughts.
+
+Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam
+continued his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and
+soothed his mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought
+with gratitude that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of
+faces rolling up to him under the lights filled him with peace. "There
+is so much of life," he thought, "it must come to some end."
+
+Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the
+faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose,
+the faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on
+which the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers
+ached to get a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas
+in enduring pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able
+to say, "Here are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves
+and for your children."
+
+In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little
+cigar counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly
+at a woman clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her
+machine to wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.
+
+Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that
+had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one
+woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little
+Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness--her quick,
+deft fingers and her muscular little arms. "Another such as she," he
+muttered, "has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman;
+a hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the
+warm furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy--a shot, and
+red blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws
+in the air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her
+white limbs, her cheeks, her hair."
+
+For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like
+himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit
+of the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could
+achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the
+power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces
+in the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers
+the story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.
+
+In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer's talk, and in Chicago and
+New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of
+the artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the
+long street he thought that he did understand.
+
+Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an
+affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her
+face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message
+of the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong,
+bullet-like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold.
+He remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love
+passage with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How
+eagerly both man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place.
+How her strong hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor
+by the office building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so
+free from the marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of
+a cattle raiser had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the
+beauty of that face.
+
+On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman,
+standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called
+softly, and turning he went to her.
+
+"I am not a customer," he said, looking at her thin face and bony
+hands, "but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am
+getting hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to
+me so that I won't get to thinking."
+
+"You're a queer bird," said the woman, taking his arm. "What have you
+done that you don't want to think?"
+
+Sam said nothing.
+
+"There's a place over there," she said, pointing to the lighted front of
+a cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.
+
+Sam kept on walking.
+
+"If you do not mind," he said, "I will pick the place. I want to buy
+a good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good
+cook in the kitchen."
+
+They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he
+waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited
+he went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When
+she returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam
+thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work
+on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still
+waiting.
+
+"I thought maybe it was a stall," she said.
+
+They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with
+clean washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private
+dining-rooms. Sam had been there several times during the month, and the
+food had been well cooked.
+
+They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself,
+and she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not
+studying her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his
+loneliness, and because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out
+from the darkness by the church door, had made an appeal.
+
+She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not
+defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy's.
+Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had
+the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother's hands. Now that she
+sat before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his
+mother.
+
+After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman
+of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.
+
+"Are you going to take me anywhere after this--after we leave here?" she
+said.
+
+"I am going to take you to the door of your room, that's all."
+
+"I'm glad," she said; "it's a long time since I've had an evening like
+this. It makes me feel clean."
+
+For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home
+town in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came
+into his mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she
+in turn told of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about
+hearing which made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be
+repeated to her and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire,
+letting her talk. Her father had been a captain of a small steamboat
+plying up and down Long Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd
+woman and a good housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village
+and had a garden back of their house. The captain had not married until
+he was forty-five and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother
+dying a year later.
+
+The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy
+and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in
+the garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with
+thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had
+married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the
+house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her
+life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills
+and the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature,
+undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of
+her husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by
+various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a
+time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that
+her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the
+town.
+
+"There wasn't any use wasting words when I found he didn't care for me
+or for the baby and wouldn't support us, so I left him," she said in a
+level, businesslike way.
+
+When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and
+had taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her
+savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to
+work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with
+her hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with
+a small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine
+man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a
+gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing
+to be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was
+seven dollars a week.
+
+"And so," she said, "I began going on the street. I knew no one and
+there was nothing else to do. I couldn't do that in the town where the
+boy lived, so I came away. I've gone from city to city, working mostly
+for patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in
+the streets. I'm not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many
+of them care about me. I don't like to have them touch me with their
+hands. I can't drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to
+be left alone. Perhaps I shouldn't have married. Not that I minded my
+husband. We got along very well until I had to stop giving him money.
+When I found where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to
+have at least a thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened
+to me. When I found there wasn't anything to do but just go on the
+streets, I went. I tried doing other work, but hadn't the strength, and
+when it came to the test I cared more about the boy than I did about
+myself--any woman would. I thought he was of more importance than what I
+wanted.
+
+"It hasn't been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with
+me I walk along the street praying that I won't shudder and draw away
+when he touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away
+and I won't get any money.
+
+"And then they talk and lie about themselves. I've had them try to work
+off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make
+love to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That's the
+hard part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies
+over and over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to
+these others lying to me."
+
+She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and
+sat looking into the fire.
+
+"My mother," she began again, "didn't always wear a clean dress. She
+couldn't. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor
+or out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was
+dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be
+that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I'm losing it all.
+All evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear
+isn't clean. Most of the time I don't care. Being clean doesn't go with
+what I am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men
+will stop when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done
+well I don't go on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean
+up my room and bathe myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the
+basement at night. I don't seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am
+on the streets."
+
+The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German
+waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He
+stopped by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From
+another room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing
+voices. The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam
+felt that he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to
+him he should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly.
+She had a quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.
+
+As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.
+
+"I wouldn't mind about you," she said, looking at him frankly.
+
+Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. "It's been a good evening," he
+said, "we'll go through with it as it stands."
+
+"Thanks for that," she said, "and there is something else I want to tell
+you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don't want to
+go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on
+gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders."
+
+As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic
+breathing as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped
+and waved her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish.
+Sam had a feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting
+citizens in the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the
+long deserted street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton.
+Like Mike, he lifted up his voice in the night.
+
+"Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth
+hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,
+and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and
+hurt and destroy?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out
+of his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia,
+looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly
+lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his
+bill at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely
+abandoned the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about
+the country and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in
+villages, and had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his
+income.
+
+He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the
+wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood.
+The spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain
+spring mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in
+his experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran
+through the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when
+the call of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind,
+filling him with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in
+his brain, yet at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was,
+after all, a man of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water
+Street and LaSalle Street had all left their marks on him, and so,
+throwing his canvas jacket into a corner of the room in the West
+Virginia hotel, he returned to the haunts of his kind.
+
+In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and
+into the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named
+Jackson.
+
+Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he
+had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again
+the quiet elegance of the surroundings.
+
+"Hello, Moneymaker," said Jackson, heartily. "Heard you had gone to a
+nunnery."
+
+Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson's eyes open
+with astonishment.
+
+"You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man's spending month after
+month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then
+suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this," he
+observed.
+
+Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.
+
+"How little you know me," he said. "I would live my life in the open but
+that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New
+York run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will
+you go back to Morrison and Prince and money making?"
+
+Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before
+him. How satisfied and happy he looked.
+
+"I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely," he said.
+
+"They are a rotten crew," Jackson assured him, "and I am taking a night
+train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over."
+
+On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old
+man who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.
+
+"I am going to sail from Seattle," he said, "and go everywhere and hunt
+everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind
+of thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there
+until I die."
+
+"I will go with you," said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at
+Detroit and continued westward with his new acquaintance.
+
+For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous,
+big-hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early
+investment in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to
+his lusty, primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion
+hunts, elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of
+Africa Sam took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the
+beach smoking black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over
+and that Sam was a fool to go.
+
+After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life
+of a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He
+went on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern
+lakes, canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat
+about clubs and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and
+women of that world.
+
+Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on
+the Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw
+her. For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure
+as she walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had
+come to mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come
+face to face with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train
+to the city feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed
+after the years.
+
+In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily
+and almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from
+his hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting
+with Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant,
+got into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode
+about town laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to
+passers-by in the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place
+at the edge of town, where the party spent hours around a long table,
+drinking, and singing songs.
+
+One of the girls sat on Sam's lap and put an arm about his neck.
+
+"Give me some money, rich man," she said.
+
+Sam looked at her closely.
+
+"Who are you?" he asked.
+
+She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that
+she had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.
+
+"I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes," she said frankly,
+"but if Tim saw me here he would kill me."
+
+Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a
+taxicab drove back to his hotel.
+
+After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in
+a kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which
+he did not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited,
+planned a return to business which he did not execute, and month after
+month continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon
+and begin drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry
+and talkative, calling men by their first names, slapping chance
+acquaintances on the back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young
+men intent upon gain. In the early summer he got in with a party of
+young men from New York and with them spent months in sheer idle waste
+of time. Together they drove high-powered automobiles on long trips,
+drank, quarrelled, and went on board a yacht to carouse, alone or with
+women. At times Sam would leave his companions and spend days riding
+through the country on fast trains, sitting for hours in silence looking
+out of the window at the passing country and wondering at his endurance
+of the life he led. For some months he carried with him a young man whom
+he called a secretary and paid a large salary for his ability to tell
+stories and sing clever songs, only to discharge him suddenly for
+telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of another tale told by the
+stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed's hotel in the Illinois
+town.
+
+From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings,
+Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless
+way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right
+way of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He
+lost his native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for
+hours by little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and
+talking nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew
+habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and
+more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about
+hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to
+sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor's head.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train
+intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had
+heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he
+thought he would do something for them.
+
+"I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them
+my money," he thought. "Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by
+setting them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear."
+
+At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see
+an attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days
+stayed about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had
+picked up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and
+gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men
+and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of
+enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that
+shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.
+
+In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he
+came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the
+river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.
+
+"I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the
+river," he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. "Take
+us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it
+costs."
+
+It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he
+went among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to
+continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him
+on the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.
+
+"Sing louder," he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his
+companions.
+
+A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to
+perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the
+deck before the shouting crowd.
+
+"Now dance!" he growled, "or I will throw you into the river."
+
+The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked
+at him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along
+the deck or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take
+effect, a queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction
+came to him and he raised his hand for silence.
+
+"I want to see a woman who is a mother," he shouted. "I want to see a
+woman who has borne children."
+
+A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the
+group gathered about the dancer.
+
+"I have borne children--three of them," she said, laughing up into his
+face. "I can bear more of them."
+
+Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair
+on the deck. The crowd laughed.
+
+"Belle is after his roll," whispered a short, fat man to his companion,
+a tall woman with blue eyes.
+
+As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing
+songs, went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman
+beside Sam pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.
+
+"My children are there. They are getting supper now," she said.
+
+She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting
+along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang
+a song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam's companion kept
+time with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain
+stood looking up the river.
+
+"Turn back," he said, "I am tired of this crew."
+
+On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside
+Sam.
+
+"We will go to my house," she said quietly, "just you and me. I will
+show you the kids."
+
+Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the
+distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had
+grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small
+groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell
+Sam her story.
+
+She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.
+
+"I drove him crazy," she said, laughing quietly. "He wanted me to stay
+at home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me
+down town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn't come he
+would go away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn't a
+man. He would do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and
+left the kids on my hands."
+
+In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in
+an open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place,
+eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but
+grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.
+
+"We will go to my house. I want to have you alone," said the woman.
+
+They drove through street after street of workingmen's houses, where
+children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their
+bare legs flashing in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after
+them, holding to the back of the carriage.
+
+The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up
+and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of
+the running boys.
+
+"Run, you little devils," she cried.
+
+They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under
+the lights.
+
+"Give me a silver dollar," she said, turning to Sam, and when he had
+given it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp.
+The two boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her.
+
+Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps,
+striking Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black
+crawling thing, alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she
+crept forward and dropped it down the neck of the driver.
+
+In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam's
+head was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran
+back over the years he had passed since breaking his word to Sue, and a
+scorn of all effort burned in him.
+
+"It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth," he thought. "He comes to
+a fine end in life."
+
+On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the
+air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night
+there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the
+carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood
+climbed through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half
+hope awoke in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing,
+intoxicated woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot
+through him. He began thinking of what she had said before the laughing
+crowd on the steamer.
+
+"I have borne three children and can bear more."
+
+His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain,
+and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him.
+He thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of
+life unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command
+and direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company.
+
+"Else why am I here?" he muttered, looking away from the vacant,
+laughing face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver
+on the seat in front. "Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why
+went I about seeking Truth?"
+
+His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles
+and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her
+black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling
+beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her
+hand.
+
+"Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have
+been," he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he
+thought, was being tossed about by life.
+
+Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped.
+Through the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before
+a bar drinking foaming glasses of beer, the hanging lamps above their
+heads throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell
+came out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and
+shouted. "O Will, come out here."
+
+A man clad in a long white apron and with his shirt sleeves rolled to
+his elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had
+started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place.
+
+"Will you run it?" he asked.
+
+"Sure," she said. "The kids can take care of themselves."
+
+At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got
+out of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk
+skirting a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a
+tangled mass of bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and
+in the distance the grey body of the river showed faint and far away.
+The undergrowth was so thick that, looking down, one saw only the
+tops of the growth, with here and there a grey outcrop of rocks that
+glistened in the moonlight.
+
+Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the
+houses facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily
+on Sam's arm, her feet groping for the steps. They passed through a door
+and into a long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the
+room went up to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the
+end one looked into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor
+and about a table, under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three
+children. Sam looked at them closely. His head reeled and he clutched at
+the knob of the door. A boy of perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his
+face and on the backs of his hands and with reddish-brown hair and brown
+eyes, was reading aloud. Beside him a younger boy with black hair and
+black eyes, and with his knees doubled up on the chair in front of him
+so that his chin rested on them, sat listening. A tiny girl, pale and
+with yellow hair and dark circles under her eyes, slept in another
+chair, her head hanging uncomfortably to one side. She was, one would
+have said, seven, the black-haired boy ten.
+
+The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman;
+the sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired
+boy straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder.
+
+"Hello, Mother," he said heartily.
+
+The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the
+dining-room and pulled aside the curtains.
+
+"Come here, Joe," she said.
+
+The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside,
+supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he passed
+she struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him
+reeling into the dining-room.
+
+"Now you, Tom," she called to the black-haired boy. "I told you kids to
+wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten
+and nothing done and you two reading books again."
+
+The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam
+walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she
+winced and twisted in his grasp.
+
+"You come with me," he said.
+
+He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned
+heavily on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face.
+
+At the top of the stairway he stopped.
+
+"We go in here," she said, pointing to a door.
+
+He took her into the room. "You get to sleep," he said, and going out
+closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.
+
+Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off
+the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by
+the table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.
+
+Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back
+at him self-consciously.
+
+"Which of you two puts Mary to bed?" he asked, and then, without waiting
+for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. "Let Tom do it," he
+said. "I will help you here."
+
+Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going
+busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him
+dry wiping towels. Sam's coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.
+
+The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within
+Sam's breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though
+the lash of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old
+memories began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood,
+his mother at work among other people's soiled clothes, his father Windy
+coming home drunk, and the chill in his mother's heart and in his own.
+There was something men and women owed to childhood, not because it
+was childhood but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any
+question of fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.
+
+In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house
+there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam's spirit. The boy Joe
+went quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves.
+Somewhere on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The
+backs of the hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and
+competent the hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled,
+unshaken by life. Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He
+had always wanted quickness and firmness within his own body, the health
+of the body that is a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an
+American and down deep within himself was the moral fervor that is
+American and that had become so strangely perverted in himself and
+others. As so often happened with him, when he was deeply stirred, an
+army of vagrant thoughts ran through his head. The thoughts had taken
+the place of the perpetual scheming and planning of his days as a man of
+affairs, but as yet all his thinking had brought him to nothing and had
+only left him more shaken and uncertain then ever.
+
+The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to
+escape the shy silent presence of the boy. "Has life quite gone from me?
+Am I but a dead thing walking about?" he asked himself. The presence of
+the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown
+tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad.
+Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?
+
+The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two
+boys said good night to the strange man in their mother's house. Joe,
+the bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook
+it solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.
+
+"I'll be around here to-morrow I think," Sam said huskily.
+
+The boys were gone, into the silence of the house, and Sam walked up and
+down in the little room. He was restless as though about to start on a
+new journey and half unconsciously began running his hands over his body
+wishing it strong and hard as when he tramped the road. As on the day
+when he had walked out of the Chicago Club bound on his hunt for
+Truth, he let his mind go so that it played freely over his past life,
+reviewing and analysing.
+
+For hours he sat on the porch or walked up and down in the room where
+the lamp still burned brightly. Again the smoke from his pipe tasted
+good on his tongue and all the night air had a sweetness that brought
+back to him the walk beside the bridle path in Jackson Park when Sue had
+given him herself, and with herself a new impulse in life.
+
+It was two o'clock when he lay down upon a couch in the living-room and
+blew out the light. He did not undress, but threw his shoes on the floor
+and lay looking at a wide path of moonlight that came through the open
+door. In the darkness it seemed that his mind worked more rapidly and
+that the events and motives of his restless years went streaming past
+like living things upon the floor.
+
+Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy
+with sleep, ran through the upper part of the house.
+
+"Mother! O Mother!" called the sleepy voice, and Sam thought he could
+hear the little body moving restlessly in bed.
+
+Silence followed. He sat upon the edge of the couch, waiting. It seemed
+to him that he was coming to something; that his brain that had for
+hours been working more and more rapidly was about to produce the thing
+for which he waited. He felt as he had felt that night as he waited in
+the corridor of the hospital.
+
+In the morning the three children came down the stairs and finished
+dressing in the long room, the little girl coming last, carrying her
+shoes and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A
+cool morning wind blew up from the river and through the open screened
+doors as he and Joe cooked breakfast, and later as the four of them
+sat at the table Sam tried to talk but did not make much progress. His
+tongue was heavy and the children seemed looking at him with strange
+questioning eyes. "Why are you here?" their eyes asked.
+
+For a week Sam stayed in the city, coming daily to the house. With the
+children he talked a little, and in the evening, when the mother had
+gone away, the little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the
+porch outside and while the boys sat reading under the lamp inside she
+went to sleep in his arms. Her body was warm and the breath came softly
+and sweetly from between her lips. Sam looked down the bluffside and saw
+the country and the river far below, sweet in the moonlight. Tears came
+into his eyes. Was a new sweet purpose growing within him or were the
+tears but evidence of self pity? He wondered.
+
+One night the black-haired woman again came home far gone in drink, and
+again Sam led her up the stairs to see her fall muttering and babbling
+upon the bed. Her companion, a little flashily dressed man with a beard,
+had run off at the sight of Sam standing in the living-room under the
+lamp. The two boys, to whom he had been reading, said nothing, looking
+self-consciously at the book upon the table and occasionally out of the
+corner of their eyes at their new friend. In a few minutes they too
+went up the stairs, and as on that first night, they put out their hands
+awkwardly.
+
+Through the night Sam again sat in the darkness outside or lay awake on
+the couch. "I will make a new try, adopt a new purpose in life now," he
+said to himself.
+
+When the children had gone to school the next morning, Sam took a car
+and went into the city, going first to a bank to have a large draft
+cashed. Then he spent many busy hours going from store to store and
+buying clothes, caps, soft underwear, suit cases, dresses, night
+clothes, and books. Last of all he bought a large dressed doll. All
+these things he had sent to his room at the hotel, leaving a man there
+to pack the trunks and suit cases, and get them to the station. A large,
+motherly-looking woman, an employe of the hotel, who passed through the
+hall, offered to help with the packing.
+
+After another visit or two Sam got back upon the car and went again to
+the house. In his pockets he had several thousands of dollars in large
+bills. He had remembered the power of cash in deals he had made in the
+past.
+
+"I will see what it will do here," he thought.
+
+In the house Sam found the black-haired woman lying on a couch in the
+living-room. As he came in at the door she arose unsteadily and looked
+at him.
+
+"There's a bottle in the cupboard in the kitchen," she said. "Get me a
+drink. Why do you hang about here?"
+
+Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with
+her by putting the bottle to his lips and throwing back his head.
+
+"What was your husband like?" he asked.
+
+"Who? Jack?" she said. "Oh, he was all right. He was stuck on me. He
+stood for anything until I brought men home here. Then he got crazy and
+went away." She looked at Sam and laughed.
+
+"I didn't care much for him," she added. "He couldn't make money enough
+for a live woman."
+
+Sam began talking of the saloon she intended buying.
+
+"The children will be a bother, eh?" he said.
+
+"I have an offer for the house," she said. "I wish I didn't have the
+kids. They are a nuisance."
+
+"I have been figuring that out," Sam told her. "I know a woman in the
+East who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I
+should like to do something to help you. I might take them to her."
+
+"In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away," she laughed, and took
+another drink from the bottle.
+
+Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown
+attorney.
+
+"Get a neighbour in here to witness this," he said. "The woman will want
+things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and
+puts it on her."
+
+She looked at him suspiciously. "What's the graft? Who gets stuck for
+the fares down east?"
+
+Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a
+tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.
+
+"Sign here," he said, putting the paper before her. "Here is your
+neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent."
+
+The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at
+Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle
+lay down again on the couch.
+
+"If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed,"
+she declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but
+at the moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take
+an advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in
+life, for purpose to come into his own life.
+
+Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at
+the brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an
+automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came
+out.
+
+He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children
+accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found
+the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit
+cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an
+envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked
+up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride
+of them.
+
+At two o'clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of
+the boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York
+flyer--bound for Sue.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money,
+that he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does
+not mean much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy
+Americans than is commonly believed. Something has happened to him
+that has happened to the others also, to how many of the others? Men
+of courage, with strong bodies and quick brains, men who have come of
+a strong race, have taken up what they had thought to be the banner of
+life and carried it forward. Growing weary they have stopped in a road
+that climbs a long hill and have leaned the banner against a tree. Tight
+brains have loosened a little. Strong convictions have become weak. Old
+gods are dying.
+
+  "It is only when you are torn from your mooring and
+    drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come
+    near to you."
+
+The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with
+determination.
+
+What is inscribed on it?
+
+It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have
+believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves
+Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been
+unknown among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life
+and courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads
+had to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What
+in Europe has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the
+generations we must build now, in a lifetime.
+
+In our father's day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio,
+Kentucky, and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in
+our fathers and mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land.
+When the land was conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in
+our American souls the wolves still howl.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three
+children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws
+of failure.
+
+But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still
+there. It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New
+England roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it
+looked down at him from the stars.
+
+Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept.
+Perhaps his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it
+began then.
+
+The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was
+a house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam's
+breast there was a feeling of something alive, growing.
+
+Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in
+Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by
+raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night,
+coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children--a
+little inclined toward tears and homesickness--she was flustered and
+nervous.
+
+Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate
+to the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe
+and Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come
+out at the front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little
+frightened. Her hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam
+thought her figure almost boyish in its slenderness.
+
+With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask
+many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question
+she did ask.
+
+"Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?" she
+asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the
+children.
+
+Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a
+help.
+
+"They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep," he
+said, as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with
+him three strange children were an everyday affair.
+
+Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the
+house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought
+together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other
+and little Mary put her arms about Sam's neck and hid her face on his
+shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue's
+arms. "She will be your mother now," he said defiantly, not looking at
+Sue.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and
+very nobly by Sue.
+
+There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted
+on that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come
+into her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly
+romantic act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening,
+both Sam and the children had been installed in the house.
+
+A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions
+regarding food for the children. "They will want bread and milk, and
+beds must be found for them," she said, and then, although her mind was
+still filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam's children
+by some other woman, she took her plunge. "This is Mr. McPherson, my
+husband, and these are our three children," she announced to the puzzled
+and smiling servant.
+
+They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden.
+In the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A
+little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more.
+"Don't bring lamps, a candle will do," Sue said, and she went to stand
+near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point
+of breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive
+sense of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children
+feel at home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys.
+"There is a barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you
+everything," she said, smiling at them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue's house and a
+road that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and
+the Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In
+the feeble light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick
+branches overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into
+the darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before
+the house.
+
+He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling
+for possession of his person.
+
+There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring
+always to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way,
+trampled people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped
+forward, the man of achievement.
+
+And then there was another personality, a quite different being
+altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a
+timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or
+walked before men.
+
+What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive
+thing within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him
+out of his place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many
+times it had tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him.
+
+It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against
+it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into
+darkness.
+
+He kept whispering to himself. Perhaps now the test of his life had
+come. There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. A basis
+for love and understanding might be found with her. Later the impulse
+could be carried on and into the lives of the children he had found and
+brought to her.
+
+A vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life,
+kneeling before the intricate wonder of life, came to him, but he was
+again afraid. When he saw Sue's figure, dressed in white, a dim, pale,
+flashing thing, coming down steps toward him, he wanted to run away, to
+hide himself in the darkness.
+
+And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because
+she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human
+perplexities.
+
+He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive
+within him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her.
+"Nothing but boldness will answer now," he kept saying to himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to
+tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he
+came to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path
+and stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.
+
+Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically.
+"I have taken them and you, of course," she said, after he had stepped
+to her and had put his arm about her waist. "My life alone hasn't turned
+out to be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them
+and you, in the house there. The two years you have been gone have
+seemed like an age. What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought
+they must be your own children by some other woman, some woman you had
+found to take my place. It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two
+must be nearly fourteen."
+
+They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue's command,
+found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped
+and excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.
+
+In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue's figure
+going through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room.
+Presently she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A
+place was being prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which
+he was to live what was left of his life.
+
+With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure
+of the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped
+down over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more
+intense.
+
+Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house
+darkly seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman,
+Sue, ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives
+together. Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three
+children who must begin life as he had once done, who must listen to
+his voice, the voice of Sue and all the other voices they would hear
+speaking words in the world. They would grow up and thrust out into a
+world of people as he had done.
+
+To what end?
+
+There was an end. Sam believed that stoutly. "To shift the load to the
+shoulders of children is cowardice," he whispered to himself.
+
+An almost overpowering desire to turn and run away from the house, from
+Sue who had so generously received him and from the three new lives into
+which he had thrust himself and in which in the future he would have to
+be concerned, took hold of him. His body shook with the strength of it,
+but he stood still under the trees. "I cannot run away from life. I must
+face it. I must begin to try to understand these other lives, to love,"
+he told himself. The buried inner thing in him thrust itself up.
+
+How still the night had become. In the tree beneath which he stood a
+bird moved on some slender branch and there was a faint rustling of
+leaves. The darkness before and behind was a wall through which he
+must in some way manage to thrust himself into the light. With his hand
+before him, as though trying to push aside some dark blinding mass, he
+moved out of the grove and thus moving stumbled up the steps and into
+the house.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Windy McPherson's Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+
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diff --git a/7443.zip b/7443.zip
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #7443 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7443)
diff --git a/old/7443-h.htm.2021-01-26 b/old/7443-h.htm.2021-01-26
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Windy Mcpherson's Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
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+    .side      { float: right; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
+               border-left: dashed thin; margin-left: 0.8em; text-align: left;
+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windy McPherson's Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Windy McPherson's Son
+
+Author: Sherwood Anderson
+
+
+Release Date: February, 2005  [EBook #7443]
+This file was first posted on April 30, 2003
+Last Updated: October 31, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON ***
+
+
+
+
+Text file produced by Anne Soulard, Eric Eldred, John R. Bilderback,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      WINDY MCPHERSON&rsquo;S SON
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By Sherwood Anderson
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h4>
+      To The Living Men And Women Of My Own Middle Western Home Town<br /> This
+      Book Is Dedicated
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>WINDY MCPHERSON&rsquo;S SON</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>BOOK I</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> <b>BOOK II</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER VII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER VIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER IX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> <b>BOOK III</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> <b>BOOK IV</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      WINDY MCPHERSON&rsquo;S SON
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson,
+      a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black eyes, and an
+      amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he walked, came
+      upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping town of Caxton in
+      Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked cautiously, lifting his
+      bare feet and putting them down with extreme deliberateness on the hot,
+      dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried a bundle of newspapers. A
+      long black cigar was in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In front of the station he stopped; and Jerry Donlin, the baggage-man,
+      seeing the cigar in his hand, laughed, and slowly drew the side of his
+      face up into a laboured wink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the game to-night, Sam?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stepped to the baggage-room door, handed him the cigar, and began
+      giving directions, pointing into the baggage-room, intent and
+      business-like in the face of the Irishman&rsquo;s laughter. Then, turning, he
+      walked across the station platform to the main street of the town, his
+      eyes bent on the ends of his fingers on which he was making computations
+      with his thumb. Jerry looked after him, grinning so that his red gums made
+      a splash of colour on his bearded face. A gleam of paternal pride lit his
+      eyes and he shook his head and muttered admiringly. Then, lighting the
+      cigar, he went down the platform to where a wrapped bundle of newspapers
+      lay against the building, under the window of the telegraph office, and
+      taking it in his arm disappeared, still grinning, into the baggage-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson walked down Main Street, past the shoe store, the bakery,
+      and the candy store kept by Penny Hughes, toward a group lounging at the
+      front of Geiger&rsquo;s drug store. Before the door of the shoe store he paused
+      a moment, and taking a small note-book from his pocket ran his finger down
+      the pages, then shaking his head continued on his way, again absorbed in
+      doing sums on his fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, from among the men by the drug store, a roaring song broke the
+      evening quiet of the street, and a voice, huge and guttural, brought a
+      smile to the boy&rsquo;s lips:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;He washed the windows and he swept the floor,
+  And he polished up the handle of the big front door.
+  He polished that handle so carefullee,
+  That now he&rsquo;s the ruler of the queen&rsquo;s navee.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The singer, a short man with grotesquely wide shoulders, wore a long
+      flowing moustache, and a black coat, covered with dust, that reached to
+      his knees. He held a smoking briar pipe in his hand, and with it beat time
+      for a row of men sitting on a long stone under the store window and
+      pounding on the sidewalk with their heels to make a chorus for the song.
+      Sam&rsquo;s smile broadened into a grin as he looked at the singer, Freedom
+      Smith, a buyer of butter and eggs, and past him at John Telfer, the
+      orator, the dandy, the only man in town, except Mike McCarthy, who kept
+      his trousers creased. Among all the men of Caxton, Sam most admired John
+      Telfer and in his admiration had struck upon the town&rsquo;s high light. Telfer
+      loved good clothes and wore them with an air, and never allowed Caxton to
+      see him shabbily or indifferently dressed, laughingly declaring that it
+      was his mission in life to give tone to the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Telfer had a small income left him by his father, once a banker in
+      the town, and in his youth he had gone to New York to study art, and later
+      to Paris; but lacking ability or industry to get on had come back to
+      Caxton where he had married Eleanor Millis, a prosperous milliner. They
+      were the most successful married pair in Caxton, and after years of life
+      together they were still in love; were never indifferent to each other,
+      and never quarrelled; Telfer treated his wife with as much consideration
+      and respect as though she were a sweetheart, or a guest in his house, and
+      she, unlike most of the wives in Caxton, never ventured to question his
+      goings and comings, but left him free to live his own life in his own way
+      while she attended to the millinery business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the age of forty-five John Telfer was a tall, slender, fine looking
+      man, with black hair and a little black pointed beard, and with something
+      lazy and care-free in his every movement and impulse. Dressed in white
+      flannels, with white shoes, a jaunty cap upon his head, eyeglasses hanging
+      from a gold chain, and a cane lightly swinging from his hand, he made a
+      figure that might have passed unnoticed on the promenade before some
+      fashionable summer hotel, but that seemed a breach of the laws of nature
+      when seen on the streets of a corn-shipping town in Iowa. And Telfer was
+      aware of the extraordinary figure he cut; it was a part of his programme
+      of life. Now as Sam approached he laid a hand on Freedom Smith&rsquo;s shoulder
+      to check the song, and, with his eyes twinkling with good-humour, began
+      thrusting with his cane at the boy&rsquo;s feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will never be ruler of the queen&rsquo;s navee,&rdquo; he declared, laughing and
+      following the dancing boy about in a wide circle. &ldquo;He is a little mole
+      that works underground intent upon worms. The trick he has of tilting up
+      his nose is only his way of smelling out stray pennies. I have it from
+      Banker Walker that he brings a basket of them into the bank every day. One
+      of these days he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Circling about on the stone sidewalk and dancing to escape the flying
+      cane, Sam dodged under the arm of Valmore, a huge old blacksmith with
+      shaggy clumps of hair on the back of his hands, and sought refuge between
+      him and Freedom Smith. The blacksmith&rsquo;s hand stole out and lay upon the
+      boy&rsquo;s shoulder. Telfer, his legs spread apart and the cane hooked upon his
+      arm, began rolling a cigarette; Geiger, a yellow skinned man with fat
+      cheeks and with hands clasped over his round paunch, smoked a black cigar,
+      and as he sent each puff into the air, grunted forth his satisfaction with
+      life. He was wishing that Telfer, Freedom Smith, and Valmore, instead of
+      moving on to their nightly nest at the back of Wildman&rsquo;s grocery, would
+      come into his place for the evening. He thought he would like to have the
+      three of them there night after night discussing the doings of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quiet once more settled down upon the sleepy street. Over Sam&rsquo;s shoulder,
+      Valmore and Freedom Smith talked of the coming corn crop and the growth
+      and prosperity of the country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Times are getting better about here, but the wild things are almost
+      gone,&rdquo; said Freedom, who in the winter bought hides and pelts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The men sitting on the stone beneath the window watched with idle interest
+      Telfer&rsquo;s labours with paper and tobacco. &ldquo;Young Henry Kerns has got
+      married,&rdquo; observed one of them, striving to make talk. &ldquo;He has married a
+      girl from over Parkertown way. She gives lessons in painting&mdash;china
+      painting&mdash;kind of an artist, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An ejaculation of disgust broke from Telfer: his fingers trembled and the
+      tobacco that was to have been the foundation of his evening smoke rained
+      on the sidewalk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An artist!&rdquo; he exclaimed, his voice tense with excitement. &ldquo;Who said
+      artist? Who called her that?&rdquo; He glared fiercely about. &ldquo;Let us have an
+      end to this blatant misuse of fine old words. To say of one that he is an
+      artist is to touch the peak of praise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Throwing his cigarette paper after the scattered tobacco he thrust one
+      hand into his trouser pocket. With the other he held the cane, emphasising
+      his points by ringing taps upon the pavement. Geiger, taking the cigar
+      between his fingers, listened with open mouth to the outburst that
+      followed. Valmore and Freedom Smith dropped their conversation and with
+      broad smiles upon their faces gave attention, and Sam McPherson, his eyes
+      round with wonder and admiration, felt again the thrill that always ran
+      through him under the drum beats of Telfer&rsquo;s eloquence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An artist is one who hungers and thirsts after perfection, not one who
+      dabs flowers upon plates to choke the gullets of diners,&rdquo; declared Telfer,
+      setting himself for one of the long speeches with which he loved to
+      astonish the men of Caxton, and glaring down at those seated upon the
+      stone. &ldquo;It is the artist who, among all men, has the divine audacity. Does
+      he not hurl himself into a battle in which is engaged against him all of
+      the accumulative genius of the world?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pausing, he looked about for an opponent upon whom he might pour the flood
+      of his eloquence, but on all sides smiles greeted him. Undaunted, he
+      rushed again to the charge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A business man&mdash;what is he?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;He succeeds by outwitting
+      the little minds with which he comes in contact. A scientist is of more
+      account&mdash;he pits his brains against the dull unresponsiveness of
+      inanimate matter and a hundredweight of black iron he makes do the work of
+      a hundred housewives. But an artist tests his brains against the greatest
+      brains of all times; he stands upon the peak of life and hurls himself
+      against the world. A girl from Parkertown who paints flowers upon dishes
+      to be called an artist&mdash;ugh! Let me spew forth the thought! Let me
+      cleanse my mouth! A man should have a prayer upon his lips who utters the
+      word artist!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, we can&rsquo;t all be artists and the woman can paint flowers upon dishes
+      for all I care,&rdquo; spoke up Valmore, laughing good naturedly. &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t all
+      paint pictures and write books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We do not want to be artists&mdash;we do not dare to be,&rdquo; shouted Telfer,
+      whirling and shaking his cane at Valmore. &ldquo;You have a misunderstanding of
+      the word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He straightened his shoulders and threw out his chest and the boy standing
+      beside the blacksmith threw up his chin, unconsciously imitating the
+      swagger of the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not paint pictures; I do not write books; yet am I an artist,&rdquo;
+       declared Telfer, proudly. &ldquo;I am an artist practising the most difficult of
+      all arts&mdash;the art of living. Here in this western village I stand and
+      fling my challenge to the world. &lsquo;On the lip of not the greatest of you,&rsquo; 
+      I cry, &lsquo;has life been more sweet.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned from Valmore to the men upon the stone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make a study of my life,&rdquo; he commanded. &ldquo;It will be a revelation to you.
+      With a smile I greet the morning; I swagger in the noontime; and in the
+      evening, like Socrates of old, I gather a little group of you benighted
+      villagers about me and toss wisdom into your teeth, striving to teach you
+      judgment in the use of great words.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk an almighty lot about yourself, John,&rdquo; grumbled Freedom Smith,
+      taking his pipe from his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The subject is complex, it is varied, it is full of charm,&rdquo; Telfer
+      answered, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking a fresh supply of tobacco and paper from his pocket, he rolled and
+      lighted a cigarette. His fingers no longer trembled. Flourishing his cane
+      he threw back his head and blew smoke into the air. He thought that in
+      spite of the roar of laughter that had greeted Freedom Smith&rsquo;s comment, he
+      had vindicated the honour of art and the thought made him happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the newsboy, who had been leaning against the storefront lost in
+      admiration, it seemed that he had caught in Telfer&rsquo;s talk an echo of the
+      kind of talk that must go on among men in the big outside world. Had not
+      this Telfer travelled far? Had he not lived in New York and Paris? Without
+      understanding the sense of what had been said, Sam felt that it must be
+      something big and conclusive. When from the distance there came the shriek
+      of a locomotive, he stood unmoved, trying to comprehend the meaning of
+      Telfer&rsquo;s outburst over the lounger&rsquo;s simple statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s the seven forty-five,&rdquo; cried Telfer, sharply. &ldquo;Is the war between
+      you and Fatty at an end? Are we going to lose our evening&rsquo;s diversion? Has
+      Fatty bluffed you out or are you growing rich and lazy like Papa Geiger
+      here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Springing from his place beside the blacksmith and grasping the bundle of
+      newspapers, Sam ran down the street, Telfer, Valmore, Freedom Smith and
+      the loungers following more slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the evening train from Des Moines stopped at Caxton, a blue-coated
+      train news merchant leaped hurriedly to the platform and began looking
+      anxiously about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hurry, Fatty,&rdquo; rang out Freedom Smith&rsquo;s huge voice, &ldquo;Sam&rsquo;s already half
+      through one car.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man called &ldquo;Fatty&rdquo; ran up and down the station platform. &ldquo;Where
+      is that bundle of Omaha papers, you Irish loafer?&rdquo; he shouted, shaking his
+      fist at Jerry Donlin who stood upon a truck at the front of the train,
+      up-ending trunks into the baggage car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jerry paused with a trunk dangling in mid-air. &ldquo;In the baggage-room, of
+      course. Hurry, man. Do you want the kid to work the whole train?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An air of something impending hung over the idlers upon the platform, the
+      train crew, and even the travelling men who began climbing off the train.
+      The engineer thrust his head out of the cab; the conductor, a dignified
+      looking man with a grey moustache, threw back his head and shook with
+      mirth; a young man with a suit-case in his hand and a long pipe in his
+      mouth ran to the door of the baggage-room, calling, &ldquo;Hurry! Hurry, Fatty!
+      The kid is working the entire train. You won&rsquo;t be able to sell a paper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The fat young man ran from the baggage-room to the platform and shouted
+      again to Jerry Donlin, who was now slowly pushing the empty truck along
+      the platform. From the train came a clear voice calling, &ldquo;Latest Omaha
+      papers! Have your change ready! Fatty, the train newsboy, has fallen down
+      a well! Have your change ready, gentlemen!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jerry Donlin, followed by Fatty, again disappeared from sight. The
+      conductor, waving his hand, jumped upon the steps of the train. The
+      engineer pulled in his head and the train began to move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fat young man emerged from the baggage-room, swearing revenge upon the
+      head of Jerry Donlin. &ldquo;There was no need to put it under a mail sack!&rdquo; he
+      shouted, shaking his fist. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be even with you for this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Followed by the shouts of the travelling men and the laughter of the
+      idlers upon the platform he climbed upon the moving train and began
+      running from car to car. Off the last car dropped Sam McPherson, a smile
+      upon his lips, the bundle of newspapers gone, his pocket jingling with
+      coins. The evening&rsquo;s entertainment for the town of Caxton was at an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Telfer, standing by the side of Valmore, waved his cane in the air
+      and began talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beat him again, by Gad!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Bully for Sam! Who says the
+      spirit of the old buccaneers is dead? That boy didn&rsquo;t understand what I
+      said about art, but he is an artist just the same!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Windy McPherson, the father of the Caxton newsboy, Sam McPherson, had been
+      war touched. The civilian clothes that he wore caused an itching of the
+      skin. He could not forget that he had once been a sergeant in a regiment
+      of infantry and had commanded a company through a battle fought in ditches
+      along a Virginia country road. He chafed under the fact of his present
+      obscure position in life. Had he been able to replace his regimentals with
+      the robes of a judge, the felt hat of a statesman, or even with the night
+      stick of a village marshal life might have retained something of its
+      sweetness, but to have ended by becoming an obscure housepainter in a
+      village that lived by raising corn and by feeding that corn to red steers&mdash;ugh!&mdash;the
+      thought made him shudder. He looked with envy at the blue coat and the
+      brass buttons of the railroad agent; he tried vainly to get into the
+      Caxton Cornet Band; he got drunk to forget his humiliation and in the end
+      he fell to loud boasting and to the nursing of a belief within himself
+      that in truth not Lincoln nor Grant but he himself had thrown the winning
+      die in the great struggle. In his cups he said as much and the Caxton corn
+      grower, punching his neighbour in the ribs, shook with delight over the
+      statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam was a twelve year old, barefooted boy upon the streets a kind of
+      backwash of the wave of glory that had swept over Windy McPherson in the
+      days of &lsquo;61 lapped upon the shores of the Iowa village. That strange
+      manifestation called the A. P. A. movement brought the old soldier to a
+      position of prominence in the community. He founded a local branch of the
+      organisation; he marched at the head of a procession through the streets;
+      he stood on a corner and pointing a trembling forefinger to where the flag
+      on the schoolhouse waved beside the cross of Rome, shouted hoarsely, &ldquo;See,
+      the cross rears itself above the flag! We shall end by being murdered in
+      our beds!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But although some of the hard-headed, money-making men of Caxton joined
+      the movement started by the boasting old soldier and although for the
+      moment they vied with him in stealthy creepings through the streets to
+      secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands the movement
+      subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its leader more
+      desolate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the little house at the end of the street by the shores of Squirrel
+      Creek, Sam and his sister Kate regarded their father&rsquo;s warlike pretensions
+      with scorn. &ldquo;The butter is low, father&rsquo;s army leg will ache to-night,&rdquo;
+       they whispered to each other across the kitchen table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Following her mother&rsquo;s example, Kate, a tall slender girl of sixteen and
+      already a bread winner with a clerkship in Winney&rsquo;s drygoods store,
+      remained silent under Windy&rsquo;s boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate them,
+      did not always succeed. There was now and then a rebellious muttering that
+      should have warned Windy. It had once burst into an open quarrel in which
+      the victor of a hundred battles withdrew defeated from the field. Windy,
+      half-drunk, had taken an old account book from a shelf in the kitchen, a
+      relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when he had first come to
+      Caxton, and had begun reading to the little family a list of names of men
+      who, he claimed, had been the cause of his ruin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is Tom Newman, now,&rdquo; he exclaimed excitedly. &ldquo;Owns a hundred acres
+      of good corn-growing land and won&rsquo;t pay for the harness on the backs of
+      his horses or for the ploughs in his barn. The receipt he has from me is
+      forged. I could put him in prison if I chose. To beat an old soldier!&mdash;to
+      beat one of the boys of &lsquo;61!&mdash;it is shameful!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard of what you owed and what men owed you; you had none the
+      worst of it,&rdquo; Sam protested coldly, while Kate held her breath and Jane
+      McPherson, at work over the ironing board in the corner, half turned and
+      looked silently at the man and the boy, the slightly increased pallor of
+      her long face the only sign that she had heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy had not pressed the quarrel. Standing for a moment in the middle of
+      the kitchen, holding the book in his hand, he looked from the pale silent
+      mother by the ironing board to the son now standing and staring at him,
+      and, throwing the book upon the table with a bang, fled the house. &ldquo;You
+      don&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; he had cried, &ldquo;you don&rsquo;t understand the heart of a
+      soldier.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a way the man was right. The two children did not understand the
+      blustering, pretending, inefficient old man. Having moved shoulder to
+      shoulder with grim, silent men to the consummation of great deeds Windy
+      could not get the flavour of those days out of his outlook upon life.
+      Walking half drunk in the darkness along the sidewalks of Caxton on the
+      evening of the quarrel the man became inspired. He threw back his
+      shoulders and walked with martial tread; he drew an imaginary sword from
+      its scabbard and waved it aloft; stopping, he aimed carefully at a body of
+      imaginary men who advanced yelling toward him across a wheatfield; he felt
+      that life in making him a housepainter in a farming village in Iowa and in
+      giving him an unappreciative son had been cruelly unfair; he wept at the
+      injustice of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The American Civil War was a thing so passionate, so inflaming, so vast,
+      so absorbing, it so touched to the quick the men and women of those
+      pregnant days that but a faint echo of it has been able to penetrate down
+      to our days and to our minds; no real sense of it has as yet crept into
+      the pages of a printed book; it yet wants its Thomas Carlyle; and in the
+      end we are put to the need of listening to old fellows boasting on our
+      village streets to get upon our cheeks the living breath of it. For four
+      years the men of American cities, villages and farms walked across the
+      smoking embers of a burning land, advancing and receding as the flame of
+      that universal, passionate, death-spitting thing swept down upon them or
+      receded toward the smoking sky-line. Is it so strange that they could not
+      come home and begin again peacefully painting houses or mending broken
+      shoes? A something in them cried out. It sent them to bluster and boast
+      upon the street corners. When people passing continued to think only of
+      their brick laying and of their shovelling of corn into cars, when the
+      sons of these war gods walking home at evening and hearing the vain
+      boastings of the fathers began to doubt even the facts of the great
+      struggle, a something snapped in their brains and they fell to chattering
+      and shouting their vain boastings to all as they looked hungrily about for
+      believing eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When our own Thomas Carlyle comes to write of our Civil War he will make
+      much of our Windy McPhersons. He will see something big and pathetic in
+      their hungry search for auditors and in their endless war talk. He will go
+      filled with eager curiosity into little G. A. R. halls in the villages and
+      think of the men who coming there night after night, year after year, told
+      and re-told endlessly, monotonously, their story of battle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us hope that in his fervour for the old fellows he will not fail to
+      treat tenderly the families of those veteran talkers; the families that
+      with their breakfasts and their dinners, by the fire at evening, through
+      fast day and feast day, at weddings and at funerals got again and again
+      endlessly, everlastingly this flow of war words. Let him reflect that
+      peaceful men in corn-growing counties do not by choice sleep among the
+      dogs of war nor wash their linen in the blood of their country&rsquo;s foe. Let
+      him, in his sympathy with the talkers, remember with kindness the heroism
+      of the listeners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a summer day Sam McPherson sat on a box before Wildman&rsquo;s grocery lost
+      in thought. In his hand he held the little yellow account book and in this
+      he buried himself, striving to wipe from his consciousness a scene being
+      enacted before his eyes upon the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The realisation of the fact that his father was a confirmed liar and
+      braggart had for years cast a shadow over his days and the shadow had been
+      made blacker by the fact that in a land where the least fortunate can
+      laugh in the face of want he had more than once stood face to face with
+      poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation was money in
+      the bank and with all the ardour of his boy&rsquo;s heart he strove to realise
+      that answer. He wanted to be a money-maker and the totals at the foot of
+      the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones that marked
+      the progress he had already made. They told him that the daily struggles
+      with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton&rsquo;s streets on bleak winter
+      evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when crowds filled the
+      stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he worked among them
+      tirelessly and persistently were not without fruit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, above the murmur of men&rsquo;s voices on the street, his father&rsquo;s
+      voice rose loud and insistent. A block further down the street, leaning
+      against the door of Hunter&rsquo;s jewelry store, Windy talked at the top of his
+      lungs, pumping his arms up and down with the air of a man making a stump
+      speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is making a fool of himself,&rdquo; thought Sam, and returned to his
+      bankbook, striving in the contemplation of the totals at the foot of the
+      pages to shake off the dull anger that had begun to burn in his brain.
+      Glancing up again, he saw that Joe Wildman, son of the grocer and a boy of
+      his own age, had joined the group of men laughing and jeering at Windy.
+      The shadow on Sam&rsquo;s face grew heavier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had been at Joe Wildman&rsquo;s house; he knew the air of plenty and of
+      comfort that hung over it; the table piled high with meat and potatoes;
+      the group of children laughing and eating to the edge of gluttony; the
+      quiet, gentle father who amid the clamour and the noise did not raise his
+      voice, and the well-dressed, bustling, rosy-cheeked mother. As a contrast
+      to this scene he began to call up in his mind a picture of life in his own
+      home, getting a kind of perverted pleasure out of his dissatisfaction with
+      it. He saw the boasting, incompetent father telling his endless tales of
+      the Civil War and complaining of his wounds; the tall, stoop-shouldered,
+      silent mother with the deep lines in her long face, everlastingly at work
+      over her washtub among the soiled clothes; the silent, hurriedly-eaten
+      meals snatched from the kitchen table; and the long winter days when ice
+      formed upon his mother&rsquo;s skirts and Windy idled about town while the
+      little family subsisted upon bowls of cornmeal mush everlastingly
+      repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half gone in
+      drink, and knew that he was boasting of his part in the Civil War. &ldquo;He is
+      either doing that or telling of his aristocratic family or lying about his
+      birthplace,&rdquo; he thought resentfully, and unable any longer to endure the
+      sight of what seemed to him his own degradation, he got up and went into
+      the grocery where a group of Caxton citizens stood talking to Wildman of a
+      meeting to be held that morning at the town hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Caxton was to have a Fourth of July celebration. The idea, born in the
+      heads of the few, had been taken up by the many. Rumours of it had run
+      through the streets late in May. It had been talked of in Geiger&rsquo;s drug
+      store, at the back of Wildman&rsquo;s grocery, and in the street before the New
+      Leland House. John Telfer, the town&rsquo;s one man of leisure, had for weeks
+      been going from place to place discussing the details with prominent men.
+      Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall over Geiger&rsquo;s drug store and
+      to a man the citizens of Caxton had turned out for the meeting. The
+      housepainter had come down off his ladder, the clerks were locking the
+      doors of the stores, men went along the streets in groups bound for the
+      hall. As they went they shouted to each other. &ldquo;The old town has woke up,&rdquo;
+       they called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a corner by Hunter&rsquo;s jewelry store Windy McPherson leaned against a
+      building and harangued the passing crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let the old flag wave,&rdquo; he shouted excitedly, &ldquo;let the men of Caxton show
+      the true blue and rally to the old standards.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right, Windy, expostulate with them,&rdquo; shouted a wit, and a roar of
+      laughter drowned Windy&rsquo;s reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson also went to the meeting in the hall. He came out of the
+      grocery store with Wildman and went along the street looking at the
+      sidewalk and trying not to see the drunken man talking in front of the
+      jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up and
+      down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the town&rsquo;s
+      life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned. He
+      squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window ledge
+      where he could watch the men come in and find seats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Caxton&rsquo;s one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a
+      living and a kind of standing in the town&rsquo;s life. To be a newsboy or a
+      bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in
+      the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great men
+      and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day
+      likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town owe to
+      future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the men of Caxton
+      and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the window ledge of the
+      hall while the other boys of the town waited on the sidewalk below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Telfer was chairman of the mass meeting. He was always chairman of
+      public meetings in Caxton. The industrious silent men of position in the
+      town envied his easy, bantering style of public address, while pretending
+      to treat it with scorn. &ldquo;He talks too much,&rdquo; they said, making a virtue of
+      their own inability with apt and clever words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer did not wait to be appointed chairman of the meeting, but went
+      forward, climbed the little raised platform at the end of the hall, and
+      usurped the chairmanship. He walked up and down on the platform bantering
+      with the crowd, answering gibes, calling to well-known men, getting and
+      giving keen satisfaction with his talent. When the hall was filled with
+      men he called the meeting to order, appointed committees and launched into
+      a harangue. He told of plans made to advertise the big day in other towns
+      and to get low railroad rates arranged for excursion parties. The
+      programme, he said, included a musical carnival with brass bands from
+      other towns, a sham battle by the military company at the fairgrounds,
+      horse races, speeches from the steps of the town hall, and fireworks in
+      the evening. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll show them a live town here,&rdquo; he declared, walking up
+      and down the platform and swinging his cane, while the crowd applauded and
+      shouted its approval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When a call came for voluntary subscriptions to pay for the fun, the
+      audience quieted down. One or two men got up and started to go out,
+      grumbling that it was a waste of money. The fate of the celebration was on
+      the knees of the gods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer arose to the occasion. He called out the names of the departing,
+      and made jests at their expense so that they dropped back into their
+      chairs unable to face the roaring laughter of the crowd, and shouted to a
+      man at the back of the hall to close and bolt the door. Men began getting
+      up in various parts of the hall and calling out sums, Telfer repeating the
+      name and the amount in a loud voice to young Tom Jedrow, clerk in the
+      bank, who wrote them down in a book. When the amount subscribed did not
+      meet with his approval, he protested and the crowd backing him up forced
+      the increase he demanded. When a man did not rise, he shouted at him and
+      the man answered back an amount.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly in the hall a diversion arose. Windy McPherson emerged from the
+      crowd at the back of the hall and walked down the centre aisle to the
+      platform. He walked unsteadily straightening his shoulders and thrusting
+      out his chin. When he got to the front of the hall he took a roll of bills
+      from his pocket and threw it on the platform at the chairman&rsquo;s feet. &ldquo;From
+      one of the boys of &lsquo;61,&rdquo; he announced in a loud voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd shouted and clapped its hands with delight as Telfer picked up
+      the bills and ran his finger over them. &ldquo;Seventeen dollars from our hero,
+      the mighty McPherson,&rdquo; he shouted while the bank clerk wrote the name and
+      the amount in the book and the crowd continued to make merry over the
+      title given the drunken soldier by the chairman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy on the window ledge slipped to the floor and stood with burning
+      cheeks behind the mass of men. He knew that at home his mother was doing a
+      family washing for Lesley, the shoe merchant, who had given five dollars
+      to the Fourth-of-July fund, and the resentment he had felt on seeing his
+      father talking to the crowd before the jewelry store blazed up anew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the taking of subscriptions, men in various parts of the hall began
+      making suggestions for added features for the great day. To some of the
+      speakers the crowd listened respectfully, at others they hooted. An old
+      man with a grey beard told a long rambling story of a Fourth-of-July
+      celebration of his boyhood. When voices interrupted he protested and shook
+      his fist in the air, pale with indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, sit down, old daddy,&rdquo; shouted Freedom Smith and a murmur of applause
+      greeted this sensible suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another man got up and began to talk. He had an idea. &ldquo;We will have,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;a bugler mounted on a white horse who will ride through the town at
+      dawn blowing the reveille. At midnight he will stand on the steps of the
+      town hall and blow taps to end the day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd applauded. The idea had caught their fancy and had instantly
+      taken a place in their minds as one of the real events of the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Windy McPherson emerged from the crowd at the back of the hall.
+      Raising his hand for silence he told the crowd that he was a bugler, that
+      he had been a regimental bugler for two years during the Civil War. He
+      said that he would gladly volunteer for the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd shouted and John Telfer waved his hand. &ldquo;The white horse for
+      you, McPherson,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson wriggled along the wall and out at the now unbolted door. He
+      was filled with astonishment at his father&rsquo;s folly, and was still more
+      astonished at the folly of these other men in accepting his statement and
+      handing over the important place for the big day. He knew that his father
+      must have had some part in the war as he was a member of the G. A. R., but
+      he had no faith at all in the stories he had heard him relate of his
+      experiences in the war. Sometimes he caught himself wondering if there
+      ever had been such a war and thought that it must be a lie like everything
+      else in the life of Windy McPherson. For years he had wondered why some
+      sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did not rise, and in a
+      matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing as the Civil War had
+      ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in the minds of pompous old
+      men demanding unearned glory of their fellows. Now hurrying along the
+      street with burning cheeks, he decided that after all there must have been
+      such a war. He had had the same feeling about birthplaces and there could
+      be no doubt that people were born. He had heard his father claim as his
+      birthplace Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana and Scotland. The
+      thing had left a kind of defect in his mind. To the end of his life when
+      he heard a man tell the place of his birth he looked up suspiciously, and
+      a shadow of doubt crossed his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the mass meeting Sam went home to his mother and presented the case
+      bluntly. &ldquo;The thing will have to be stopped,&rdquo; he declared, standing with
+      blazing eyes before her washtub. &ldquo;It is too public. He can&rsquo;t blow a bugle;
+      I know he can&rsquo;t. The whole town will have another laugh at our expense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jane McPherson listened in silence to the boy&rsquo;s outburst, then, turning,
+      went back to rubbing clothes, avoiding his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With his hands thrust into his trousers pocket Sam stared sullenly at the
+      ground. A sense of justice told him not to press the matter, but as he
+      walked away from the washtub and out at the kitchen door, he hoped there
+      would be plain talk of the matter at supper time. &ldquo;The old fool!&rdquo; he
+      protested, addressing the empty street. &ldquo;He is going to make a show of
+      himself again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Windy McPherson came home that evening, something in the eyes of the
+      silent wife, and the sullen face of the boy, startled him. He passed over
+      lightly his wife&rsquo;s silence but looked closely at his son. He felt that he
+      faced a crisis. In the emergency he was magnificent. With a flourish, he
+      told of the mass meeting, and declared that the citizens of Caxton had
+      arisen as one man to demand that he take the responsible place as official
+      bugler. Then, turning, he glared across the table at his son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, openly defiant, announced that he did not believe his father capable
+      of blowing a bugle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy roared with amazement. He rose from the table declaring in a loud
+      voice that the boy had wronged him; he swore that he had been for two
+      years bugler on the staff of a colonel, and launched into a long story of
+      a surprise by the enemy while his regiment lay asleep in their tents, and
+      of his standing in the face of a storm of bullets and blowing his comrades
+      to action. Putting one hand on his forehead he rocked back and forth as
+      though about to fall, declaring that he was striving to keep back the
+      tears wrenched from him by the injustice of his son&rsquo;s insinuation and,
+      shouting so that his voice carried far down the street, he declared with
+      an oath that the town of Caxton should ring and echo with his bugling as
+      the sleeping camp had echoed with it that night in the Virginia wood. Then
+      dropping again into his chair, and resting his head upon his hand, he
+      assumed a look of patient resignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy McPherson was victorious. In the little house a great stir and
+      bustle of preparation arose. Putting on his white overalls and forgetting
+      for the time his honourable wounds the father went day after day to his
+      work as a housepainter. He dreamed of a new blue uniform for the great day
+      and in the end achieved the realisation of his dreams, not however without
+      material assistance from what was known in the house as &ldquo;Mother&rsquo;s Wash
+      Money.&rdquo; And the boy, convinced by the story of the midnight attack in the
+      woods of Virginia, began against his judgment to build once more an old
+      dream of his father&rsquo;s reformation. Boylike, the scepticism was thrown to
+      the winds and he entered with zeal into the plans for the great day. As he
+      went through the quiet residence streets delivering the late evening
+      papers, he threw back his head and revelled in the thought of a tall
+      blue-clad figure on a great white horse passing like a knight before the
+      gaping people. In a fervent moment he even drew money from his carefully
+      built-up bank account and sent it to a firm in Chicago to pay for a
+      shining new bugle that would complete the picture he had in his mind. And
+      when the evening papers were distributed he hurried home to sit on the
+      porch before the house discussing with his sister Kate the honours that
+      had alighted upon their family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the coming of dawn on the great day the three McPhersons hurried hand
+      in hand toward Main Street. In the street, on all sides of them, they saw
+      people coming out of houses rubbing their eyes and buttoning their coats
+      as they went along the sidewalk. All of Caxton seemed abroad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Main Street the people were packed on the sidewalk, and massed on the
+      curb and in the doorways of the stores. Heads appeared at windows, flags
+      waved from roofs or hung from ropes stretched across the street, and a
+      great murmur of voices broke the silence of the dawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;s heart beat so that he was hard put to it to keep back the tears from
+      his eyes. He thought with a gasp of the days of anxiety that had passed
+      when the new bugle had not come from the Chicago company, and in
+      retrospect he suffered again the horror of the days of waiting. It had
+      been all important. He could not blame his father for raving and shouting
+      about the house, he himself had felt like raving, and had put another
+      dollar of his savings into telegrams before the treasure was finally in
+      his hands. Now, the thought that it might not have come sickened him, and
+      a little prayer of thankfulness rose from his lips. To be sure one might
+      have been secured from a nearby town, but not a new shining one to go with
+      his father&rsquo;s new blue uniform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A cheer broke from the crowd massed along the street. Into the street rode
+      a tall figure seated upon a white horse. The horse was from Culvert&rsquo;s
+      livery and the boys there had woven ribbons into its mane and tail. Windy
+      McPherson, sitting very straight in the saddle and looking wonderfully
+      striking in the new blue uniform and the broad-brimmed campaign hat, had
+      the air of a conqueror come to receive the homage of the town. He wore a
+      gold band across his chest and against his hip rested the shining bugle.
+      With stern eyes he looked down upon the people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lump in the throat of the boy hurt more and more. A great wave of
+      pride ran over him, submerging him. In a moment he forgot all the past
+      humiliations the father had brought upon his family, and understood why
+      his mother remained silent when he, in his blindness, had wanted to
+      protest against her seeming indifference. Glancing furtively up he saw a
+      tear lying upon her cheek and felt that he too would like to sob aloud his
+      pride and happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly and with stately stride the horse walked up the street between the
+      rows of silent waiting people. In front of the town hall the tall military
+      figure, rising in the saddle, took one haughty look at the multitude, and
+      then, putting the bugle to his lips, blew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the bugle came only a thin piercing shriek followed by a squawk.
+      Again Windy put the bugle to his lips and again the same dismal squawk was
+      his only reward. On his face was a look of helpless boyish astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in a moment the people knew. It was only another of Windy McPherson&rsquo;s
+      pretensions. He couldn&rsquo;t blow a bugle at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great shout of laughter rolled down the street. Men and women sat on the
+      curbstones and laughed until they were tired. Then, looking at the figure
+      upon the motionless horse, they laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy looked about him with troubled eyes. It is doubtful if he had ever
+      had a bugle to his lips until that moment, but he was filled with wonder
+      and astonishment that the reveille did not roll forth. He had heard the
+      thing a thousand times and had it clearly in his mind; with all his heart
+      he wanted it to roll forth, and could picture the street ringing with it
+      and the applause of the people; the thing, he felt, was in him, and it was
+      only a fatal blunder in nature that it did not come out at the flaring end
+      of the bugle. He was amazed at this dismal end of his great moment&mdash;he
+      was always amazed and helpless before facts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd began gathering about the motionless, astonished figure,
+      laughter continuing to send them off into something near convulsions.
+      Grasping the bridle of the horse, John Telfer began leading it off up the
+      street. Boys whooped and shouted at the rider, &ldquo;Blow! Blow!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The three McPhersons stood in a doorway leading into a shoe store. The boy
+      and the mother, white and speechless with humiliation, dared not look at
+      each other. In the flood of shame sweeping over them they stared straight
+      before them with hard, stony eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The procession led by John Telfer at the bridle of the white horse marched
+      down the street. Looking up, the eyes of the laughing, shouting man met
+      those of the boy and a look of pain shot across his face. Dropping the
+      bridle he hurried away through the crowd. The procession moved on, and
+      watching their chance the mother and the two children crept home along
+      side streets, Kate weeping bitterly. Leaving them at the door Sam went
+      straight on down a sandy road toward a small wood. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got my lesson.
+      I&rsquo;ve got my lesson,&rdquo; he muttered over and over as he went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the edge of the wood he stopped and leaning on a rail fence watched
+      until he saw his mother come out to the pump in the back yard. She had
+      begun to draw water for the day&rsquo;s washing. For her also the holiday was at
+      an end. A flood of tears ran down the boy&rsquo;s cheeks, and he shook his fist
+      in the direction of the town. &ldquo;You may laugh at that fool Windy, but you
+      shall never laugh at Sam McPherson,&rdquo; he cried, his voice shaking with
+      excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One evening, when he had grown so that he outtopped Windy, Sam McPherson
+      returned from his paper route to find his mother arrayed in her black,
+      church-going dress. An evangelist was at work in Caxton and she had
+      decided to hear him. Sam shuddered. In the house it was an understood
+      thing that when Jane McPherson went to church her son went with her. There
+      was nothing said. Jane McPherson did all things without words, always
+      there was nothing said. Now she stood waiting in her black dress when her
+      son came in at the door and he hurriedly put on his best clothes and went
+      with her to the brick church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Valmore, John Telfer, and Freedom Smith, who had taken upon themselves a
+      kind of common guardianship of the boy and with whom he spent evening
+      after evening at the back of Wildman&rsquo;s grocery, did not go to church. They
+      talked of religion and seemed singularly curious and interested in what
+      other men thought on the subject but they did not allow themselves to be
+      coaxed into a house of worship. To the boy, who had become a fourth member
+      of the evening gatherings at the back of the grocery store, they would not
+      talk of God, answering the direct questions he sometimes asked by changing
+      the subject. Once Telfer, the reader of poetry, answered the boy. &ldquo;Sell
+      papers and fill your pockets with money but let your soul sleep,&rdquo; he said
+      sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the absence of the others Wildman talked more freely. He was a
+      spiritualist and tried to make Sam see the beauties of that faith. On long
+      summer afternoons the grocer and the boy spent hours driving through the
+      streets in a rattling old delivery wagon, the man striving earnestly to
+      make clear to the boy the shadowy ideas of God that were in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although Windy McPherson had been the leader of a Bible class in his
+      youth, and had been a moving spirit at revival meetings during his early
+      days in Caxton, he no longer went to church and his wife did not ask him
+      to go. On Sunday mornings he lay abed. If there was work to be done about
+      the house or yard he complained of his wounds. He complained of his wounds
+      when the rent fell due, and when there was a shortage of food in the
+      house. Later in his life and after the death of Jane McPherson the old
+      soldier married the widow of a farmer by whom he had four children and
+      with whom he went to church twice on Sunday. Kate wrote Sam one of her
+      infrequent letters about it. &ldquo;He has met his match,&rdquo; she said, and was
+      tremendously pleased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In church on Sunday mornings Sam went regularly to sleep, putting his head
+      on his mother&rsquo;s arm and sleeping throughout the service. Jane McPherson
+      loved to have the boy there beside her. It was the one thing in life they
+      did together and she did not mind his sleeping the time away. Knowing how
+      late he had been upon the streets at the paper selling on Saturday
+      evenings, she looked at him with eyes filled with tenderness and sympathy.
+      Once the minister, a man with brown beard and hard, tightly-closed mouth,
+      spoke to her. &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you keep him awake?&rdquo; he asked impatiently. &ldquo;He needs
+      the sleep,&rdquo; she said and hurried past the minister and out of the church,
+      looking ahead of her and frowning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening of the evangelist meeting was a summer evening fallen on a
+      winter month. All day the warm winds had come up from the southwest. Mud
+      lay soft and deep in the streets and among the little pools of water on
+      the sidewalks were dry spots from which steam arose. Nature had forgotten
+      herself. A day that should have sent old fellows to their nests behind
+      stoves in stores sent them forth to loaf in the sun. The night fell warm
+      and cloudy. A thunder storm threatened in the month of February.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam walked along the sidewalk with his mother bound for the brick church,
+      wearing a new grey overcoat. The night did not demand the overcoat but Sam
+      wore it out of an excess of pride in its possession. The overcoat had an
+      air. It had been made by Gunther the tailor after a design sketched on the
+      back of a piece of wrapping paper by John Telfer and had been paid for out
+      of the newsboy&rsquo;s savings. The little German tailor, after a talk with
+      Valmore and Telfer, had made it at a marvellously low price. Sam swaggered
+      as he walked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not sleep in church that evening; indeed he found the quiet church
+      filled with a medley of strange noises. Folding carefully the new coat and
+      laying it beside him on the seat he looked with interest at the people,
+      feeling within him something of the nervous excitement with which the air
+      was charged. The evangelist, a short, athletic-looking man in a grey
+      business suit, seemed to the boy out of place in the church. He had the
+      assured business-like air of the travelling men who come to the New Leland
+      House, and Sam thought he looked like a man who had goods to be sold. He
+      did not stand quietly back of the pulpit giving out the text as did the
+      brown-bearded minister, nor did he sit with closed eyes and clasped hands
+      waiting for the choir to finish singing. While the choir sang he ran up
+      and down the platform waving his arms and shouting excitedly to the people
+      on the church benches, &ldquo;Sing! Sing! Sing! For the glory of God, sing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the song was finished, he began talking, quietly at first, of life in
+      the town. As he talked he grew more and more excited. &ldquo;The town is a
+      cesspool of vice!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;It reeks with evil! The devil counts it a
+      suburb of hell!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice rose, and sweat ran off his face. A sort of frenzy seized him.
+      He pulled off his coat and throwing it over a chair ran up and down the
+      platform and into the aisles among the people, shouting, threatening,
+      pleading. People began to stir uneasily in their seats. Jane McPherson
+      stared stonily at the back of the woman in front of her. Sam was horribly
+      frightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The newsboy of Caxton was not without a hunger for religion. Like all boys
+      he thought much and often of death. In the night he sometimes awakened
+      cold with fear, thinking that death must be just without the door of his
+      room waiting for him. When in the winter he had a cold and coughed, he
+      trembled at the thought of tuberculosis. Once, when he was taken with a
+      fever, he fell asleep and dreamed that he had died and was walking on the
+      trunk of a fallen tree over a ravine filled with lost souls that shrieked
+      with terror. When he awoke he prayed. Had some one come into his room and
+      heard his prayer he would have been ashamed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On winter evenings as he walked through the dark streets with the papers
+      under his arm he thought of his soul. As he thought a tenderness came over
+      him; a lump came into his throat and he pitied himself; he felt that there
+      was something missing in his life, something he wanted very badly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under John Telfer&rsquo;s influence, the boy, who had quit school to devote
+      himself to money making, read Walt Whitman and had a season of admiring
+      his own body with its straight white legs, and the head that was poised so
+      jauntily on the body. Sometimes he would awaken on summer nights and be so
+      filled with strange longing that he would creep out of bed and, pushing
+      open the window, sit upon the floor, his bare legs sticking out beyond his
+      white nightgown, and, thus sitting, yearn eagerly toward some fine
+      impulse, some call, some sense of bigness and of leadership that was
+      absent from the necessities of the life he led. He looked at the stars and
+      listened to the night noises, so filled with longing that the tears sprang
+      to his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once, after the affair of the bugle, Jane McPherson had been ill&mdash;and
+      the first touch of the finger of death reaching out to her&mdash;had sat
+      with her son in the warm darkness in the little grass plot at the front of
+      the house. It was a clear, warm, starlit evening without a moon, and as
+      the two sat closely together a sense of the coming of death crept over the
+      mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the evening meal Windy McPherson had talked voluminously, ranting and
+      shouting about the house. He said that a housepainter who had a real sense
+      of colour had no business trying to work in a hole like Caxton. He had
+      been in trouble with a housewife about a colour he had mixed for painting
+      a porch floor and at his own table he raved about the woman and what he
+      declared her lack of even a primitive sense of colour. &ldquo;I am sick of it
+      all,&rdquo; he shouted, going out of the house and up the street with uncertain
+      steps. His wife had been unmoved by his outburst, but in the presence of
+      the quiet boy whose chair touched her own she trembled with a strange new
+      fear and began to talk of the life after death, making effort after effort
+      to get at what she wanted to say, and only succeeding in finding
+      expression for her thoughts in little sentences broken by long painful
+      pauses. She told the boy she had no doubt at all that there was some kind
+      of future life and that she believed she should see and live with him
+      again after they had finished with this world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day the minister who had been annoyed because he had slept in his
+      church, stopped Sam on the street to talk to him of his soul. He said that
+      the boy should be thinking of making himself one of the brothers in Christ
+      by joining the church. Sam listened silently to the talk of the man, whom
+      he instinctively disliked, but in his silence felt there was something
+      insincere. With all his heart he wanted to repeat a sentence he had heard
+      from the lips of grey-haired, big-fisted Valmore&mdash;&ldquo;How can they
+      believe and not lead a life of simple, fervent devotion to their belief?&rdquo;
+       He thought himself superior to the thin-lipped man who talked with him and
+      had he been able to express what was in his heart he might have said,
+      &ldquo;Look here, man! I am made of different stuff from all the people there at
+      the church. I am new clay to be moulded into a new man. Not even my mother
+      is like me. I do not accept your ideas of life just because you say they
+      are good any more than I accept Windy McPherson just because he happens to
+      be my father.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During one winter Sam spent evening after evening reading the Bible in his
+      room. It was after Kate&rsquo;s marriage&mdash;she had got into an affair with a
+      young farmer that had kept her name upon the tongues of whisperers for
+      months but was now a housewife on a farm at the edge of a village some
+      miles from Caxton, and the mother was again at her endless task among the
+      soiled clothes in the kitchen and Windy McPherson off drinking and
+      boasting about town. Sam read the book in secret. He had a lamp on a
+      little stand beside his bed and a novel, lent him by John Telfer, beside
+      it. When his mother came up the stairway he slipped the Bible under the
+      cover of the bed and became absorbed in the novel. He thought it something
+      not quite in keeping with his aims as a business man and a money getter to
+      be concerned about his soul. He wanted to conceal his concern but with all
+      his heart wanted to get hold of the message of the strange book, about
+      which men wrangled hour after hour on winter evenings in the store.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not get it; and after a time he stopped reading the book. Left to
+      himself he might have sensed its meaning, but on all sides of him were the
+      voices of the men&mdash;the men at Wildman&rsquo;s who owned to no faith and yet
+      were filled with dogmatisms as they talked behind the stove in the
+      grocery; the brown-bearded, thin-lipped minister in the brick church; the
+      shouting, pleading evangelists who came to visit the town in the winter;
+      the gentle old grocer who talked vaguely of the spirit world,&mdash;all
+      these voices were at the mind of the boy pleading, insisting, demanding,
+      not that Christ&rsquo;s simple message that men love one another to the end,
+      that they work together for the common good, be accepted, but that their
+      own complex interpretation of his word be taken to the end that souls be
+      saved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the end the boy of Caxton got to the place where he had a dread of the
+      word soul. It seemed to him that the mention of the word in conversation
+      was something shameful and to think of the word or the shadowy something
+      for which the word stood an act of cowardice. In his mind the soul became
+      a thing to be hidden away, covered up, not thought of. One might be
+      allowed to speak of the matter at the moment of death, but for the healthy
+      man or boy to have the thought of his soul in his mind or word of it on
+      his lips&mdash;one might better become blatantly profane and go to the
+      devil with a swagger. With delight he imagined himself as dying and with
+      his last breath tossing a round oath into the air of his death chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime Sam continued to have inexplicable longings and hopes. He
+      kept surprising himself by the changing aspect of his own viewpoint of
+      life. He found himself indulging in the most petty meannesses, and
+      following these with flashes of a kind of loftiness of mind. Looking at a
+      girl passing in the street, he had unbelievably mean thoughts; and the
+      next day, passing the same girl, a line caught from the babbling of John
+      Telfer came to his lips and he went his way muttering, &ldquo;June&rsquo;s twice June
+      since she breathed it with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then into the complex nature of this boy came the sex motive. Already
+      he dreamed of having women in his arms. He looked shyly at the ankles of
+      women crossing the street, and listened eagerly when the crowd about the
+      stove in Wildman&rsquo;s fell to telling smutty stories. He sank to unbelievable
+      depths of triviality in sordidness, looking shyly into dictionaries for
+      words that appealed to the animal lust in his queerly perverted mind and,
+      when he came across it, lost entirely the beauty of the old Bible tale of
+      Ruth in the suggestion of intimacy between man and woman that it brought
+      to him. And yet Sam McPherson was no evil-minded boy. He had, as a matter
+      of fact, a quality of intellectual honesty that appealed strongly to the
+      clean-minded, simple-hearted old blacksmith Valmore; he had awakened
+      something like love in the hearts of the women school teachers in the
+      Caxton schools, at least one of whom continued to interest herself in him,
+      taking him with her on walks along country roads, and talking to him
+      constantly of the development of his mind; and he was the friend and boon
+      companion of Telfer, the dandy, the reader of poems, the keen lover of
+      life. The boy was struggling to find himself. One night when the sex call
+      kept him awake he got up and dressed, and went and stood in the rain by
+      the creek in Miller&rsquo;s pasture. The wind swept the rain across the face of
+      the water and a sentence flashed through his mind: &ldquo;The little feet of the
+      rain run on the water.&rdquo; There was a quality of almost lyrical beauty in
+      the Iowa boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this boy, who couldn&rsquo;t get hold of his impulse toward God, whose sex
+      impulses made him at times mean, at times full of beauty, and who had
+      decided that the impulse toward bargaining and money getting was the
+      impulse in him most worth cherishing, now sat beside his mother in church
+      and watched with wide-open eyes the man who took off his coat, who sweated
+      profusely, and who called the town in which he lived a cesspool of vice
+      and its citizens wards of the devil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evangelist from talking of the town began talking instead of heaven
+      and hell and his earnestness caught the attention of the listening boy who
+      began seeing pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into his mind there came a picture of a burning pit of fire in which great
+      flames leaped about the heads of the people who writhed in the pit. &ldquo;Art
+      Sherman would be there,&rdquo; thought Sam, materialising the picture he saw;
+      &ldquo;nothing can save him; he keeps a saloon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Filled with pity for the man he saw in the picture of the burning pit, his
+      mind centered on the person of Art Sherman. He liked Art Sherman. More
+      than once he had felt the touch of human kindness in the man. The roaring,
+      blustering saloonkeeper had helped the boy sell and collect for
+      newspapers. &ldquo;Pay the kid or get out of the place,&rdquo; the red-faced man
+      roared at drunken men leaning on the bar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, looking into the burning pit, Sam thought of Mike McCarthy, for
+      whom he had at that moment a kind of passion akin to a young girl&rsquo;s blind
+      devotion to her lover. With a shudder he realised that Mike also would go
+      into the pit, for he had heard Mike laughing at churches and declaring
+      there was no God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evangelist ran upon the platform and called to the people demanding
+      that they stand upon their feet. &ldquo;Stand up for Jesus,&rdquo; he shouted; &ldquo;stand
+      up and be counted among the host of the Lord God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the church people began getting to their feet. Jane McPherson stood
+      with the others. Sam did not stand. He crept behind his mother&rsquo;s dress,
+      hoping to pass through the storm unnoticed. The call to the faithful to
+      stand was a thing to be complied with or resisted as the people might
+      wish; it was something entirely outside of himself. It did not occur to
+      him to count himself among either the lost or the saved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the choir began singing and a businesslike movement began among the
+      people. Men and women went up and down the aisles clasping the hands of
+      people in the pews, talking and praying aloud. &ldquo;Welcome among us,&rdquo; they
+      said to certain ones who stood upon their feet. &ldquo;It gladdens our hearts to
+      see you among us. We are happy at seeing you in the fold among the saved.
+      It is good to confess Jesus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly a voice from the bench back of him struck terror to Sam&rsquo;s heart.
+      Jim Williams, who worked in Sawyer&rsquo;s barber shop, was upon his knees and
+      in a loud voice was praying for the soul of Sam McPherson. &ldquo;Lord, help
+      this erring boy who goes up and down in the company of sinners and
+      publicans,&rdquo; he shouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment the terror of death and the fiery pit that had possessed him
+      passed, and Sam was filled instead with blind, dumb rage. He remembered
+      that this same Jim Williams had treated lightly the honour of his sister
+      at the time of her disappearance, and he wanted to get upon his feet and
+      pour out his wrath on the head of the man, who, he felt, had betrayed him.
+      &ldquo;They would not have seen me,&rdquo; he thought; &ldquo;this is a fine trick Jim
+      Williams has played me. I shall be even with him for this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got to his feet and stood beside his mother. He had no qualms about
+      passing himself off as one of the lambs safely within the fold. His mind
+      was bent upon quieting Jim Williams&rsquo; prayers and avoiding the attention of
+      the people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The minister began calling on the standing people to testify of their
+      salvation. From various parts of the church the people spoke out, some
+      loudly and boldly and with a ring of confidence in their voices, some
+      tremblingly and hesitatingly. One woman wept loudly shouting between the
+      paroxysms of sobbing that seized her, &ldquo;The weight of my sins is heavy on
+      my soul.&rdquo; Girls and young men when called on by the minister responded
+      with shamed, hesitating voices asking that a verse of some hymn be sung,
+      or quoting a line of scripture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the back of the church the evangelist with one of the deacons and two
+      or three women had gathered about a small, black-haired woman, the wife of
+      a baker to whom Sam delivered papers. They were urging her to rise and get
+      within the fold, and Sam turned and watched her curiously, his sympathy
+      going out to her. With all his heart he hoped that she would continue
+      doggedly shaking her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly the irrepressible Jim Williams broke forth again. A quiver ran
+      over Sam&rsquo;s body and the blood rose to his cheeks. &ldquo;Here is another sinner
+      saved,&rdquo; shouted Jim, pointing to the standing boy. &ldquo;Count this boy, Sam
+      McPherson, in the fold among the lambs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the platform the brown-bearded minister stood upon a chair and looked
+      over the heads of the people. An ingratiating smile played about his lips.
+      &ldquo;Let us hear from the young man, Sam McPherson,&rdquo; he said, raising his hand
+      for silence, and, then, encouragingly, &ldquo;Sam, what have you to say for the
+      Lord?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Become the centre for the attention of the people in the church Sam was
+      terror-stricken. The rage against Jim Williams was forgotten in the spasm
+      of fear that seized him. He looked over his shoulder to the door at the
+      back of the church and thought longingly of the quiet street outside. He
+      hesitated, stammered, grew more red and uncertain, and finally burst out:
+      &ldquo;The Lord,&rdquo; he said, and then looked about hopelessly, &ldquo;the Lord maketh me
+      to lie out in green pastures.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the seats behind him a titter arose. A young woman sitting among the
+      singers in the choir put her handkerchief to her face and throwing back
+      her head rocked back and forth. A man near the door guffawed loudly and
+      went hurriedly out. All over the church people began laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam turned his eyes upon his mother. She was staring straight ahead of
+      her, and her face was red. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going out of this place and I&rsquo;m never
+      coming back again,&rdquo; he whispered, and, stepping into the aisle, walked
+      boldly toward the door. He had made up his mind that if the evangelist
+      tried to stop him he would fight. At his back he felt the rows of people
+      looking at him and smiling. The laughter continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the street he hurried along consumed with indignation. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll never go
+      into any church again,&rdquo; he swore, shaking his fist in the air. The public
+      avowals he had heard in the church seemed to him cheap and unworthy. He
+      wondered why his mother stayed in there. With a sweep of his arm he
+      dismissed all the people in the church. &ldquo;It is a place to make public
+      asses of the people,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson wandered through Main Street, dreading to meet Valmore and
+      John Telfer. Finding the chairs back of the stove in Wildman&rsquo;s grocery
+      deserted, he hurried past the grocer and hid in a corner. Tears of wrath
+      stood in his eyes. He had been made a fool of. He imagined the scene that
+      would go on when he came upon the street with the papers the next morning.
+      Freedom Smith would be there sitting in the old worn buggy and roaring so
+      that all the street would listen and laugh. &ldquo;Going to lie out in any green
+      pastures to-night, Sam?&rdquo; he would shout. &ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t you afraid you&rsquo;ll take
+      cold?&rdquo; By Geiger&rsquo;s drug store would stand Valmore and Telfer, eager to
+      join in the fun at his expense. Telfer would pound on the side of the
+      building with his cane and roar with laughter. Valmore would make a
+      trumpet of his hands and shout after the fleeing boy. &ldquo;Do you sleep out
+      alone in them green pastures?&rdquo; Freedom Smith would roar again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam got up and went out of the grocery. As he hurried along, blind with
+      wrath, he felt he would like a stand-up fight with some one. And, then,
+      hurrying and avoiding the people, he merged with the crowd on the street
+      and became a witness to the strange thing that happened that night in
+      Caxton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Main Street hushed people stood about in groups talking. The air was
+      heavy with excitement. Solitary figures went from group to group
+      whispering hoarsely. Mike McCarthy, the man who had denied God and who had
+      won a place for himself in the affection of the newsboy, had assaulted a
+      man with a pocket knife and had left him bleeding and wounded beside a
+      country road. Something big and sensational had happened in the life of
+      the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mike McCarthy and Sam were friends. For years the man had idled upon the
+      streets of the town, loitering about, boasting and talking. He had sat for
+      hours in a chair under a tree before the New Leland House, reading books,
+      doing tricks with cards, engaging in long discussions with John Telfer or
+      any who would stand up to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mike McCarthy got into trouble in a fight over a woman. A young farmer
+      living at the edge of Caxton had come home from the fields to find his
+      wife in the bold Irishman&rsquo;s arms and the two men had gone out of the house
+      together to fight in the road. The woman, weeping in the house, followed
+      to ask forgiveness of her husband. Running in the gathering darkness along
+      the road she had found him cut and bleeding terribly, lying in a ditch
+      under a hedge. On down the road she ran and appeared at the door of a
+      neighbour, screaming and calling for help.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of the fight in the road got to Caxton just as Sam came out of
+      the corner, back of the stove in Wildman&rsquo;s and appeared on the street. Men
+      ran from store to store and from group to group along the street saying
+      that the young farmer had died and that murder had been done. On a street
+      corner Windy McPherson harangued the crowd declaring that the men of
+      Caxton should arise in the defence of their homes and string the murderer
+      to a lamp post. Hop Higgins, driving a horse from Culvert&rsquo;s livery,
+      appeared on Main Street. &ldquo;He will be at the McCarthy farm,&rdquo; he shouted.
+      When several men, coming out of Geiger&rsquo;s drug store, stopped the marshal&rsquo;s
+      horse, saying, &ldquo;You will have trouble out there; you had better take
+      help,&rdquo; the little red-faced marshal with the crippled leg laughed. &ldquo;What
+      trouble?&rdquo; he asked&mdash;&ldquo;To get Mike McCarthy? I shall ask him to come
+      and he will come. The rest of that lot won&rsquo;t cut any figure. Mike can wrap
+      the entire McCarthy family around his finger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There were six of the McCarthy men, all, except Mike, silent, sullen men
+      who only talked when they were in liquor. Mike furnished the town&rsquo;s social
+      touch with the family. It was a strange family to live there in that fat,
+      corn-growing country, a family with something savage and primitive about
+      it, one that belonged among western mining camps or among the half savage
+      dwellers in deep alleys in cities, and the fact that it lived on a corn
+      farm in Iowa was, in the words of John Telfer, &ldquo;something monstrous in
+      Nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The McCarthy farm, lying some four miles east of Caxton, had once
+      contained a thousand acres of good corn-growing land. Lem McCarthy, the
+      father of the family, had inherited it from a brother, a gold miner, a
+      forty-niner, a sport owning fast horses, who planned to breed race horses
+      on the Iowa land. Lem had come out of the back streets of an eastern city,
+      bringing his brood of tall, silent, savage boys to live upon the land and,
+      like the forty-niner, to be a sport. Thinking the wealth that had come to
+      him vast beyond spending, he had plunged into horse racing and gambling.
+      When, within two years, five hundred acres of the farm had to be sold to
+      pay gambling debts, and the wide acres lay covered with weeds, Lem became
+      alarmed, and settled down to hard work, the boys working all day in the
+      field and at long intervals coming into town at night to get into trouble.
+      Having no mother or sister, and knowing that no Caxton woman could be
+      hired to go upon the place, they did their own housework; and on rainy
+      days sat about the old farmhouse playing cards and fighting. On other days
+      they would stand around the bar in Art Sherman&rsquo;s saloon in Piety Hollow
+      drinking until they had lost their savage silence and had become loud and
+      quarrelsome, going from there upon the streets to seek trouble. Once,
+      going into Hayner&rsquo;s restaurant, they took stacks of plates from shelves
+      back of the counter and, standing in the doorway, threw them at people
+      passing in the street, the crash of the breaking crockery accompanying
+      their roaring laughter. When they had driven the people to cover they got
+      upon their horses and with wild shouts raced up and down Main Street
+      between the rows of tied horses until Hop Higgins, the town marshal,
+      appeared, when they rode off into the country awakening the farmers along
+      the darkened road as they fled, shouting and singing, toward home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the McCarthy boys got into trouble in Caxton, old Lem McCarthy drove
+      into town and got them out of it, paying for the damage done and going
+      about declaring the boys meant no harm. When told to keep them out of town
+      he shook his head and said he would try.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mike McCarthy did not ride swearing and singing with the five brothers
+      along the dark road. He did not work all day in the hot corn fields. He
+      was the family gentleman, and, wearing good clothes, strolled instead upon
+      the street or loitered in the shade before the New Leland House. Mike had
+      been educated. For some years he had attended a college in Indiana from
+      which he was expelled for an affair with a woman. After his return from
+      college he stayed in Caxton, living at the hotel and making a pretence of
+      studying law in the office of old Judge Reynolds. He paid slight attention
+      to the study of law, but with infinite patience had so trained his hands
+      that he became wonderfully dexterous with coins and cards, plucking them
+      out of the air and making them appear in the shoes, the hats, and even in
+      the mouths, of bystanders. During the day he walked the streets looking at
+      the girl clerks in the stores, or stood upon the station platform waving
+      his hand to women passengers on passing trains. He told John Telfer that
+      the flattery of women was a lost art that he intended to restore. Mike
+      McCarthy carried in his pockets books which he read sitting in a chair
+      before the hotel or on the stones before store windows. When on Saturdays
+      the streets were filled with people, he stood on the corners giving
+      gratuitous performances of his magical art with cards and coins, and
+      eyeing country girls in the crowd. Once, a woman, the town stationer&rsquo;s
+      wife, shouted at him, calling him a lazy lout, whereupon he threw a coin
+      in the air, and when it did not come down rushed toward her shouting, &ldquo;She
+      has it in her stocking.&rdquo; When the stationer&rsquo;s wife ran into her shop and
+      banged the door the crowd laughed and shouted with delight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer had a liking for the tall, grey-eyed, loitering McCarthy and
+      sometimes sat with him discussing a novel or a poem; Sam in the background
+      listened eagerly. Valmore did not care for the man, shaking his head and
+      declaring that such a fellow could come to no good end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rest of the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this,
+      sunned himself in the town&rsquo;s displeasure. For the sake of the public furor
+      it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist, an
+      anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone cared
+      greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations of his
+      passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in Wildman&rsquo;s
+      grocery store he would stand whipping them into a frenzy by declaring for
+      free love, and vowing that he would have the best of any woman who gave
+      him the chance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For this man the frugal, hard working newsboy had conceived a regard
+      amounting to a passion. As he listened to McCarthy he got continuous
+      delightful little thrills. &ldquo;There is nothing he would not dare,&rdquo; thought
+      the boy. &ldquo;He is the freest, the boldest, the bravest man in town.&rdquo; When
+      the young Irishman, seeing the admiration in his eyes, flung him a silver
+      dollar saying, &ldquo;That is for your fine brown eyes, my boy; it I had them I
+      would have half the women in town after me,&rdquo; Sam kept the dollar in his
+      pocket and counted it a kind of treasure like the rose given a lover by
+      his sweetheart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was past eleven o&rsquo;clock when Hop Higgins returned to town with
+      McCarthy, driving quietly along the street and through an alley at the
+      back of the town hall. The crowd upon the street had broken up. Sam had
+      gone from one to another of the muttering groups, his heart quaking with
+      fear. Now he stood at the back of the mass of men gathered at the jail
+      door. An oil lamp, burning at the top of the post above the door, threw
+      dancing, flickering lights on the faces of the men before him. The thunder
+      storm that had threatened had not come, but the unnatural warm wind
+      continued and the sky overhead was inky black.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the alley, to the jail door, drove the town marshal, the young
+      McCarthy sitting in the buggy beside him. A man rushed forward to hold the
+      horse. McCarthy&rsquo;s face was chalky white. He laughed and shouted, raising
+      his hand toward the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Michael, son of God. I have cut a man with a knife so that his red
+      blood ran upon the ground. I am the son of God and this filthy jail shall
+      be my sanctuary. In there I shall talk aloud with my Father,&rdquo; he roared
+      hoarsely, shaking his fist at the crowd. &ldquo;Sons of this cesspool of
+      respectability, stay and hear! Send for your females and let them stand in
+      the presence of a man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking the white, wild-eyed man by the arm Marshal Higgins led him into
+      the jail, the clank of locks, the low murmur of the voice of Higgins and
+      the wild laughter of McCarthy floating out to the group of silent men
+      standing in the mud of the alley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson ran past the group of men to the side of the jail and
+      finding John Telfer and Valmore leaning silently against the wall of Tom
+      Folger&rsquo;s wagon shop slipped between them. Telfer put out his arm and laid
+      it upon the boy&rsquo;s shoulder. Hop Higgins, coming out of the jail, addressed
+      the crowd. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t answer if he talks,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;he is as crazy as a
+      loon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam moved closer to Telfer. The voice of the imprisoned man, loud, and
+      filled with a startling boldness, rolled out of the jail. He began
+      praying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hear me, Father Almighty, who has permitted this town of Caxton to exist
+      and has let me, Thy son, grow to manhood. I am Michael, Thy son. They have
+      put me in this jail where rats run across the floor and they stand in the
+      mud outside as I talk with Thee. Are you there, old Truepenny?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A breath of cold air blew up the alley followed by a flaw of rain. The
+      group under the flickering lamp by the jail entrance drew back against the
+      walls of the building. Sam could see them dimly, pressing closely against
+      the wall. The man in the jail laughed loudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had a philosophy of life, O Father,&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;I have seen men
+      and women here living year after year without children. I have seen them
+      hoarding pennies and denying Thee new life on which to work Thy will. To
+      these women I have gone secretly talking of carnal love. With them I have
+      been gentle and kind; them I have flattered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A roaring laugh broke from the lips of the imprisoned man. &ldquo;Are you there,
+      oh dwellers in the cesspool of respectability?&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;Do you stand
+      in the mud with cold feet listening? I have been with your wives. Eleven
+      Caxton wives without babes have I been with and it has been fruitless. The
+      twelfth woman I have just left, leaving her man in the road a bleeding
+      sacrifice to thee. I shall call out the names of the eleven. I shall have
+      revenge also upon the husbands of the women, some of whom wait with the
+      others in the mud outside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began calling off the names of Caxton wives. A shudder ran through the
+      body of the boy, sensitised by the new chill in the air and by the
+      excitement of the night. Among the men standing along the wall of the jail
+      a murmur arose. Again they grouped themselves under the flickering light
+      by the jail door, disregarding the rain. Valmore, stumbling out of the
+      darkness beside Sam, stood before Telfer. &ldquo;The boy should be going home,&rdquo;
+       he said; &ldquo;this isn&rsquo;t fit for him to hear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer laughed and drew Sam closer to him. &ldquo;He has heard enough lies in
+      this town,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Truth won&rsquo;t hurt him. I would not go myself, nor
+      would you, and the boy shall not go. This McCarthy has a brain. Although
+      he is half insane now he is trying to work something out. The boy and I
+      will stay to hear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice from the jail continued calling out the names of Caxton wives.
+      Voices in the group before the jail door began shouting: &ldquo;This should be
+      stopped. Let us tear down the jail.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McCarthy laughed aloud. &ldquo;They squirm, oh Father, they squirm; I have them
+      in the pit and I torture them,&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An ugly feeling of satisfaction came over Sam. He had a sense of the fact
+      that the names shouted from the jail would be repeated over and over
+      through the town. One of the women whose names had been called out had
+      stood with the evangelist at the back of the church trying to induce the
+      wife of the baker to rise and be counted in the fold with the lambs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rain, falling on the shoulders of the men by the jail door, changed to
+      hail, the air grew colder and the hailstones rattled on the roofs of
+      buildings. Some of the men joined Telfer and Valmore, talking in low,
+      excited voices. &ldquo;And Mary McKane, too, the hypocrite,&rdquo; Sam heard one of
+      them say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice inside the jail changed. Still praying, Mike McCarthy seemed
+      also to be talking to the group in the darkness outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sick of my life. I have sought leadership and have not found it. Oh
+      Father! Send down to men a new Christ, one to get hold of us, a modern
+      Christ with a pipe in his mouth who will swear and knock us about so that
+      we vermin who pretend to be made in Thy image will understand. Let him go
+      into churches and into courthouses, into cities, and into towns like this,
+      shouting, &lsquo;Be ashamed! Be ashamed of your cowardly concern over your
+      snivelling souls!&rsquo; Let him tell us that never will our lives, so miserably
+      lived, be repeated after our bodies lie rotting in the grave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sob broke from his lips and a lump came into Sam&rsquo;s throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh Father! help us men of Caxton to understand that we have only this,
+      our lives, this life so warm and hopeful and laughing in the sun, this
+      life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls
+      with their long legs and freckles on their noses, that are meant to carry
+      life within themselves, new life, kicking and stirring, and waking them at
+      night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice of the prayer broke. Wild sobs took the place of speech.
+      &ldquo;Father!&rdquo; shouted the broken voice, &ldquo;I have taken a life, a man that moved
+      and talked and whistled in the sunshine on winter mornings; I have
+      killed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice inside the jail became inaudible. Silence, broken by low sobs
+      from the jail, fell on the little dark alley and the listening men began
+      going silently away. The lump in Sam&rsquo;s throat grew larger. Tears stood in
+      his eyes. He went with Telfer and Valmore out of the alley and into the
+      street, the two men walking in silence. The rain had ceased and a cold
+      wind blew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy felt that he had been shriven. His mind, his heart, even his tired
+      body seemed strangely cleansed. He felt a new affection for Telfer and
+      Valmore. When Telfer began talking he listened eagerly, thinking that at
+      last he understood him and knew why men like Valmore, Wildman, Freedom
+      Smith, and Telfer loved each other and went on being friends year after
+      year in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings. He thought that he
+      had got hold of the idea of brotherhood that John Telfer talked of so
+      often and so eloquently. &ldquo;Mike McCarthy is only a brother who has gone the
+      dark road,&rdquo; he thought and felt a glow of pride in the thought and in the
+      apt expression of it in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Telfer, forgetting the boy, talked soberly to Valmore, the two men
+      stumbling along in the darkness intent upon their own thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is an odd thought,&rdquo; said Telfer and his voice seemed far away and
+      unnatural like the voice from the jail; &ldquo;it is an odd thought that but for
+      a quirk in the brain this Mike McCarthy might himself have been a kind of
+      Christ with a pipe in his mouth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Valmore stumbled and half fell in the darkness at a street crossing.
+      Telfer went on talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The world will some day grope its way into some kind of an understanding
+      of its extraordinary men. Now they suffer terribly. In success or in such
+      failures as has come to this imaginative, strangely perverted Irishman
+      their lot is pitiful. It is only the common, the plain, unthinking man who
+      slides peacefully through this troubled world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the house Jane McPherson sat waiting for her boy. She was thinking of
+      the scene in the church and a hard light was in her eyes. Sam went past
+      the sleeping room of his parents, where Windy McPherson snored peacefully,
+      and up the stairway to his own room. He undressed and, putting out the
+      light, knelt upon the floor. From the wild ravings of the man in the jail
+      he had got hold of something. In the midst of the blasphemy of Mike
+      McCarthy he had sensed a deep and abiding love of life. Where the church
+      had failed the bold sensualist succeeded. Sam felt that he could have
+      prayed in the presence of the entire town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Father!&rdquo; he cried, sending up his voice in the silence of the little
+      room, &ldquo;make me stick to the thought that the right living of this, my
+      life, is my duty to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By the door below, while Valmore waited on the sidewalk, Telfer talked to
+      Jane McPherson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted Sam to hear,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;He needs a religion. All young men
+      need a religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man like Mike McCarthy
+      keeps instinctively trying to justify himself before God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      John Telfer&rsquo;s friendship was a formative influence upon Sam McPherson. His
+      father&rsquo;s worthlessness and the growing realisation of the hardship of his
+      mother&rsquo;s position had given life a bitter taste in his mouth, and Telfer
+      sweetened it. He entered with zeal into Sam&rsquo;s thoughts and dreams, and
+      tried valiantly to arouse in the quiet, industrious, money-making boy some
+      of his own love of life and beauty. At night, as the two walked down
+      country roads, the man would stop and, waving his arms about, quote Poe or
+      Browning or, in another mood, would compel Sam&rsquo;s attention to the rare
+      smell of a hayfield or to a moonlit stretch of meadow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before people gathered on the streets he teased the boy, calling him a
+      little money grubber and saying, &ldquo;He is like a little mole that works
+      underground. As the mole goes for a worm so this boy goes for a five-cent
+      piece. I have watched him. A travelling man goes out of town leaving a
+      stray dime or nickel here and within an hour it is in this boy&rsquo;s pocket. I
+      have talked to banker Walker of him. He trembles lest his vaults become
+      too small to hold the wealth of this young Croesus. The day will come when
+      he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For all his public teasing of the boy Telfer had the genius to adopt a
+      different attitude when they were alone together. Then he talked to him
+      openly and freely as he talked to Valmore and Freedom Smith and to other
+      cronies of his on the streets of Caxton. Walking along the road he would
+      point with his cane to the town and say, &ldquo;You and that mother of yours
+      have more of the real stuff in you than the rest of the boys and mothers
+      of the town put together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In all Caxton Telfer was the only man who knew books and who took them
+      seriously. Sam sometimes found his attitude toward them puzzling and would
+      stand with open mouth listening as Telfer swore or laughed at a book as he
+      did at Valmore or Freedom Smith. He had a fine portrait of Browning which
+      he kept hung in the stable and before this he would stand, his legs spread
+      apart, and his head tilted to one side, talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A rich old sport you are, eh?&rdquo; he would say, grinning. &ldquo;Getting yourself
+      discussed by women and college professors in clubs, eh? You old fraud!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Toward Mary Underwood, the school teacher who had become Sam&rsquo;s friend and
+      with whom the boy sometimes walked and talked, Telfer had no charity. Mary
+      Underwood was a sort of cinder in the eyes of Caxton. She was the only
+      child of Silas Underwood, the town harness maker, who once had worked in a
+      shop belonging to Windy McPherson. After the business failure of Windy he
+      had started independently and for a time did well, sending his daughter to
+      a school in Massachusetts. Mary did not understand the people of Caxton
+      and the people misunderstood and distrusted her. Taking no part in the
+      life of the town and keeping to herself and to her books she awoke a kind
+      of fear in others. Because she did not join them at church suppers, or go
+      from porch to porch gossiping with other women through the long summer
+      evenings, they thought her something abnormal. On Sundays she sat alone in
+      her pew at church and on Saturday afternoons, come storm, come sunshine,
+      she walked on country roads and through the woods accompanied by a collie
+      dog. She was a small woman with a straight, slender figure and had fine
+      blue eyes filled with changing lights, hidden by the eye-glasses she
+      almost constantly wore. Her lips were very full and red, and she sat with
+      them parted so that the edges of her fine teeth showed. Her nose was
+      large, and a fine reddish-brown colour glowed in her cheeks. Though
+      different, she had, like Jane McPherson, a habit of silence; and under her
+      silence, she, like Sam&rsquo;s mother, possessed an unusually strong and
+      vigorous mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a child she was a sort of half invalid and had not been on friendly
+      footing with other children. It was then that her habit of silence and
+      reticence had been established. The years in the school in Massachusetts
+      restored her health but did not break this habit. She came home and took
+      the place in the schools to earn money with which to take her back East,
+      dreaming of a position as instructor in an eastern college. She was that
+      rare thing, a woman scholar, loving scholarship for its own sake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood&rsquo;s position in the town and in the schools was insecure. Out
+      of her silent, independent way of life had sprung a misunderstanding that,
+      at least once, had taken definite form and had come near driving her from
+      the town and schools. That she did not succumb to the storm of criticism
+      that for some weeks beat about her head was due to her habit of silence
+      and to a determination to get her own way in the face of everything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a suggestion of scandal that had put the grey hairs upon her head.
+      The scandal had blown over before the time of her friendship for Sam, but
+      he had known of it. In those days he knew of everything that went on in
+      the town&mdash;his quick ears and eyes missed nothing. More than once he
+      had heard the men waiting to be shaved in Sawyer&rsquo;s barber shop speak of
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tale ran that she had been involved in an affair with a real estate
+      agent who had afterward left town. It was said that the man, a tall,
+      fine-looking fellow, had been in love with Mary and had wanted to desert
+      his wife and go away with her. One night he had driven to Mary&rsquo;s house in
+      a closed buggy and the two had driven into the country. They had sat for
+      hours in the covered buggy at the side of the road and talked, and people
+      driving past had seen them there talking together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then she had got out of the buggy and walked home alone through snow
+      drifts. The next day she was at school as usual. When told of it the
+      school superintendent, a puttering old fellow with vacant eyes, had shaken
+      his head in alarm and declared that it must be looked into. He called Mary
+      into his little narrow office in the school building, but lost courage
+      when she sat before him, and said nothing. The man in the barber shop, who
+      repeated the tale, said that the real estate man drove on to a distant
+      station and took a train to the city, and that some days later he came
+      back to Caxton and moved his family out of town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam dismissed the story from his mind. Having begun a friendship for Mary
+      he put the man in the barber shop into a class with Windy McPherson and
+      thought of him as a pretender and liar who talked for the sake of talk. He
+      remembered with a shock the crude levity with which the loafers in the
+      shop had greeted the repetition of the tale. Their comments had come back
+      to his mind as he walked through the streets with his newspapers and had
+      given him a kind of jolt. He went along under the trees thinking of the
+      sunlight falling upon the grey hair as they walked together on summer
+      afternoons, and bit his lip and opened and closed his fist convulsively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During Mary&rsquo;s second year in the Caxton schools her mother died, and at
+      the end of another year, her father, failing in the harness business, Mary
+      became a fixture in the schools. The house at the edge of the town, the
+      property of her mother, had come down to her and she lived there with an
+      old aunt. After the passing of the wind of scandal concerning the real
+      estate man the town lost interest in her. She was thirty-six at the time
+      of her first friendship with Sam and lived alone among her books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had been deeply moved by her friendship. It had seemed to him
+      something significant that grown people with affairs of their own should
+      be so in earnest about his future as she and Telfer were. Boylike, he
+      counted it a tribute to himself rather than to the winsome youth in him,
+      and was made proud by it. Having no real feeling for books, and only
+      pretending to have out of a desire to please, he sometimes went from one
+      to the other of his two friends, passing off their opinions as his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this trick Telfer invariably caught him. &ldquo;That is not your notion,&rdquo; he
+      would shout, &ldquo;you have it from that school teacher. It is the opinion of a
+      woman. Their opinions, like the books they sometimes write, are founded on
+      nothing. They are not the real things. Women know nothing. Men only care
+      for them because they have not had what they want from them. No woman is
+      really big&mdash;except maybe my woman, Eleanor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam continued to be much in the company of Mary, Telfer grew more
+      bitter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would have you observe women&rsquo;s minds and avoid letting them influence
+      your own,&rdquo; he told the boy. &ldquo;They live in a world of unrealities. They
+      like even vulgar people in books, but shrink from the simple, earthy folk
+      about them. That school teacher is so. Is she like me? Does she, while
+      loving books, love also the very smell of human life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a way Telfer&rsquo;s attitude toward the kindly little school teacher became
+      Sam&rsquo;s attitude. Although they walked and talked together the course of
+      study she had planned for him he never took up and as he grew to know her
+      better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced appealed to him less
+      and less. He thought that she, as Telfer held, lived in a world of
+      illusion and unreality and said so. When she lent him books, he put them
+      in his pocket and did not read them. When he did read, he thought the
+      books reminded him of something that hurt him. They were in some way false
+      and pretentious. He thought they were like his father. One day he tried
+      reading aloud to Telfer from a book Mary Underwood had lent him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story was one of a poetic man with long, unclean fingernails who went
+      among people preaching the doctrine of beauty. It began with a scene on a
+      hillside in a rainstorm where the poetic man sat under a tent writing a
+      letter to his sweetheart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer was beside himself. Jumping from his seat under a tree by the
+      roadside he waved his arms and shouted:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop! Stop it! Do not go on with it. The story lies. A man could not
+      write love letters under the circumstances and he was a fool to pitch his
+      tent on a hillside. A man in a tent on a hillside in a storm would be cold
+      and wet and getting the rheumatism. To be writing letters he would need to
+      be an unspeakable ass. He had better be out digging a trench to keep the
+      water from running through his tent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Waving his arms, Telfer went off up the road and Sam followed thinking him
+      altogether right, and, if later in life he learned that there are men who
+      could write love letters on a piece of housetop in a flood, he did not
+      know it then and the least suggestion of windiness or pretence lay heavy
+      in his stomach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer had a vast enthusiasm for Bellamy&rsquo;s &ldquo;Looking Backward,&rdquo; and read it
+      aloud to his wife on Sunday afternoons, sitting under the apple trees in
+      the garden. They had a fund of little personal jokes and sayings that they
+      were forever laughing over, and she had infinite delight in his comments
+      on the life and people of Caxton, but did not share his love of books.
+      When she sometimes went to sleep in her chair during the Sunday afternoon
+      readings he poked her with his cane and laughingly told her to wake up and
+      listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning&rsquo;s verses his
+      favourites were &ldquo;A Light Woman&rdquo; and &ldquo;Fra Lippo Lippi,&rdquo; and he would recite
+      these aloud with great gusto. He declared Mark Twain the greatest man in
+      the world and in certain moods he would walk the road beside Sam reciting
+      over and over one or two lines of verse, often this from Poe:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  Helen, thy beauty is to me
+  Like some Nicean bark of yore.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Then, stopping and turning upon the boy, he would demand whether or not
+      the writing of such lines wasn&rsquo;t worth living a life for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer had a pack of dogs that always went with them on their walks at
+      night and he had for them long Latin names that Sam could never remember.
+      One summer be bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and gave great
+      attention to the colt, which he named Bellamy Boy, trotting him up and
+      down a little driveway by the side of his house for hours at a time and
+      declaring he would be a great trotting horse. He could recite the colt&rsquo;s
+      pedigree with great gusto and when he had been talking to Sam of some book
+      he would repay the boy&rsquo;s attention by saying, &ldquo;You, my boy, are as far
+      superior to the run of boys about town as the colt, Bellamy Boy, is
+      superior to the farm horses that are hitched along Main Street on Saturday
+      afternoons.&rdquo; And then, with a wave of his hand and a look of much
+      seriousness on his face, he would add, &ldquo;And for the same reason. You have
+      been, like him, under a master trainer of youth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening Sam, now grown to man&rsquo;s stature and full of the awkwardness
+      and self-consciousness of his new growth, was sitting on a cracker barrel
+      at the back of Wildman&rsquo;s grocery. It was a summer evening and a breeze
+      blew through the open doors swaying the hanging oil lamps that burned and
+      sputtered overhead. As usual he was listening in silence to the talk that
+      went on among the men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Standing with legs wide apart and from time to time jabbing with his cane
+      at Sam&rsquo;s legs, John Telfer held forth on the subject of love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a theme that poets do well to write of,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;In writing
+      of it they avoid the necessity of embracing it. In trying for a
+      well-turned line they forget to look at well-turned ankles. He who sings
+      most passionately of love has been in love the least; he woos the goddess
+      of poesy and only gets into trouble when he, like John Keats, turns to the
+      daughter of a villager and tries to live the lines he has written.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stuff and nonsense,&rdquo; roared Freedom Smith, who had been sitting tilted
+      far back in a chair with his feet against the cold stove, smoking a short,
+      black pipe, and who now brought his feet down upon the floor with a bang.
+      Admiring Telfer&rsquo;s flow of words he pretended to be filled with scorn. &ldquo;The
+      night is too hot for eloquence,&rdquo; he bellowed. &ldquo;If you must be eloquent
+      talk of ice cream or mint juleps or recite a verse about the old swimming
+      pool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer, wetting his finger, thrust it into the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The wind is in the north-west; the beasts roar; we will have a storm,&rdquo; he
+      said, winking at Valmore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Banker Walker came into the store, followed by his daughter. She was a
+      small, dark-skinned girl with black, quick eyes. Seeing Sam sitting with
+      swinging legs upon the cracker barrel she spoke to her father and went out
+      of the store. At the sidewalk she stopped and, turning, made a quick
+      motion with her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam jumped off the cracker barrel and strolled toward the street door. A
+      flush was on his cheeks. His mouth felt hot and dry. He went with extreme
+      deliberateness, stopping to bow to the banker, and for a moment lingering
+      to read a newspaper that lay upon the cigar case, to avoid the comments he
+      feared his going might excite among the men by the stove. In his heart he
+      trembled lest the girl should have disappeared down the street, and with
+      his eyes, he looked guiltily at the banker, who had joined the group at
+      the back of the store and who now stood listening to the talk, while he
+      read from a list held in his hand and Wildman went here and there doing up
+      packages and repeating aloud the names of articles called off by the
+      banker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of the lighted business section of Main Street, Sam found the
+      girl waiting for him. She began to tell of the subterfuge by which she had
+      escaped her father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told him I would go home with my sister,&rdquo; she said, tossing her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking hold of the boy&rsquo;s hand, she led him along the shaded street. For
+      the first time Sam walked in the company of one of the strange beings that
+      had begun to bring him uneasy nights, and overcome with the wonder of it
+      the blood climbed through his body and made his head reel so that he
+      walked in silence unable to understand his own emotions. He felt the soft
+      hand of the girl with delight; his heart pounded against the walls of his
+      chest and a choking sensation gripped at his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking along the street, past lighted residences where the low voices of
+      women in talk greeted his ears, Sam was inordinately proud. He thought
+      that he should like to turn and walk with this girl through the lighted
+      Main Street. Had she not chosen him from among all the boys of the town;
+      had she not, with a flutter of her little, white hand, called to him with
+      a call that he wondered the men upon the cracker barrels had not heard?
+      Her boldness and his own took his breath away. He could not talk. His
+      tongue seemed paralysed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down the street went the boy and girl, loitering in the shadows, hurrying
+      past the dim oil lamps at street crossings, getting from each other wave
+      after wave of exquisite little thrills. Neither spoke. They were beyond
+      words. Had they not together done this daring thing?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the shadow of a tree they stopped and stood facing each other; the girl
+      looked at the ground and stood facing the boy. Putting out his hand he
+      laid it upon her shoulder. In the darkness on the other side of the street
+      a man stumbled homeward along a board sidewalk. The lights of Main Street
+      glowed in the distance. Sam drew the girl toward him. She raised her head.
+      Their lips met, and then, throwing her arms about his neck, she kissed him
+      again and again eagerly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;s return to Wildman&rsquo;s was marked by extreme caution. Although he had
+      been absent but fifteen minutes it seemed to him that hours must have
+      passed and he would not have been surprised to see the stores locked and
+      darkness settled down on Main Street. It was inconceivable that the grocer
+      could still be wrapping packages for banker Walker. Worlds had been
+      remade. Manhood had come to him. Why! the man should have wrapped the
+      entire store, package after package, and sent it to the ends of the earth.
+      He lingered in the shadows at the first of the store lights where ages
+      before he had gone, a mere boy, to meet her, a mere girl, and looked with
+      wonder at the lighted way before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam crossed the street and, from the front of Sawyer&rsquo;s barber shop, looked
+      into Wildman&rsquo;s. He felt like a spy looking into the camp of an enemy.
+      There before him sat the men into whose midst he had it in his power to
+      cast a thunderbolt. He might walk to the door and say, truthfully enough,
+      &ldquo;Here before you is a boy that by the flutter of a white hand has been
+      made into a man; here is one who has wrung the heart of womankind and
+      eaten his fill at the tree of the knowledge of life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the grocery the talk still continued among the men upon the cracker
+      barrels who seemed unconscious of the boy&rsquo;s slinking entrance. Indeed,
+      their talk had sunk. From talking of love and of poets they talked of corn
+      and of steers. Banker Walker, his packages of groceries lying on the
+      counter, smoked a cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can fairly hear the corn growing to-night,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It wants but
+      another shower or two and we shall have a record crop. I plan to feed a
+      hundred steers at my farm out Rabbit Road this winter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy climbed again upon a cracker barrel and tried to look unconcerned
+      and interested in the talk. Still his heart thumped; still a throbbing
+      went on in his wrists. He turned and looked at the floor hoping his
+      agitation would pass unnoticed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The banker, taking up the packages, walked out at the door. Valmore and
+      Freedom Smith went over to the livery barn for a game of pinochle. And
+      John Telfer, twirling his cane and calling to a troup of dogs that
+      loitered in an alley back of the store, took Sam for a walk into the
+      country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will continue this talk of love,&rdquo; said Telfer, striking at weeds along
+      the road with his cane and from time to time calling sharply to the dogs
+      that, filled with delight at being abroad, ran growling and tumbling over
+      each other in the dusty road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Freedom Smith is a sample of life in this town. At the word love he
+      drops his feet upon the floor and pretends to be filled with disgust. He
+      will talk of corn or steers or of the stinking hides that he buys, but at
+      the mention of the word love he is like a hen that has seen a hawk in the
+      sky. He runs about in circles making a fuss. &lsquo;Here! Here! Here!&rsquo; he cries,
+      &lsquo;you are making public something that should be kept hidden. You are doing
+      in the light of day what should only be done with a shamed face in a
+      darkened room.&rsquo; Why, boy, if I were a woman in this town I would not stand
+      it&mdash;I would go to New York, to France, to Paris&mdash;To be wooed for
+      but a passing moment by a shame-faced yokel without art&mdash;uh&mdash;it
+      is unthinkable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man and the boy walked in silence. The dogs, scenting a rabbit,
+      disappeared across a long pasture, their master letting them go. From time
+      to time he threw back his head and took long breaths of the night air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not like banker Walker,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;He thinks of the growing corn
+      in terms of fat steers feeding on the Rabbit Run farm; I think of it as
+      something majestic. I see the long corn rows with the men and the horses
+      half hidden, hot and breathless, and I think of a vast river of life. I
+      catch a breath of the flame that was in the mind of the man who said, &lsquo;The
+      land is flowing with milk and honey.&rsquo; I am made happy by my thoughts not
+      by the dollars clinking in my pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then in the fall when the corn stands shocked I see another picture.
+      Here and there in companies stand the armies of the corn. It puts a ring
+      in my voice to look at them. &lsquo;These orderly armies has mankind brought out
+      of chaos,&rsquo; I say to myself. &lsquo;On a smoking black ball flung by the hand of
+      God out of illimitable space has man stood up these armies to defend his
+      home against the grim attacking armies of want.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer stopped and stood in the road with his legs spread apart. He took
+      off his hat and throwing back his head laughed up at the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Freedom Smith should hear me now,&rdquo; he cried, rocking back and forth with
+      laughter and switching his cane at the boy&rsquo;s legs so that Sam had to hop
+      merrily about in the road to avoid it. &ldquo;Flung by the hand of God out of
+      illimitable space&mdash;eh! not bad, eh! I should be in Congress. I am
+      wasted here. I am throwing priceless eloquence to dogs who prefer to chase
+      rabbits and to a boy who is the worst little money grubber in the town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The midsummer madness that had seized Telfer passed and for a time he
+      walked in silence. Suddenly, putting his arm on the boy&rsquo;s shoulder, he
+      stopped and pointed to where a faint light in the sky marked the lighted
+      town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are good people,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but their ways are not my ways or your
+      ways. You will go out of the town. You have genius. You will be a man of
+      finance. I have watched you. You are not niggardly and you do not cheat
+      and lie&mdash;result&mdash;you will not be a little business man. What
+      have you? You have the gift of seeing dollars where the rest of the boys
+      of the town see nothing and you are tireless after those dollars&mdash;you
+      will be a big man of dollars, it is plain.&rdquo; Into his voice came a touch of
+      bitterness. &ldquo;I also was marked out. Why do I carry a cane? why do I not
+      buy a farm and raise steers? I am the most worthless thing alive. I have
+      the touch of genius without the energy to make it count.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;s mind that had been inflamed by the kiss of the girl cooled in the
+      presence of Telfer. In the summer madness of the talking man there was
+      something soothing to the fever in his blood. He followed the words
+      eagerly, seeing pictures, getting thrills, filled with happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the edge of town a buggy passed the walking pair. In the buggy sat a
+      young farmer, his arm about the waist of a girl, her head upon his
+      shoulder. Far in the distance sounded the faint call of the dogs. Sam and
+      Telfer sat down on a grassy bank under a tree while Telfer rolled and
+      lighted a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I promised, I will talk to you of love,&rdquo; he said, making a wide sweep
+      with his arm each time as he put his cigarette into his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grassy bank on which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot
+      days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind
+      them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of
+      serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer and his
+      face became serious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My foolishness is more than half earnest,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I think that a man
+      or boy who has set for himself a task had better let women and girls
+      alone. If he be a man of genius, he has a purpose independent of all the
+      world, and should cut and slash and pound his way toward his mark,
+      forgetting every one, particularly the woman that would come to grips with
+      him. She also has a mark toward which she goes. She is at war with him and
+      has a purpose that is not his purpose. She believes that the pursuit of
+      women is an end for a life. For all they now condemn Mike McCarthy who
+      went to the asylum because of them and who, while loving life, came near
+      to taking life, the women of Caxton do not condemn his madness for
+      themselves; they do not blame him for loitering away his good years or for
+      making an abortive mess of his good brain. While he made an art of the
+      pursuit of women they applauded secretly. Did not twelve of them accept
+      the challenge thrown out by his eyes as he loitered in the streets?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man, who had begun talking quietly and seriously, raised his voice and
+      waved the lighted cigarette in the air and the boy who had begun to think
+      again of the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker listened attentively.
+      The barking of the dogs grew nearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you as a boy can get from me, a grown man, an understanding of the
+      purpose of women you will not have lived in this town for nothing. Set
+      your mark at money making if you will, but drive at that. Let yourself but
+      go and a sweet wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd or a pair of
+      little feet running over a dance floor will retard your growth for years.
+      No man or boy can grow toward the purpose of a life while he thinks of
+      women. Let him try it and he will be undone. What is to him a passing
+      humour is to them an end. They are diabolically clever. They will run and
+      stop and run and stop again, keeping just without his reach. He sees them
+      here and there about him. His mind is filled with vague, delicious
+      thoughts that come out of the very air; before he realises what he has
+      done he has spent his years in vain pursuit and turning finds himself old
+      and undone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer began jabbing at the ground with his stick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had my chance. In New York I had money to live on and time to have made
+      an artist of myself. I won prize after prize. The master, walking up and
+      down back of us, lingered longest over my easel. There was a fellow sat
+      beside me who had nothing. I made sport of him and called him Sleepy Jock
+      after a dog we used to have about our house here in Caxton. Now I am here
+      idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only last week I saw in
+      a paper that he had won a place among the world&rsquo;s great artists by a
+      picture he has painted. In the school I watched for a look in the eyes of
+      the girl students and went about with them night after night winning, like
+      Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy Jock had the best of it. He did
+      not look about with open eyes but kept peering instead at the face of the
+      master. My days were full of small successes. I could wear clothes. I
+      could make soft-eyed girls turn to look at me in a dance hall. I remember
+      a night. We students gave a dance and Sleepy Jock came. He went about
+      asking for dances and the girls laughed and told him they had none to
+      give, that the dances were taken. I followed him and had my ears filled
+      with flattery and my card with names. In riding the wave of small success
+      I got the habit of small success. When I could not catch the line I wanted
+      to make a drawing live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my
+      arm, went for a day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I
+      overheard two women talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy
+      for a week.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me?
+      Let me tell you. It has brought me to this&mdash;that at fifty I, who
+      might have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of
+      beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a
+      flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising corn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small success
+      and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you that I got it
+      when I saw it lurking in a woman&rsquo;s eyes and heard the pleasant little
+      songs that lull to sleep upon a woman&rsquo;s lips.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy, sitting upon the grassy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of
+      life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare
+      silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at night,
+      of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little
+      blue-eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith&rsquo;s home and of
+      how he had gone at night to stand under her window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Caxton adolescent love had about it a virility befitting a land that
+      raised so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers through
+      the streets to be loaded upon cars. Men and women went their ways
+      believing, with characteristic American what-boots-it attitude toward the
+      needs of childhood, that it was well for growing boys and girls to be much
+      alone together. To leave them alone together was a principle with them.
+      When a young man called upon his sweetheart, her parents sat in the
+      presence of the two with apologetic eyes and presently disappeared leaving
+      them alone together. When boys&rsquo; and girls&rsquo; parties were given in Caxton
+      houses, parents went away leaving the children to shift for themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now have a good time and don&rsquo;t tear the house down,&rdquo; they said, going off
+      upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Left to themselves the children played kissing games and young men and
+      tall half-formed girls sat on the front porches in the darkness, thrilled
+      and half frightened, getting through their instincts, crudely and without
+      guidance, their first peep at the mystery of life. They kissed
+      passionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds fevered
+      and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing
+      aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a
+      kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as a
+      drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on the
+      next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost their
+      keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men about the
+      station and in the stores, they went slinking through the streets in
+      groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said, &ldquo;It is the
+      loutish age.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to
+      increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to
+      the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and
+      to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now sat
+      musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to do with
+      the Walker girl. He remembered his sister&rsquo;s affair with a young farmer and
+      shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the shoulder of the
+      man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the rolling fields
+      stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came Telfer&rsquo;s speech. So
+      vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the armies of standing corn which
+      men had set up in the fields to protect themselves against the march of
+      pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the picture in his mind as he followed
+      the sense of Telfer&rsquo;s talk, thought that all society had resolved itself
+      into a few sturdy souls who went on and on regardless, and a hunger to
+      make of himself such another arose engulfing him. The desire within him
+      seemed so compelling that he turned and haltingly tried to express what
+      was in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will try,&rdquo; he stammered, &ldquo;I will try to be a man. I will try to not
+      have anything to do with them&mdash;with women. I will work and make money&mdash;and&mdash;and&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the
+      ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Hell with women and girls,&rdquo; he burst forth as though throwing
+      something distasteful out of his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits,
+      came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the grassy bank,
+      covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his sensitive
+      nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. His <i>sang froid</i> had
+      returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the dogs he
+      cried joyfully, &ldquo;We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy, and dog.
+      We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked into bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to him.
+      For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun come up
+      hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the streets in
+      the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from the north came
+      into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on the deserted
+      little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry
+      with his work that they might get back into the warm stale air of the
+      smoking car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become a
+      man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some subtle
+      way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that to make money
+      and to have money would in some way make up for the old half-forgotten
+      humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and would set it on a
+      more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had provided, grew and
+      influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly he kept at his efforts to
+      get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of dollars. Jane McPherson had
+      herself a passion for frugality. In spite of Windy&rsquo;s incompetence and her
+      own growing ill health, she would not permit the family to go into debt,
+      and although, in the long hard winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush
+      until his mind revolted at the thought of a corn field, yet was the rent
+      of the little house paid on the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to
+      increase the totals in the yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the
+      death of his wife had lived in a loft above his shop and who was a
+      blacksmith of the old days, a workman first and a money maker later, did
+      not despise the thought of gain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is money makes the mare go,&rdquo; he said with a kind of reverence as
+      banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of
+      Wildman&rsquo;s grocery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of John Telfer&rsquo;s attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain. The
+      man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right,&rdquo; he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express
+      opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly that
+      the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their
+      achievements, &ldquo;Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big world!
+      Get your name up for a modern, high-class American!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to berate
+      the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that the day
+      would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning, he shouted,
+      &ldquo;Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old clerkliness lies
+      asleep!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who
+      had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a man,
+      was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they talked
+      to him of the city and of the money to be made there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the place for a live young man,&rdquo; they said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their
+      affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into his
+      nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the great ways
+      filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching the sky, the men
+      running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks going on year after
+      year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of, and yet not
+      understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises that supported
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of
+      life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a
+      sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing, had
+      he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he not
+      introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the Saturday
+      night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the totals in
+      the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He felt within
+      him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and would do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will be richer than any man in town here,&rdquo; he declared in his pride. &ldquo;I
+      will be richer than Ed Walker.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks in
+      the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn venders,
+      for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses close by the
+      beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the farmers, and the
+      labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth to mingle with their
+      fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores, the sidewalks, and
+      drinking places, and men stood about in groups talking while young girls
+      with their lovers walked up and down. In the hall over Geiger&rsquo;s drug store
+      a dance went on and the voice of the caller-off rose above the clatter of
+      voices and the stamping of horses in the street. Now and then a fight
+      broke out among the roisterers in Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was
+      killed with a knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon,&rdquo; he said, pushing a paper into
+      the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. &ldquo;Recipes for cooking new dishes,&rdquo; he
+      urged to the farmer&rsquo;s wife. &ldquo;There is a page of new fashions in dress,&rdquo; he
+      told the young girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and
+      the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Saturday
+      paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day&rsquo;s business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it was on a Saturday night that he decided to drop paper selling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will take you into business with me,&rdquo; announced Freedom Smith, stopping
+      him as he hurried by. &ldquo;You are getting too old to sell papers and you know
+      too much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday
+      night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year he
+      had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he nodded
+      his head as he hurried away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the end of romance,&rdquo; shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom Smith
+      before Geiger&rsquo;s drug store and who had heard the offer. &ldquo;A boy, who has
+      seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe and
+      Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am overcome
+      by the thought.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to
+      Sam of the matter at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place,&rdquo; he
+      declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time to
+      time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. &ldquo;For any boy I put
+      money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who despise
+      money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she puts into the
+      selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been the making of
+      her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without the millinery
+      business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon clothes and with it
+      she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the
+      ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking
+      thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the
+      boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret
+      regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by
+      throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making
+      the words roll and tumble from his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes
+      many virtues that are forever on men&rsquo;s lips,&rdquo; he declared fiercely as
+      though trying to down an opponent. &ldquo;It is one of the virtues that proves
+      man not a savage. It has lifted him up&mdash;not money-making, but the
+      power to make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and
+      destroys fear. Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It
+      brings into men&rsquo;s lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to
+      go adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
+      wealth,&rdquo; he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. &ldquo;No doubt the
+      things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct
+      to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty,
+      the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of
+      the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the
+      defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man&rsquo;s
+      city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at
+      the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and
+      I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not
+      acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables him to get on, may
+      build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is diseased and decaying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his
+      eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that makes
+      our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for shrewd
+      money getting or it will destroy itself,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;And the really
+      great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve in
+      garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages on Fifth
+      Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for yourself. Visit
+      the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to one that you will
+      find him not only incapable in money getting but also incapable in the
+      very art for which he starves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer
+      for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted a
+      chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and hides
+      he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged persistency
+      with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank had caught
+      Freedom&rsquo;s imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty
+      dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn
+      business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with
+      the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business,
+      backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the
+      cashier telling of Sam&rsquo;s record as a depositor, and the seven hundred
+      dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with Freedom,
+      Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his savings as he
+      had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was impressed. He
+      thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a week Sam had seen
+      the silent suggestive power of cash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to more
+      than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have two-thirds
+      of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other hand was to
+      furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam was to take care
+      of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things bought were to be fixed
+      each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at less than the prices named
+      two-thirds of the savings went to him. The arrangement was suggested by
+      Sam, who thought he would make more from the saving than from the wage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice,
+      roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great
+      inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man,
+      woman and child he knew and liked. &ldquo;Old Maybe-Not&rdquo; he called Windy
+      McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed
+      rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low
+      phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip in
+      the top. To Sam&rsquo;s knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed
+      during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying.
+      Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar until
+      the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him. And then
+      haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his way while the
+      farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton&rsquo;s best
+      streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked
+      him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing
+      and roaring about it. &ldquo;Good morning, Mary,&rdquo; he would shout at the neat
+      German woman across the street. &ldquo;Wait and you&rsquo;ll see me clean up about
+      here. I&rsquo;m going at it right now. I&rsquo;m going to brush the flies off the
+      fence first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the
+      county.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and agricultural
+      implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard, gathering rust and
+      decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the lot were a half dozen
+      buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction engine, a mowing machine,
+      several farm wagons and other farm tools gone beyond naming. Every few
+      days he came home bringing a new prize. They overflowed the yard and crept
+      onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell any of this stuff. He had at
+      one time sixteen sets of harness all broken and unrepaired in the barn and
+      in a shed back of the house. A great flock of chickens and two or three
+      pigs wandered about among this junk and all the children of the
+      neighbourhood joined Freedom&rsquo;s four and ran howling and shouting over and
+      under the mass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom&rsquo;s wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house. She
+      had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally stood
+      at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at evening as he
+      stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both she and Freedom
+      treated him with great respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling. He was
+      a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very systematically
+      and within a year more than doubling the bulk of Freedom&rsquo;s purchases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a little of Windy McPherson&rsquo;s grotesque pretentiousness in every
+      man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of it. He
+      let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value of their
+      goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they had recovered
+      from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam&rsquo;s day, farmers did not
+      watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets were not systematised
+      and regulated as they were later, and the skill of the buyer was of the
+      first importance. Having the skill, Sam used it constantly to put money
+      into his pockets, but in some way kept the confidence and respect of the
+      men with whom he traded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading
+      ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the
+      streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy,&rdquo; he would shout to the
+      loafers in the store.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his own
+      affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom&rsquo;s affairs,
+      but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and apples, butter
+      and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working always to swell his
+      commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business and many times
+      profited little, but the two liked and respected each other and it was
+      through Freedom&rsquo;s efforts that Sam finally got out of Caxton and into
+      larger affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam stood
+      taking the harness off his horse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is a chance for you, my boy,&rdquo; he said, putting his hand
+      affectionately on Sam&rsquo;s shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his
+      voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the
+      things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had replied
+      making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might hope for in
+      Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for
+      him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at
+      last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in
+      the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the
+      door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb
+      to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told him that
+      in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and filled with
+      uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom&rsquo;s stable wishing
+      that he also might be gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken
+      from the horse upon a peg in the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will be glad to go,&rdquo; he said heavily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who had
+      come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man of eighteen.
+      He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago company because of
+      his affection for the boy and because he believed him capable of something
+      more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence holding the lantern
+      aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the yard, filled with
+      regrets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who,
+      putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her
+      eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street,
+      Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From a
+      street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could see
+      them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom&rsquo;s hand and the
+      slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving
+      March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom&rsquo;s hand. At the
+      front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on
+      the gate and looking at the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall have a rain,&rdquo; he said in a quavering voice, as though giving a
+      decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an answer
+      went along a narrow path into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The incident brought a smile to Sam&rsquo;s lips followed by a kind of weariness
+      of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had, day after
+      day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking at the sky.
+      The man was one of Sam&rsquo;s old newspaper customers who stood as a kind of
+      figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he had been a
+      gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part in more than
+      one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he had come to end
+      his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself by keeping year
+      after year a carefully tabulated record of weather variations. Once or
+      twice a month during the warm season he stumbled into Wildman&rsquo;s and,
+      sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the accuracy of his records and
+      the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at his heels. In his present mood
+      the endless sameness and uneventfulness of the man&rsquo;s life seemed to Sam
+      amusing and in some way sad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point to
+      a day&mdash;to look forward to and depend upon that&mdash;what
+      deadliness!&rdquo; he thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt
+      with pleasure the letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much
+      of the big outside world to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he
+      felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought
+      on by his mother&rsquo;s approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of
+      confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost cheerful.
+      The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom was renewed
+      by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching a
+      mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer,&rdquo; he
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three years in Freedom Smith&rsquo;s service had taught Sam not to doubt his
+      ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his way. He
+      knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business man, one of
+      the men who direct and control the affairs in which they are concerned
+      because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He recalled with
+      pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped calling him a bright
+      boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these
+      things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old man
+      he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his mother&rsquo;s life
+      had been as barren as that of the man who depended for companionship upon
+      a dog and a thermometer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo; he said to himself, pursuing the thought, &ldquo;it has been worse.
+      She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the
+      remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the last
+      days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old man
+      watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house chasing
+      playthings.&rdquo; The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the wind
+      singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional drop of
+      rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with his mother.
+      During the last two or three years he had been trying to make things up to
+      her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the beginning of his
+      success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub and since the
+      beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after evening with her
+      instead of going to Wildman&rsquo;s to sit with the four friends and hear the
+      talk that went on among them. No more did he walk with Telfer or Mary
+      Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the bedside of the sick
+      woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an arm chair upon the
+      grass plot at the front of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an
+      understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to the
+      ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together, the
+      mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much
+      speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it
+      unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought of
+      the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had been
+      made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which he had
+      been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the doings of the
+      pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane&rsquo;s illness continued to go off
+      after pension day for long periods of drunkenness, and who only came home
+      to weep and wail through the house, when the pension money was gone,
+      regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the loss of both the washwoman
+      and the wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has been the most wonderful woman in the world,&rdquo; he told himself and
+      tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend, John
+      Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy trotting
+      beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of her long
+      gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A picture of
+      George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness in the kitchen of
+      Freedom Smith&rsquo;s house, had caught his eye some days before, and in the
+      darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his lips, realising that
+      in some indescribable way it was like his mother as she had been before
+      her illness. Freedom&rsquo;s wife had given him the picture and he had been
+      carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on lonely stretches of road as he
+      went about his work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of an
+      attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue the
+      thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details of a
+      long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It was
+      extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could
+      remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her
+      youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy&rsquo;s mind.
+      She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of a
+      thin-lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a farm,
+      and of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved to buy
+      books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a school
+      teacher, and of her marriage to Windy&mdash;then John McPherson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in the
+      town&rsquo;s life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man who
+      walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and who
+      taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him
+      eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should
+      have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour and
+      unhappiness for me,&rdquo; the sick woman had told her son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton where
+      he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the store into
+      the sheriff&rsquo;s hands and his wife into the position of town laundress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted
+      across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy and
+      another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the state
+      giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs and had
+      written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the applause that
+      greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances, the little
+      dimly-lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces shining in the
+      light of the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted Windy running here and
+      there, talking the jargon of stageland, arraying himself in his motley and
+      strutting upon the little stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And all winter he did not send me a penny,&rdquo; the sick woman had said,
+      interrupting his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth,
+      the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been killed
+      in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an anecdote,
+      touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for an
+      hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old woman
+      looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter feel she
+      had been a fool to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The story
+      ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding the woman
+      alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman, then in her
+      prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house. The railroad
+      agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She knocked him out, too,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;knocked him cold upon the ground and
+      then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town
+      declaring her the finest woman in the state.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the darkness by the broken shed Sam&rsquo;s mind turned from thoughts of his
+      mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young farmer. He
+      thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of the failings
+      of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of the house to
+      wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of war talk
+      always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of the night
+      when, getting a rig from Culvert&rsquo;s livery, she had driven off alone into
+      the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show her wedding
+      ring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before him there rose a picture of a summer afternoon when he had seen a
+      part of the love making that had preceded this. He had gone into the store
+      to see his sister when the young farmer came in, looked awkwardly about
+      and pushed a new gold watch across the counter to Kate. A sudden wave of
+      respect for his sister had pervaded the boy. &ldquo;What a sum it must have
+      cost,&rdquo; he thought, and looked with new interest at the back of the lover
+      and at the flushed cheek and shining eyes of his sister. When the lover,
+      turning, had seen young McPherson standing at the counter, he laughed
+      self-consciously and walked out at the door. Kate had been embarrassed and
+      secretly pleased and flattered by the look in her brother&rsquo;s eyes, but had
+      pretended to treat the gift lightly, twirling it carelessly back and forth
+      on the counter and walking up and down swinging her arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t go telling,&rdquo; she had said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then don&rsquo;t go pretending,&rdquo; the boy had answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam thought that his sister&rsquo;s indiscretion, which had brought her a babe
+      and a husband in the same month had, after all, ended better than the
+      indiscretion of his mother in her marriage with Windy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for
+      the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of
+      his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and
+      presently returned, bringing a daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in a
+      house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an
+      attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code, if
+      she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The
+      thought amused and saddened him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would have thought her safe,&rdquo; he mused. She was fifty, small, nervous
+      and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled as she
+      talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue because of
+      nervousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the door
+      holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My wife&mdash;my wife is dying. She may die any day,&rdquo; he wailed, tears
+      standing in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed had
+      been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with anger
+      and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and began
+      sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped and Sam
+      could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as the man
+      turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels rose a
+      voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had begun to
+      rain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has got into the wrong street,&rdquo; thought the boy stupidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs
+      echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air
+      of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother&rsquo;s ironing board stood
+      against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering
+      in Sam&rsquo;s heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store
+      doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of his
+      father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate&rsquo;s wedding, when Windy
+      had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and the
+      mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house, sick
+      with humiliation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores
+      replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy&rsquo;s anger. Sam began thinking
+      again of his mother&rsquo;s life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now
+      seemed utterly fruitless. &ldquo;I would like to repay him,&rdquo; he thought, shaken
+      with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him. The
+      cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages on
+      the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol of
+      the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he turned
+      his face and stared at the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith&rsquo;s house. Freedom
+      had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just as to-night
+      he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and just as Sam was
+      shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the stable door had
+      come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy girl of fourteen with
+      the strength of a man and an inclination to burst out of her clothes at
+      unexpected places, they had come charging into the stables to carry Sam
+      off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them on, his voice roaring in
+      the stable so that the horses jumped about in their stalls. Into the house
+      they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of four, sitting astride his back
+      and beating on his head with a woollen cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern
+      and giving an occasional helpful push with his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of the
+      big dining room in Freedom&rsquo;s house came back into the mind of the boy now
+      sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted, badly-cooked
+      food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great dishes heaped
+      with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had always been just enough
+      food for the single meal. The thing was nicely calculated, when you had
+      finished the table was bare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a
+      flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and
+      passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh
+      supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the
+      children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the tomboy
+      girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mother never knew anything like that,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking
+      loudly&mdash;some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he
+      talked of the cost of school books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They change the books in the school too often,&rdquo; he declared in a loud
+      voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an
+      audience. &ldquo;It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I
+      will not stand it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a
+      message upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be silent,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;If you say another word or make another sound to
+      disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the
+      street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a fork
+      taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under the
+      lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a desire to
+      spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had brought his
+      mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking at her very
+      death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared about the
+      kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not
+      understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his
+      pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A dog is dead, eh?&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;Well you&rsquo;re getting too big and smart,
+      lad. What do I care for a dead dog?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put
+      his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must not kill,&rdquo; he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a
+      stranger. &ldquo;I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise,
+      struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at him
+      and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a start
+      that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly it
+      stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had become.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub
+      by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with so
+      little extra pressure,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the
+      forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon of
+      drunken carousing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it looks
+      now all the days of my life,&rdquo; thought the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman
+      speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the
+      sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and went
+      carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down upon
+      him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind, shaking
+      loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it against
+      his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before the house
+      he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into the road.
+      Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will go for Mary Underwood,&rdquo; he thought, his mind returning to the
+      friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose
+      friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer&rsquo;s tirades against all
+      women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his bare
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We need a woman in our house,&rdquo; he kept saying over and over to himself.
+      &ldquo;We need a woman in our house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Leaning against the wall under the veranda of Mary Underwood&rsquo;s house, Sam
+      tried to get in his mind a remembrance of what had brought him there. He
+      had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along a country road.
+      Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He had forgotten the
+      purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The unexpected and terrible
+      hatred of his father that had come upon him in the tense silence of the
+      kitchen had so paralysed his brain that he now felt light-headed and
+      wonderfully happy and carefree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been doing something,&rdquo; he thought; &ldquo;I wonder what it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The house faced a grove of pine trees and was reached by climbing a little
+      rise and following a winding road out beyond the graveyard and the last of
+      the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled on the tin
+      roof overhead, and Sam, his back closely pressed against the front of the
+      house, fought to regain control of his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For an hour he stood there staring into the darkness and watched with
+      delight the progress of the storm. He had&mdash;an inheritance from his
+      mother&mdash;a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a
+      boy and his mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the
+      house singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did not
+      hear, and in his bed upstairs Sam had lain awake listening to the noises&mdash;the
+      rain on the roof, the occasional crash of thunder, the snoring of Windy,
+      and the unusual and, he thought, beautiful sound of the mother singing in
+      the storm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, lifting up his head, he looked about with delight. Trees in the grove
+      in front of him bent and tossed in the wind. The inky blackness of the
+      night was relieved by the flickering oil lamp in the road beyond the
+      graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the windows
+      of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which he stood
+      made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees through which
+      the raindrops fell gleaming and sparkling. An occasional flash of
+      lightning lit up the trees and the winding road, and the cannonry of the
+      skies rolled and echoed overhead. A kind of wild song sang in Sam&rsquo;s heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish it would last all night,&rdquo; he thought, his mind fixed on the
+      singing of his mother in the dark house when he was a boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door opened and a woman stepped out upon the veranda and stood before
+      him facing the storm, the wind tossing the soft kimono in which she was
+      clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air was filled
+      with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted her head
+      and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her fine
+      contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and going
+      on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover riding
+      through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the song&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch and
+      leaning forward into the storm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who had
+      been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind had
+      turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman standing
+      singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother singing on
+      the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on, seeing pictures as
+      he used to see them when a boy walking under the stars and listening to
+      the talk of John Telfer. He saw a broad-shouldered man shouting defiance
+      to the storm as he rode down a mountain path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak,&rdquo; went on the voice of
+      the singer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood&rsquo;s singing there in the rain made her seem near and likeable
+      as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;John Telfer was wrong about her,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down
+      across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating the
+      spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon his
+      clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation of
+      surprise broke from her lips:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the
+      rain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like it here,&rdquo; replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at
+      the storm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary looked
+      into the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been a long time coming to see me,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the
+      veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon a
+      table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the shelves
+      along the walls. On a table burned a student&rsquo;s lamp and in the corners of
+      the room lay heavy shadows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned clad
+      in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began moving
+      about the room picking up odds and ends of woman&rsquo;s clothing scattered on
+      the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks piled in an
+      open grate at the side of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was the storm made me want to sing,&rdquo; she said self-consciously, and
+      then briskly, &ldquo;we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in the
+      road and got yourself covered with mud.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into
+      his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come here courting,&rdquo; he thought; &ldquo;I have come to ask Mary
+      Underwood to be my wife and live in my house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused
+      something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore, falling
+      away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by the kimono,
+      wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the soft grey hair
+      and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks caused a jumping of
+      his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are needing a woman in our house,&rdquo; he said heavily, repeating the
+      words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept
+      streets and along the mud-covered roads. &ldquo;We are needing a woman in our
+      house, and I have come to take you there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I intend to marry you,&rdquo; he added, lurching across the room and grasping
+      her roughly by the shoulders. &ldquo;Why not? I am needing a woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood was dismayed and frightened by the face looking down at
+      her, and by the strong hands clenched upon her shoulders. In his youth she
+      had conceived a kind of maternal passion for the newsboy and had planned a
+      future for him. Her plans if followed would have made him a scholar, a man
+      living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had chosen to live his
+      life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about the country like
+      Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen him driving at
+      evening through the street to Freedom&rsquo;s house, going in and out of
+      Wildman&rsquo;s, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim way she knew
+      that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from the things of
+      which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John Telfer, the
+      talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had come back to
+      her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of the road, and
+      talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother, of marriage and of
+      coming to live with him in his house. She stood, chilled, looking into the
+      eager, strong face and the eyes with the pained, dazed look in them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to Sam,
+      and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;it was
+      because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired of
+      them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little
+      schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew
+      tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks and
+      looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to get
+      out of there and into the streets myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and stared
+      into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from his trousers
+      legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to reconstruct an
+      old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer&rsquo;s, that had years before
+      come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and Telfer had made of the
+      ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central figure, a stoop-shouldered,
+      feeble old man stumbling along the street, muttering to himself and poking
+      in a gutter with a stick. The picture was a caricature of puttering old
+      Frank Huntley, superintendent of the Caxton schools.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood&rsquo;s house, become, for the moment,
+      a boy, facing a boy&rsquo;s problems, Sam did not want to be such a man. He
+      wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the kind of man
+      he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of the world and
+      making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get expressed when
+      he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind, he felt that he
+      must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that the schools were
+      not giving him what he wanted. His brain worked on the problem of how to
+      tell her about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: &ldquo;I am going to quit the
+      schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the
+      chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the door
+      opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called
+      sharply, &ldquo;Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A startled, trembling voice answered from above, &ldquo;Who is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her hand
+      gently on his shoulder, said, &ldquo;It is your mother and you are only a sick,
+      half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head. &ldquo;She is still there in the bed, coughing.&rdquo; He roused
+      himself and stood up. &ldquo;I have just killed my father,&rdquo; he announced. &ldquo;I
+      choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the
+      house. He made horrible noises in the kitchen and mother was tired and
+      wanted to sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood began running about the room. From a little alcove under a
+      stairway she took clothes, throwing them upon the floor about the room.
+      She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam&rsquo;s presence, raised her
+      skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the stockinged foot and
+      the other on the bare one, she turned to him. &ldquo;We will go back to your
+      house. I think you are right. You need a woman there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the street she walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall
+      fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over Sam.
+      He felt he had accomplished something&mdash;something he had set out to
+      accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion
+      that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith&rsquo;s, began planning
+      the evening he would spend with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will tell her of the letter from the Chicago company and of what I will
+      do when I go to the city,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the gate before the McPherson house Mary looked into the road below the
+      grassy bank that ran down from the fence, but in the darkness she could
+      see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and shouted
+      as it rushed through the bare branches of the trees. Sam went through the
+      gate and around the house to the kitchen door intent upon getting to his
+      mother&rsquo;s bedside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the house the neighbour woman sat asleep in a chair before the kitchen
+      stove. The daughter had gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam went through the house to the parlour and sat down in a chair beside
+      his mother&rsquo;s bed, picking up her hand and holding it in his own. &ldquo;She must
+      be asleep,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the kitchen door Mary Underwood stopped, and, turning, ran away into
+      the darkness along the street. By the kitchen fire the neighbour woman
+      still slept. In the parlour Sam, sitting on the chair beside his mother&rsquo;s
+      bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little stand beside
+      the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a tall,
+      aristocratic-looking woman with rings on her fingers, that hung upon the
+      wall. The picture belonged to Windy and was claimed by him as a portrait
+      of his mother, and it had once brought on a quarrel between Sam and his
+      sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kate had taken the portrait of the lady seriously, and the boy had come
+      upon her sitting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands
+      lying in her lap in imitation of the pose maintained so haughtily by the
+      great lady who looked down at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a fraud,&rdquo; he had declared, irritated by what he believed his
+      sister&rsquo;s devotion to one of the father&rsquo;s pretensions. &ldquo;It is a fraud he
+      has picked up somewhere and now claims as his mother to make people
+      believe he is something big.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl, ashamed at having been caught in the pose, and furious because
+      of the attack upon the authenticity of the portrait, had gone into a spasm
+      of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the floor
+      with her foot. Then she had run across the room and dropped upon her knees
+      before a little couch, buried her face in a pillow and shook with anger
+      and grief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had turned and walked out of the room. The emotions of the sister had
+      seemed to him to have the flavour of one of Windy&rsquo;s outbreaks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She likes it,&rdquo; he had thought, dismissing the incident. &ldquo;She likes
+      believing in lies. She is like Windy and would rather believe in them than
+      not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer&rsquo;s house and beat on the
+      door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, holding a lamp above
+      her head, appeared at the door. With Telfer she went back through the
+      streets to the front of Sam&rsquo;s house thinking of the terrible choked and
+      disfigured man they should find there. She went along clinging to Telfer&rsquo;s
+      arm as she had clung to Sam&rsquo;s, unconscious of her bare head and scanty
+      attire. In his hand Telfer carried a lantern secured from the stable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the road before the house they found nothing. Telfer went up and down
+      swinging the lantern and peering into gutters. The woman walked beside
+      him, her skirts lifted and the mud splashing upon her bare leg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Telfer threw back his head and laughed. Taking her hand he led
+      Mary with a rush up the bank and through the gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a muddle-headed old fool I am!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I am getting old and
+      addle-pated! Windy McPherson is not dead! Nothing could kill that old war
+      horse! He was in at Wildman&rsquo;s grocery after nine o&rsquo;clock to-night covered
+      with mud and swearing he had been in a fight with Art Sherman. Poor Sam
+      and you&mdash;to have come to me and to have found me a stupid ass! Fool!
+      Fool! What a fool I have become!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In at the kitchen door ran Mary and Telfer, frightening the woman by the
+      stove so that she sprang to her feet and began nervously making the false
+      teeth rattle with her tongue. In the parlour they found Sam, his head upon
+      the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand of Jane
+      McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood stooped over and
+      kissed his wet hair as the neighbour woman came in at the doorway bearing
+      the kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, holding his finger to his lips,
+      commanded silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He thought
+      that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become coarsened&mdash;she
+      looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had an air of having
+      quarrelled with her husband when they came out of their bedroom in the
+      morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the parlour, astonished and
+      irritated by the endless number of women that crowded into the house. They
+      were everywhere, in the kitchen, the sleeping room back of the parlour;
+      and in the parlour, where the dead woman lay in her coffin, they were
+      massed. When the thin-lipped minister, holding a book in his hand, held
+      forth upon the virtues of the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the
+      floor and thought that thus they would have wept over the body of the dead
+      Windy, had his fingers but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister
+      would have talked in the same way&mdash;blatantly and without knowledge&mdash;of
+      the virtues of the dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved
+      husband, in new black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious
+      undertaker kept moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his
+      trade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the floor
+      at Sam&rsquo;s feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to distract
+      his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of the weeping
+      women, none of whom had before been in the house and all of whom he
+      thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of privacy. The
+      note was from John Telfer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will not come to your mother&rsquo;s funeral,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;I respected your
+      mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she is
+      dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in
+      Wildman&rsquo;s, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the
+      moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore&rsquo;s shop, I will
+      go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If he
+      or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their
+      friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know
+      that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take
+      them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of the
+      dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something
+      that had slipped from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is good sense, after all,&rdquo; he thought, and realised that even in the
+      days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the fact
+      that Jane McPherson&rsquo;s long, hard role was just being played out to the
+      end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore was beating upon
+      his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with a flourish. He arose,
+      interrupting the minister&rsquo;s discourse. Mary Underwood had come in just as
+      the minister began talking and had dropped into an obscure corner near the
+      door leading into the street. Sam crowded past the women who stared and
+      the minister who frowned and the baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands
+      and, dropping the note into her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking
+      and listening with breathless curiosity, &ldquo;It is from John Telfer. Read it.
+      Even he, hating women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their
+      heads together and their hands before their faces, nodded toward the
+      school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had created,
+      went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting until the
+      talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the streets should
+      be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have become older than all of these people here,&rdquo; thought the youth.
+      &ldquo;They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of my
+      hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood, lacking Sam&rsquo;s unconsciousness of the people, looked about
+      with burning cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and putting their heads
+      together, a chill of fear ran through her. Into the room had been thrust
+      the face of an old enemy to her&mdash;the scandal of a small town. Picking
+      up the note she slipped out at the door and stole away along the street.
+      The old maternal love for Sam had returned strengthened and ennobled by
+      the terror through which she had passed with him that night in the rain.
+      Going to her house she whistled the collie dog and set out along a country
+      road. At the edge of a grove of trees she stopped, sat down on a log, and
+      read Telfer&rsquo;s note. From the soft ground into which her feet sank there
+      came the warm pungent smell of the new growth. Tears came into her eyes.
+      She thought that in a few days much had come to her. She had got a boy
+      upon whom she could pour out the mother love in her heart, and she had
+      made a friend of Telfer, whom she had long regarded with fear and doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a month Sam lingered in Caxton. It seemed to him there was something
+      that wanted doing there. He sat with the men at the back of Wildman&rsquo;s, and
+      walked aimlessly through the streets and out of the town along the country
+      roads, where men worked all day in the fields behind sweating horses,
+      ploughing the land. The thrill of spring was in the air, and in the
+      evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree below his bedroom window.
+      Sam walked and loitered in silence, looking at the ground. In his mind was
+      the dread of people. The talk of the men in the store wearied him and when
+      he went alone into the country he found himself accompanied by the voices
+      of all of those he had come out of town to escape. On the street corner
+      the thin-lipped, brown-bearded minister stopped him and talked of the
+      future life as he had stopped and talked to a bare-legged newsboy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your mother,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;has but gone before. It is for you to get into
+      the narrow path and follow her. God has sent this sorrow as a warning to
+      you. He wants you also to get into the way of life and in the end to join
+      her. Begin coming to our church. Join in the work of the Christ. Find
+      truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The
+      minister&rsquo;s talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of
+      which he got but one thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Find truth,&rdquo; he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his mind
+      play with the idea. &ldquo;The best men are all trying to do that. They spend
+      their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the
+      interpretation he had put upon the minister&rsquo;s words. The terrible moments
+      in the kitchen followed by his mother&rsquo;s death had put a new look of
+      seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of
+      responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the
+      street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become
+      public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public
+      affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour&rsquo;s wife,&rdquo; said
+      John Telfer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken him to
+      its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had encouraged
+      him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father, and patronised
+      him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was a boy, scurrying
+      between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a Saturday night,
+      there was always some one to speak a word to him of his morals and to
+      shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected to remain there,
+      with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the Savings Bank&mdash;built
+      to that during his years with Freedom Smith&mdash;he might soon become one
+      of the town&rsquo;s solid men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and
+      that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the train
+      and be off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences, hearing
+      the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the smell of the
+      new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town and sat down on a
+      low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the railroad station, to
+      wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken on a new meaning to
+      him since any day might see him on such a train bound into his new life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed
+      by two women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here, watch these,&rdquo; he said to the women, setting the bags upon the
+      platform; &ldquo;I will go for the tickets,&rdquo; and disappeared into the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two women resumed their interrupted talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ed&rsquo;s wife has been poorly these ten years,&rdquo; said one of them. &ldquo;It will be
+      better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long ride.
+      I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to be
+      train-sick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John
+      Telfer&rsquo;s old talks with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away from
+      here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending
+      shoes on a side street back of Geiger&rsquo;s drug store and the two women, one
+      short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery shop and
+      were Eleanor Telfer&rsquo;s only competitors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, the town knows her now for what she is,&rdquo; said the tall woman.
+      &ldquo;Milly Peters says she won&rsquo;t rest until she has put that stuck-up Mary
+      Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house and it
+      was her told Milly. I never heard such a story. To think of Jane McPherson
+      working all these years and then having such goings-on in her house when
+      she lay dying, Milly says that Sam went away early in the evening and came
+      home late with that Underwood thing, half dressed, hanging on his arm.
+      Milly&rsquo;s mother looked out of the window and saw them. Then she ran out by
+      the kitchen stove and pretended to be asleep. She wanted to see what was
+      up. And the bold hussy came right into the house with Sam. Then she went
+      away, and after a while back she came with that John Telfer. Milly is
+      going to see that Eleanor Telfer finds it out. I guess it will bring her
+      down, too. And there is no telling how many other men in this town Mary
+      Underwood is running with. Milly says&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two women turned as out of the darkness came a tall figure roaring and
+      swearing. Two hands flashed out and sank into their hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop it!&rdquo; growled Sam, beating the two heads together, &ldquo;stop your dirty
+      lies!&mdash;you ugly she-beasts!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hearing the two women screaming the man who had gone for the railroad
+      tickets came running down the station platform followed by Jerry Donlin.
+      Springing forward Sam knocked the shoemaker over the iron fence into a
+      newly spaded flower bed and then turned to the baggage man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They were telling lies about Mary Underwood,&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;She tried to
+      save me from killing my father and now they are telling lies about her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two women picked up the bags and ran whimpering away along the station
+      platform. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and confronted the
+      surprised and frightened shoemaker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the Hell are you doing in my flower bed?&rdquo; he growled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hurrying through the streets Sam&rsquo;s mind was in a ferment. Like the Roman
+      emperor he wished that all the world had but one head that he might cut it
+      off with a slash. The town that had seemed so paternal, so cheery, so
+      intent upon wishing him well, now seemed horrible. He thought of it as a
+      great, crawling, slimy thing lying in wait amid the cornfields.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be saying that of her, of that white soul!&rdquo; he exclaimed aloud in the
+      empty street, all of his boyish loyalty and devotion to the woman who had
+      put out a hand to him in his hour of trouble aroused and burning in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a swinging
+      blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to his own
+      house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing
+      meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets
+      past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone
+      and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and quiet.
+      He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane
+      McPherson&rsquo;s funeral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy he
+      saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with
+      coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They were
+      the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers. He
+      remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the papers
+      and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational murder
+      cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive and the
+      details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain their
+      curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing the
+      newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and over on
+      their tongues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the thought
+      of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small, unaired,
+      unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and clothes&mdash;only
+      their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean thoughts,
+      are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a darkened room
+      by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a yokel, live lives
+      of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these women come the husbands
+      at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly and then go again
+      into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical exhaustion having come
+      to them, to sit for an hour in stockinged feet before crawling away to
+      sleep and oblivion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed
+      ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the man
+      they have snatched from society they cling also with a tenacity to be
+      measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the craving for
+      food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the despair of
+      reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put the black
+      dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, &ldquo;The female of the species is
+      more deadly than the male.&rdquo; At their worst they are to be seen drunk with
+      emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution or immersed in the
+      secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious persecution. At their
+      best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth coming to them, they throw
+      themselves into garish display of it and flash upon the sight of Newport
+      or Palm Beach. In their native lair in the close little houses, they sleep
+      in the bed of the man who has put clothes upon their backs and food into
+      their mouths because that is the usage of their kind and give him of their
+      bodies grudgingly or willingly as the laws of their physical needs direct.
+      They do not love, they sell, instead, their bodies in the market place and
+      cry out that man shall witness their virtue because they had had the joy
+      of finding one buyer instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce
+      animalism in them makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the
+      days of its softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch
+      again an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy,
+      no longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite.
+      Having passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of
+      emotions and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the
+      eloquence of evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell&mdash;the call to
+      the one being brother to the call of the other&mdash;crying upon the
+      troubled air of hot little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of
+      vulgarity, &ldquo;The weight of my sins is heavy on my soul.&rdquo; Along streets they
+      go lifting heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel
+      to roll upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the
+      life of a Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its
+      offal. Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air,
+      dream dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of
+      animal youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door to
+      kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has found a
+      carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it forward to
+      the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the fine emotion of
+      achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having hysteria rather than
+      reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of femininity&mdash;and
+      none of it. For the most part they live and die unseen, unknown, eating
+      rank food, sleeping overmuch, and sitting through summer afternoons
+      rocking in chairs and looking at people passing in the street. In the end
+      they die full of faith, hoping for a life to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making on
+      Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields that lay
+      beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness and he
+      thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that had been
+      marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and shivered as
+      he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air aggravating the
+      dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the assurance of the
+      days before his mother&rsquo;s illness and to get again the strong belief in his
+      own destiny that had kept him at the money making and saving and had urged
+      him to the efforts to rise above the level of the man who bred him. He
+      didn&rsquo;t succeed. The feeling of age that had settled upon him in the midst
+      of the people mourning over the body of his mother came back, and,
+      turning, he went along the road toward the town, saying to himself: &ldquo;I
+      will go and talk to Mary Underwood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While he waited on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided that
+      after all a marriage with her might lead to happiness. The half spiritual,
+      half physical love of woman that is the glory and mystery of youth was
+      gone from him. He thought that if he could only drive from her presence
+      the fear of the faces that had been coming and going in his own mind he
+      would, for his own part, be content to live his life as a worker and money
+      maker, one without dreams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood came to the door wearing the same heavy long coat she had
+      worn on that other night and taking her by the hand Sam led her to the
+      edge of the veranda. He looked with content at the pine trees before the
+      house, thinking that some benign influence must have guided the hand that
+      planted them there to stand clothed and decent amid the barrenness of the
+      land at the end of winter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it, boy?&rdquo; asked the woman, and her voice was filled with anxiety.
+      The maternal passion again glowing in her had for days coloured all her
+      thoughts, and with all the ardour of an intense nature she had thrown
+      herself into her love of Sam. Thinking of him, she felt in fancy the pangs
+      of birth, and in her bed at night relived with him his boyhood in the town
+      and built again her plans for his future. In the day time she laughed at
+      herself and said tenderly, &ldquo;You are an old fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brutally and frankly Sam told her of the thing he had heard on the station
+      platform, looking past her at the pine trees and gripping the veranda
+      rail. From the dead land there came again the smell of the new growth as
+      it had come to him on the road before the revelation at the railroad
+      station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something kept telling me not to go away,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It must have been in
+      the air&mdash;this thing. Already these evil crawling things were at work.
+      Oh, if only all the world, like you and Telfer and some of the others
+      here, had an appreciation of the sense of privacy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Underwood laughed quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making you
+      a man at work upon the things of the mind,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The sense of
+      privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer&rsquo;s method was
+      better than my own. He has given you the knack of saying things with a
+      flourish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh,&rdquo; he said
+      stoutly. &ldquo;Here is something at you&mdash;it is tearing at you&mdash;it has
+      got to be met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter
+      over in their minds. To-morrow they will be at you again. There is but one
+      way and we must take it. You and I will have to marry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary looked at the serious new lines of his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a proposal!&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On an impulse she began singing, her voice fine and strong running through
+      the quiet night.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      she sang, and laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You should come like that,&rdquo; she said, and then, &ldquo;you poor muddled boy.
+      Don&rsquo;t you know that I am your new mother?&rdquo; she added, taking hold of his
+      two arms and turning him about facing her. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be absurd. I don&rsquo;t want
+      a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him. I
+      adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick and
+      covered with mud. As for these women&mdash;away with them&mdash;I&rsquo;ll face
+      them down&mdash;I did it once before and I&rsquo;ll do it again. Go to your city
+      and make your fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman&rsquo;s fight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is horrible. You don&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; Sam protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I have been on that battlefield. It is to be
+      won only by silence and tireless waiting. Your very effort to help would
+      make the matter worse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman and the tall boy, suddenly become a man, stood in thought. She
+      was thinking of the end toward which her life was drifting. How
+      differently she had planned it. She thought of the college in
+      Massachusetts and of the men and women walking under the elm trees there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I have got me a son and I am going to keep him,&rdquo; she said aloud,
+      putting her hand on Sam&rsquo;s arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very serious and troubled, Sam went down the gravel path toward the road.
+      He felt there was something cowardly in the part she had given him to
+      play, but he could see no alternative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all,&rdquo; he reflected, &ldquo;it is sensible&mdash;it is a woman&rsquo;s battle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Half way to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his arms
+      and gave her a great hug.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye, little Mother,&rdquo; he cried and kissed her upon the lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was overcome
+      with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning against the
+      house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling through her
+      tears she called after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you crack their heads hard, boy?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Mary&rsquo;s house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had come
+      to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen table with
+      pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the parlour he
+      could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and writing again.
+      Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read over and over
+      what he had written, and putting on his coat went through the dawn to the
+      house of Tom Comstock, editor of the <i>Caxton Argus</i>, and roused him
+      out of bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won&rsquo;t cost you anything,&rdquo;
+       Comstock promised. &ldquo;But why run it? Let the matter drop.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago,&rdquo;
+       Sam thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at Valmore&rsquo;s
+      suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter&rsquo;s jewelry store. For an hour they
+      bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When the choice
+      was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a box on the
+      counter Telfer made a speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will talk straight to that boy,&rdquo; he declared, laughing. &ldquo;I am not going
+      to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have him fail
+      me. I shall tell him that if he doesn&rsquo;t make money in that Chicago I shall
+      come and take the watch from him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along
+      the street to Eleanor&rsquo;s shop. He strutted through the display room and
+      into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What am I going to do, Eleanor?&rdquo; he demanded, standing with legs spread
+      apart and frowning down upon her, &ldquo;what am I going to do without Sam?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A freckle-faced boy opened the shop door and threw a newspaper on the
+      floor. The boy had a ringing voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer went again
+      through the display room, touching with his cane the posts upon which hung
+      the finished hats, and whistling. Standing before the shop, with the cane
+      hooked upon his arm, he rolled a cigarette and watched the boy running
+      from door to door along the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall have to be adopting a new son,&rdquo; he said musingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood in his white nightgown and re-read the
+      statement just given him. He read it over and over, and then, laying it on
+      the kitchen table, filled and lighted a corncob pipe. A draft of wind blew
+      into the room under the kitchen door chilling his thin shanks so that he
+      drew his bare feet, one after the other, up behind the protective walls of
+      his nightgown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the night of my mother&rsquo;s death,&rdquo; ran the statement, &ldquo;I sat in the
+      kitchen of our house eating my supper when my father came in and began
+      shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother who was asleep. I put my
+      hand at his throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, and carried
+      him around the house and threw him into the road. Then I ran to the house
+      of Mary Underwood, who was once my schoolteacher, and told her what I had
+      done. She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went to look for the
+      body of my father, who was not dead after all. John McPherson knows this
+      is true, if he can be made to tell the truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous woman with red cheeks,
+      who set up type in the shop, did her own housework, and gathered most of
+      the news and advertising for <i>The Argus</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t that a slasher?&rdquo; he asked, handing her the statement Sam had
+      written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it ought to stop the mean things they are saying about Mary
+      Underwood,&rdquo; she snapped. Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and
+      looking at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her much help with
+      <i>The Argus</i>, was the best checker player in Caxton and had once been
+      to a state tournament of experts in that sport, she added, &ldquo;Poor Jane
+      McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better father for him than
+      that liar Windy. Choked him, eh? Well, if the men of this town had any
+      spunk they would finish the job.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns in
+      Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like Freedom
+      Smith, bought the farmers&rsquo; products. On Sundays he sat in chairs before
+      country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or, getting
+      back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown streets and
+      among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on the road. From
+      time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with the men in
+      Wildman&rsquo;s, stealing away later for an evening with Mary Underwood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the
+      farmer&rsquo;s widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In the
+      store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose&mdash;the same John Telfer
+      had watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show
+      Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker
+      barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging cane
+      and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer had not
+      got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad station and
+      make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the loss of that
+      opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and thinking of
+      many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour to the speech he
+      had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam, while the gift had
+      touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind the essential solid
+      goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he lost much of the
+      bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood, had been able to
+      make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his room in Chicago he
+      had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting in and taking out
+      flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of thanks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now
+      that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom
+      Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in the
+      wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore&rsquo;s shop as the blacksmith
+      walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What has happened to Sam&mdash;he has changed so much?&rdquo; he asked,
+      dropping a foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel.
+      &ldquo;Already the city has changed him,&rdquo; he added regretfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He bites off his words,&rdquo; continued Valmore; &ldquo;he sits for an hour in the
+      store and then goes away, and doesn&rsquo;t come back to say good-bye when he
+      leaves town. What has got into him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust of
+      the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had been
+      hurled at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all
+      right,&rdquo; he exploded. &ldquo;He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes
+      to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing,
+      hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy from
+      the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the
+      money-maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems of
+      life and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great game
+      in which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited
+      patiently until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would
+      possess. With the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they
+      pounced and Sam felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with
+      country buyers used it ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look that
+      came into the eyes of unsuccessful business men at critical moments and
+      watched for it and took advantage of it as a successful prize fighter
+      watches for a similar vague, uncertain look in the eyes of an opponent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that comes
+      with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the successful
+      business men about him is the stroke also of the master painter,
+      scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of Whistler,
+      Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been in him when
+      as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook, and now and
+      then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road. In the city
+      where men of wealth and power in affairs rubbed elbows with him in the
+      street cars and walked past him in hotel lobbies he watched and waited
+      saying to himself, &ldquo;I also will be such a one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked
+      on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of
+      himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a
+      knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of vast
+      work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but for the
+      most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about him,
+      keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton
+      family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but that
+      still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer
+      vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed
+      him during the month after his mother&rsquo;s death, and letters regarding him
+      had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down to
+      dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and talk
+      of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking of old John Moore to-day&mdash;does he still drive that
+      team of black ponies?&rdquo; the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman of
+      thirty, would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a
+      conversation of baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new office
+      building to be erected in the Loop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, he don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in a
+      machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake been
+      the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that he looked
+      upon Sam as an intruder. &ldquo;John told me last summer when I was home that he
+      intended to sell the blacks and buy mules,&rdquo; he would add, looking at the
+      youth challengingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar and
+      bustle of Chicago&rsquo;s vast west side, it still turned with hungry heart
+      toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for Jake, its
+      mainstay, could be found in that paradise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey moustache,
+      and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so that they
+      stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn,
+      worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night, going to
+      bed at nine o&rsquo;clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling, from room
+      to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers, or sitting
+      in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the habits formed
+      in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home with his pay in his
+      pocket, settled with the two sisters for the week&rsquo;s living, sat down to
+      dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then disappeared upon the troubled
+      waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening he re-appeared, with empty
+      pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and a noisy attempt at
+      self-possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl into bed in
+      preparation for another week of toil and respectability. The man had a
+      certain Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new ladies met
+      on his weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall. He once took
+      Sam upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half around the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of thirty-five
+      who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and blessed with a
+      remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical student in the
+      front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired woman
+      stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer from a
+      wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little Southern
+      wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The women in the Pergrin house seemed to Sam tremendously concerned about
+      their health and each evening talked of the matter, he thought, more than
+      his mother had talked during her illness. While Sam lived with them they
+      were all under the influence of a strange sort of faith healer and took
+      what they called &ldquo;Health Suggestion&rdquo; treatments. Twice each week the faith
+      healer came to the house, laid his hands upon their backs and took their
+      money. The treatment afforded Jake a never-ending source of amusement and
+      in the evening he went through the house putting his hands upon the backs
+      of the women and demanding money from them, but the dry-goods buyer&rsquo;s
+      wife, who for years had coughed at night, slept peacefully after some
+      weeks of the treatment and the cough did not return while Sam remained in
+      the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the house Sam had a standing. Glowing tales of his shrewdness in
+      business, his untiring industry, and the size of his bank account, had
+      preceded him from Caxton, and these tales the Pergrins, in their loyalty
+      to the town and to all the products of the town, did not allow to shrink
+      in the re-telling. The housekeeping sister, a kindly woman, became fond of
+      Sam, and in his absence would boast of him to chance callers or to the
+      boarders gathered in the living room in the evening. She it was who laid
+      the foundation of the medical student&rsquo;s belief that Sam was a kind of
+      genius in money matters, a belief that enabled him later to make a
+      successful assault upon a legacy which came to that young man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank Eckardt, the medical student, Sam took as a friend. On Sunday
+      afternoons they went to walk in the streets, or, taking two girl friends
+      of Frank&rsquo;s, who were also students at the medical school, on their arms,
+      they went to the park and sat upon benches under the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For one of these young women Sam conceived a regard that approached
+      tenderness. Sunday after Sunday he spent with her, and once, walking
+      through the park on an evening in the late fall, the dry brown leaves
+      rustling under their feet and the sun going down in red splendour before
+      their eyes, he took her hand and walked in silence, feeling tremendously
+      alive and vital as he had felt on that other night walking under the trees
+      of Caxton with the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That nothing came of the affair and that after a time he did not see the
+      girl again was due, he thought, to his own growing interest in money
+      making and to the fact that there was in her, as in Frank Eckardt, a blind
+      devotion to something that he could not himself understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once he had a talk with Eckardt of the matter. &ldquo;She is fine and purposeful
+      like a woman I knew in my home town,&rdquo; he said, thinking of Eleanor Telfer,
+      &ldquo;but she will not talk to me of her work as sometimes she talks to you. I
+      want her to talk. There is something about her that I do not understand
+      and that I want to understand. I think that she likes me and once or twice
+      I have thought she would not greatly mind my making love to her, but I do
+      not understand her just the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One day in the office of the company for which he worked Sam became
+      acquainted with a young advertising man named Jack Prince, a brisk, very
+      much alive young fellow who made money rapidly, spent it lavishly, and had
+      friends and acquaintances in every office, every hotel lobby, every bar
+      room and restaurant in the down-town section of the city. The chance
+      acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. The clever, witty Prince made a
+      kind of hero of Sam, admiring his reserve and good sense and boasting of
+      him far and wide through the town. With Prince, Sam occasionally went on
+      mild carouses, and, once, in the midst of thousands of people sitting
+      about tables and drinking beer at the Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, he and
+      Prince got into a fight with two waiters, Prince declaring he had been
+      cheated and Sam, although he thought his friend in the wrong, striking out
+      with his fist and dragging Prince through the door and into a passing
+      street car in time to avoid a rush of other waiters hurrying to the aid of
+      the one who lay dazed and sputtering on the sawdust floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After these evenings of carousal, carried on with Jack Prince and with
+      young men met on trains and about country hotels, Sam spent hour after
+      hour walking about town absorbed in his own thoughts and getting his own
+      impressions of what he saw. In the affairs with the young men he played,
+      for the most part, a passive rôle, going with them from place to place and
+      drinking until they became loud and boisterous, or morose and quarrelsome,
+      and then slipping away to his own room, amused or irritated as the
+      circumstances, or the temperament of his companions, had made or marred
+      the joviality of the evening. On his nights alone, he put his hands into
+      his pockets and walked for endless miles through the lighted streets,
+      getting in a dim way a realisation of the hugeness of life. All of the
+      faces going past him, the women in their furs, the young men with cigars
+      in their mouths going to the theatres, the bald old men with watery eyes,
+      the boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and the slim
+      prostitutes lurking in the hallways, should have interested him deeply. In
+      his youth, and with the pride of sleeping power in him, he saw them only
+      as so many individuals that might some day test their ability against his
+      own. And if he peered at them closely and marked down face after face in
+      the crowds it was as a sitter in the great game of business that he
+      looked, exercising his mind by imagining this or that one arrayed against
+      him in deals, and planning the method by which he would win in the
+      imaginary struggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was at that time in Chicago a place, to be reached by a bridge above
+      the Illinois Central Railroad track, that Sam sometimes visited on stormy
+      nights to watch the lake lashed by the wind. Great masses of water moving
+      swiftly and silently broke with a roar against wooden piles, backed by
+      hills of stone and earth, and the spray from the broken waves fell upon
+      Sam&rsquo;s face and on winter nights froze on his coat. He had learned to
+      smoke, and leaning upon the railing of the bridge would stand for hours
+      with a pipe in his mouth looking at the moving water, filled with awe and
+      admiration of the silent power of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One night in September, when he was walking alone in the streets, an
+      incident happened that showed him also a silent power within himself, a
+      power that startled and for the moment frightened him. Walking into a
+      little street back of Dearborn, he was suddenly aware of the faces of
+      women looking out at him through small square windows cut in the fronts of
+      the houses. Here and there, before and behind him, were the faces; voices
+      called, smiles invited, hands beckoned. Up and down the street went men
+      looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their necks, their
+      hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces of the women
+      pressed against the little squares of glass and then, turning, suddenly,
+      sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued. Among the walkers on
+      the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats whose feet scuffled as they
+      hurried along, and young boys with the pink of virtue in their cheeks. In
+      the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It got into Sam&rsquo;s brain and he stood
+      hesitating and uncertain, startled, nerveless, afraid. He remembered a
+      story he had once heard from John Telfer, a story of the disease and death
+      that lurks in the little side streets of cities, and ran into Van Buren
+      Street and from that into lighted State. He climbed up the stairway of the
+      elevated railroad and jumping on the first train went away south to walk
+      for hours on a gravel roadway at the edge of the lake in Jackson Park. The
+      wind from the lake and the laughter and talk of people passing under the
+      lights cooled the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the
+      eloquence of John Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his
+      voice marshalling the armies of the standing corn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into Sam&rsquo;s mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great
+      masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there
+      was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of,
+      moving always forward, silent, powerful&mdash;the force of sex. He
+      wondered how the force would be broken in his own case, against what
+      breakwater it would spend itself. At midnight, he went home across the
+      city and crept into his alcove in the Pergrin house, puzzled and for the
+      time utterly tired. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and
+      resolutely closing his eyes tried to sleep. &ldquo;There are things not to be
+      understood,&rdquo; he told himself. &ldquo;To live decently is a matter of good sense.
+      I will keep thinking of what I want to do and not go into such a place
+      again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One day, when he had been in Chicago two years, there happened an incident
+      of another sort, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, so full of youth,
+      that for days after it happened he thought of it with delight, and walked
+      in the streets or sat in a passenger train laughing joyfully at the
+      remembrance of some new detail of the affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, who was the son of Windy McPherson and who had more than once
+      ruthlessly condemned all men who put liquor into their mouths, got drunk,
+      and for eighteen hours went shouting poetry, singing songs, and yelling at
+      the stars like a wood god on the bend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in
+      DeJonge&rsquo;s restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before him
+      on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers, talked
+      to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will be late, of course,&rdquo; he exclaimed, refilling Sam&rsquo;s glass. &ldquo;The
+      man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would
+      take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from the
+      cheeks of a maiden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had already seen the man for whom they waited. He was thirty-five,
+      small and narrow-shouldered, with a little wrinkled face, a huge nose, and
+      a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. Sam had seen him in a
+      Michigan Avenue club with Prince solemnly pitching silver dollars at a
+      chalk mark on the floor with a group of serious, solid-looking old men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are the crowd that have just put through the big deal in Kansas oil
+      stock and the little one is Morris, who handled the publicity for them,&rdquo;
+       Prince had explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later, when they were walking down Michigan Avenue, Prince talked at
+      length of Morris, whom he admired immensely. &ldquo;He is the best advertising
+      and publicity man in America,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;He isn&rsquo;t a four-flusher, as I
+      am, and does not make as much money, but he can take another man&rsquo;s ideas
+      and express them so simply and forcibly that they tell the man&rsquo;s story
+      better than he knew it himself. And that&rsquo;s all there is to advertising.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the man
+      for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every pat
+      phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He will
+      howl like a beast at paying Tom&rsquo;s bill, and then the next time he will try
+      to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so that he has to
+      send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like shelling corn off
+      the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge
+      pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. &ldquo;I am on my way to
+      the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company,&rdquo; he
+      explained to Prince. &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t stop at all. I have here the layout of a
+      circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common stock
+      of theirs that hasn&rsquo;t paid a dividend for ten years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. &ldquo;Never mind
+      the Biscuit Machine people and their stock,&rdquo; he commanded; &ldquo;they will
+      always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to meet
+      McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help him
+      with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Morris reached across the table and took Sam&rsquo;s hand; his own was small and
+      soft like that of a woman. &ldquo;I am worked to death,&rdquo; he complained; &ldquo;I have
+      my eye on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am going down there to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For an hour the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked of a
+      place in Wisconsin where the fish should be biting. &ldquo;A man has told me of
+      the place twenty times,&rdquo; he declared; &ldquo;I am sure I could find it on a
+      railroad folder. I have never been fishing nor have you, and Sam here
+      comes from a place to which they carry water in wagons over the plains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little man who had been drinking copiously of the wine looked from
+      Prince to Sam. From time to time he took off his glasses and wiped them
+      with a handkerchief. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand your being in such society,&rdquo; he
+      announced; &ldquo;you have the solid, substantial look of a bucket-shop man.
+      Prince here will get nowhere. He is honest, sells wind and his charming
+      society, and spends the money that he gets, instead of marrying and
+      putting it in his wife&rsquo;s name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prince arose. &ldquo;It is useless to waste time in persiflage,&rdquo; he began and
+      then turning to Sam, &ldquo;There is a place in Wisconsin,&rdquo; he said uncertainly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morris picked up the portfolio and with a grotesque effort at steadiness
+      started for the door followed by Prince and Sam walking with wavering
+      steps. In the street Prince took the portfolio out of the little man&rsquo;s
+      hand. &ldquo;Let your mother carry it, Tommy,&rdquo; he said, shaking his finger under
+      Morris&rsquo;s nose. He began singing a lullaby. &ldquo;When the bough bends the
+      cradle will fall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The three men walked out of Monroe and into State Street, Sam&rsquo;s head
+      feeling strangely light. The buildings along the street reeled against the
+      sky. A sudden fierce longing for wild adventure seized him. On a corner
+      Morris stopped, took the handkerchief from his pocket and again wiped his
+      glasses. &ldquo;I want to be sure that I see clearly,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;it seems to me
+      that in the bottom of that last glass of wine I saw three of us in a cab
+      with a basket of life oil on the seat between us going to the station to
+      catch the train for that place Jack&rsquo;s friend told fish lies about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next eighteen hours opened up a new world to Sam. With the fumes of
+      liquor rising in his brain, he rode for two hours on a train, tramped in
+      the darkness along dusty roads and, building a bonfire in a woods, danced
+      in the light of it upon the grass, holding the hands of Prince and the
+      little man with the wrinkled face. Solemnly he stood upon a stump at the
+      edge of a wheatfield and recited Poe&rsquo;s &ldquo;Helen,&rdquo; taking on the voice, the
+      gestures and even the habit of spreading his legs apart, of John Telfer.
+      And then overdoing the last, he sat down suddenly on the stump, and
+      Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand said, &ldquo;Fill the lamp, man&mdash;the
+      light of reason has gone out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From the bonfire in the woods and Sam&rsquo;s recital from the stump, the three
+      friends emerged again upon the road, and a belated farmer driving home
+      half asleep on the seat of his wagon caught their attention. With the
+      skill of an Indian boy the diminutive Morris sprang upon the wagon and
+      thrust a ten dollar bill into the farmer&rsquo;s hand. &ldquo;Lead us, O man of the
+      soil!&rdquo; he shouted, &ldquo;Lead us to a gilded palace of sin! Take us to a
+      saloon! The life oil gets low in the can!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond the long, jolting ride in the wagon Sam never became quite clear.
+      In his mind ran vague notions of a wild carousal in a country tavern, of
+      himself acting as bartender, and a huge red-faced woman rushing here and
+      there under the direction of a tiny man, dragging reluctant rustics to the
+      bar and commanding them to keep on drinking the beer that Sam drew until
+      the last of the ten dollars given to the man of the wagon should have gone
+      into her cash drawer. Also, he thought that Jack Prince had put a chair
+      upon the bar and that he sat on it explaining to the hurrying drawer of
+      beer that although the Egyptian kings had built great pyramids to
+      celebrate themselves they never built anything more gigantic than the jag
+      Tom Morris was building among the farm hands in the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later Sam thought that he and Jack Prince tried to sleep under a pile of
+      grain sacks in a shed and that Morris came to them weeping because every
+      one in the world was asleep and most of them lying under tables.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, his head clearing, Sam found himself with the two others walking
+      again upon the dusty road in the dawn and singing songs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the train, with the help of a Negro porter, the three men tried to
+      efface the dust and the stains of the wild night. The pasteboard portfolio
+      containing the circular for the Biscuit Machine Company was still under
+      Jack Prince&rsquo;s arm and the little man, wiping and re-wiping his glasses,
+      peered at Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you come with us or are you a child we have adopted here in these
+      parts?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street in Chicago where Sam
+      came to make his business start in the city, and it was proof of the dry
+      unresponsiveness in him that he did not sense more fully its meaning and
+      its message. All day the food stuff of a vast city flowed through the
+      narrow streets. Blue-shirted, broad-shouldered teamsters from the tops of
+      high piled wagons bawled at scurrying pedestrians. On the sidewalks in
+      boxes, bags, and barrels, lay oranges from Florida and California, figs
+      from Arabia, bananas from Jamaica, nuts from the hills of Spain and the
+      plains of Africa, cabbages from Ohio, beans from Michigan, corn and
+      potatoes from Iowa. In December, fur-coated men hurried through the
+      forests of northern Michigan gathering Christmas trees that found their
+      way to warm firesides through the street. And summer and winter a million
+      hens laid the eggs that were gathered there, and the cattle on a thousand
+      hills sent their yellow butter fat packed in tubs and piled upon trucks to
+      add to the confusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into this street Sam walked, thinking little of the wonder of these things
+      and thinking haltingly, getting his sense of the bigness of it in dollars
+      and cents. Standing in the doorway of the commission house for which he
+      was to work, strong, well clad, able and efficient, he looked through the
+      streets, seeing and hearing the hurry and the roar and the shouting of
+      voices, and then with a smile upon his lips went inside. In his brain was
+      an unexpressed thought. As the old Norse marauders looked at the cities
+      sitting in their splendour on the Mediterranean so looked he. &ldquo;What loot!&rdquo;
+       a voice within him said, and his brain began devising methods by which he
+      should get his share of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Years later, when Sam was a man of big affairs, he drove one day in a
+      carriage through the streets and turning to his companion, a grey-haired,
+      dignified Boston man who sat beside him, said, &ldquo;I worked here once and
+      used to sit on a barrel of apples at the edge of the sidewalk thinking how
+      clever I was to make more money in one month than the man who raised the
+      apples made in a year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Boston man, stirred by the sight of so much foodstuff and moved to
+      epigram by his mood, looked up and down the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The foodstuff of an empire rattling o&rsquo;er the stones,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should have made more money here,&rdquo; answered Sam dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The commission firm for which Sam worked was a partnership, not a
+      corporation, and was owned by two brothers. Of the two Sam thought that
+      the elder, a tall, bald, narrow-shouldered man, with a long narrow face
+      and a suave manner, was the real master, and represented most of the
+      ability in the partnership. He was oily, silent, tireless. All day he went
+      in and out of the office and warehouses and up and down the crowded
+      street, sucking nervously at an unlighted cigar. He was a great worker in
+      a suburban church, but a shrewd and, Sam suspected, an unscrupulous
+      business man. Occasionally the minister or some of the women of the
+      suburban church came into the office to talk with him, and Sam was amused
+      at the thought that Narrow Face, when he talked of the affairs of the
+      church, bore a striking resemblance to the brown-bearded minister of the
+      church in Caxton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other brother was a far different sort, and, in business, Sam thought,
+      a much inferior man. He was a heavy, broad-shouldered, square-faced man of
+      about thirty, who sat in the office dictating letters and who stayed out
+      two or three hours to lunch. He sent out letters signed by him on the
+      firm&rsquo;s stationery with the title of General Manager, and Narrow Face let
+      him do it. Broad Shoulders had been educated in New England and even after
+      several years away from his college seemed more interested in it than in
+      the welfare of the business. For a month or more in the spring he took
+      most of the time of one of the two stenographers employed by the firm
+      writing letters to graduates of Chicago high schools to induce them to go
+      East to finish their education; and when a graduate of the college came to
+      Chicago seeking employment, he closed his desk and spent entire days going
+      from place to place, introducing, urging, recommending. Sam noticed,
+      however, that when the firm employed a new man in their own office or on
+      the road it was Narrow-Face who chose the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Broad-shoulders had been a famous football player in his day and wore an
+      iron brace on his leg. The offices, like most of the offices on the
+      street, were dark and narrow, and smelled of decaying vegetables and
+      rancid butter. Noisy Greek and Italian hucksters wrangled on the sidewalk
+      in front, and among these went Narrow-Face hurrying about making deals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In South Water Street Sam did well, multiplying his thirty-six hundred
+      dollars by ten during the three years that he stayed there, or went out
+      from there to towns and cities directing a part of the great flowing river
+      of foodstuff through his firm&rsquo;s front door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With almost his first day on the street he began seeing on all sides of
+      him opportunity for gain, and set himself industriously at work to get his
+      hand upon money with which to take advantage of the chances that he
+      thought lay so invitingly about. Within a year he had made much progress.
+      From a woman on Wabash Avenue he got six thousand dollars, and he planned
+      and executed a coup that gave him the use of twenty thousand dollars that
+      had come as a legacy to his friend, the medical student, who lived at the
+      Pergrin house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had eggs and apples lying in warehouse against a rise; game, smuggled
+      across the state line from Michigan and Wisconsin, lay frozen in cold
+      storage tagged with his name and ready to be sold at a long profit to
+      hotels and fashionable restaurants; and there were even secret bushels of
+      corn and wheat lying in other warehouses along the Chicago River ready to
+      be thrown on the market at a word from him, or, the margins by which he
+      kept his hold on the stuff not being forthcoming, at a word from a LaSalle
+      Street broker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Getting the twenty thousand dollars out of the hands of the medical
+      student was a turning point in Sam&rsquo;s life. Sunday after Sunday he walked
+      with Eckardt in the streets or loitered with him in the parks thinking of
+      the money lying idle in the bank and of the deals he might be turning with
+      it in the street or on the road. Daily he saw more clearly the power of
+      cash. Other commission merchants along South Water Street came running
+      into the office of his firm with tense, anxious faces asking Narrow-Face
+      to help them over rough spots in the day&rsquo;s trading. Broad-Shoulders, who
+      had no business ability but who had married a rich woman, went on month
+      after month taking half the profits brought in by the ability of his tall,
+      shrewd brother, and Narrow-Face, who had taken a liking for Sam and who
+      occasionally stopped for a word with him, spoke of the matter often and
+      eloquently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Spend your time with no one who hasn&rsquo;t money to help you,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;on
+      the road look for the men with money and then try to get it. That&rsquo;s all
+      there is to business&mdash;money-getting.&rdquo; And then looking across to the
+      desk of his brother he would add, &ldquo;I would kick half the men in business
+      out of it if I could, but I myself must dance to the tune that money
+      plays.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One day Sam went to the office of an attorney named Webster, whose
+      reputation for the shrewd drawing of contracts had come to him from
+      Narrow-Face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want a contract drawn that will give me absolute control of twenty
+      thousand dollars with no risk on my part if I lose the money and no
+      promise to pay more than seven per cent if I do not lose,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attorney, a slender, middle-aged man with a swarthy skin and black
+      hair, put his hands on the desk before him and looked at the tall young
+      man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What collateral?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head. &ldquo;Can you draw such a contract that will be legal and
+      what will it cost me?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawyer laughed good naturedly. &ldquo;I can draw it of course. Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, taking a roll of bills from his pocket, counted the amount upon the
+      table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you anyway?&rdquo; asked Webster. &ldquo;If you can get twenty thousand and
+      without collateral you&rsquo;re worth knowing. I might be getting up a gang to
+      rob a mail train.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;There is no use his knowing I
+      have been to a lawyer,&rdquo; he thought guiltily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;In my hands it will double itself every year,&rdquo;
+       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. &ldquo;I will run factories and
+      banks and maybe mines and railroads,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s word picture&mdash;&ldquo;You will be a big man of dollars&mdash;it is
+      plain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then into Sam&rsquo;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&rsquo;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, &ldquo;But,
+      man, my honour is at stake,&rdquo; and of a coldness in the answering voice
+      replying persistently, &ldquo;With me it is not a matter of honour but of
+      dollars, and I am going to get them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;I will do what I can,&rdquo; when in truth he meant, &ldquo;I will get
+      what I can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;I will get Frank&rsquo;s money if I can,&rdquo; he told himself, settling
+      the matter that had been in his mind. &ldquo;Most men are fools and if I do not
+      get his money some other man will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s just it,&rdquo; said Frank Eckardt, falling quickly into the trap Sam
+      had set, and hungering for profits; &ldquo;I have money but no head on my
+      shoulders for using it. I wish you would take it and see what you can do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a thumping heart Sam went home across the city to the Pergrin house,
+      Eckardt beside him in the elevated train. In Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the agreement turned out to Eckardt&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through Jack Prince&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the kind of connection Sam had unconsciously been seeking&mdash;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&mdash;these
+      things were of course remote&mdash;to be dreamed of and worked toward&mdash;the
+      company made it a part of its policy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over against these advantages the place at Rainey&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rainey Arms Company, at the time of Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Do this, or that,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There must be loose ends lying about everywhere,&rdquo; he thought and followed
+      the thought with another. &ldquo;A man will come along, pick up these loose
+      ends, and run the whole shop. Why not I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the Civil War, and Colonel Tom&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>he</i> intended
+      to save.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One afternoon in a room in the Palmer House a scene was played out that
+      for days stayed in Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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, &ldquo;You are short here; you will have to
+      build this pile higher if you expect to interest me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man by the window shrugged his shoulders&mdash;he was a slender,
+      young-looking man in a fancy waistcoat&mdash;and then turning and taking a
+      roll of bills from his pocket he walked to the table, facing Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall expect you to be reasonable,&rdquo; he said, as he laid the bills on
+      the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the pile had reached twenty thousand, Sam reached out his hand and
+      taking it up put it in his pocket. &ldquo;You will get a receipt for this when I
+      get back to the office,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&mdash;written by Sam&mdash;on
+      a man&rsquo;s place in the organisation and conducting of a great modern
+      industry and his duty to perfect himself as a workman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;that
+      was Colonel Tom&rsquo;s own touch and the rousing reception of it brought a glow
+      of pride to his cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t have your time taken up by them,&rdquo; Sam explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s innovations&mdash;to be replaced
+      later by two&mdash;their stock by a prearranged agreement came back into
+      the company&rsquo;s hands. This stock and another block, secured for him by the
+      colonel, got into Sam&rsquo;s hands through the use of Eckardt&rsquo;s money, that of
+      the Wabash Avenue woman, and his own snug pile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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. &ldquo;I have in my hand a great tool,&rdquo; he thought; &ldquo;with it
+      I will pry my way into the place I mean to occupy among the big men of
+      this city and this nation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;of whom he
+      intended to be one&mdash;intent upon growth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Edith!&rdquo; he called, and running forward thrust the roses into her hand.
+      &ldquo;For Janet,&rdquo; he said, and lifting his hat walked beside her along State to
+      Van Buren Street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;ll be a hot time in the old town to-night,&rdquo; sang the voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;There&rsquo;ll
+      be a hot time in the old town to-night,&rdquo; again insisted the voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Ladies&rsquo; Entrance,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Take it and make money for me,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s
+      ability in affairs. &ldquo;What is the good of having a talent if you do not use
+      it to benefit those who haven&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Going up the stairway after the ride in the cable car Sam stood beside
+      Janet&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk!&rdquo; she broke out. &ldquo;Books are not full of pretence and lies; you
+      business men are&mdash;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&rsquo;t read books, not real ones. Didn&rsquo;t my father know; didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little woman, a light, half scorn, half amusement in her eyes, leaned
+      forward and ran her fingers through Sam&rsquo;s hair, laughing down into the
+      astonished face he turned up to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m not afraid, in spite of what Edith and Jack Prince say of you,&rdquo;
+       she went on impulsively. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam grinned. &ldquo;You are like your father, driving the mowing machine up and
+      down under the church windows on Sunday mornings,&rdquo; he declared; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Janet, closing her eyes and lying back in her chair, laughed with delight
+      and declared that they would have a splendid quarrelsome evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam did not understand Janet&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Janet&rsquo;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&rsquo;s money had grown in his hands and did not see her again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sam, were you ever in love?&rdquo; asked the colonel, with a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam turned and buried his face in the pillow and the white covering of his
+      bed danced up and down. &ldquo;The old fool, has it come to that with him?&rdquo; he
+      asked himself. &ldquo;After all these years of single life is he going to begin
+      running after women now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not answer the colonel&rsquo;s question. &ldquo;There are breakers ahead for
+      you, old boy,&rdquo; he thought, the figure of quiet, determined, little Sue
+      Rainey, the colonel&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel, oblivious of Sam&rsquo;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. &ldquo;Children are so unfair,&rdquo; he complained; &ldquo;they forget
+      about a man&rsquo;s feelings and can&rsquo;t realise that his heart is still young.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a smile on his lips, Sam began trying to picture a woman&rsquo;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. &ldquo;She is an actress, a
+      working girl,&rdquo; he said feelingly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sat up in bed. &ldquo;Letters!&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;The old dog is going to get
+      himself involved.&rdquo; He dropped again upon the pillow. &ldquo;Well, let him. Why
+      need I bother myself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel, having begun talking, could not stop. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A worried sigh broke from the colonel. &ldquo;I want Sue to invite her to the
+      house, but I am afraid,&rdquo; he complained; &ldquo;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&rsquo;s feelings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The moon had risen, shedding its light in Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would not hurt her feelings for anything. She is the squarest little
+      woman alive,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;It is a wonderful thing,&rdquo; half sobbed the
+      colonel, &ldquo;when a young and beautiful woman gives her whole heart into the
+      keeping of a man like me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The colonel,&rdquo; she began, and then hesitated and smiled. &ldquo;You, Mr.
+      McPherson, have become a figure in my father&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam watched her gravely. A flicker of mirth ran through him, but his face
+      was grave and disinterested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; he said, looking into her eyes. &ldquo;Have you met Miss London?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have,&rdquo; answered Sue Rainey. &ldquo;Have you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is impossible,&rdquo; declared the colonel&rsquo;s daughter, clutching the glove
+      held in her hand and staring at the floor. A flush of anger rose in her
+      cheeks. &ldquo;She is a crude, hard, scheming woman. She colours her hair, she
+      cries when you look at her, she hasn&rsquo;t even the grace to be ashamed of
+      what she is trying to do, and she has got the colonel into a fix.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at the brown of Sue Rainey&rsquo;s cheek and thought the texture of
+      it beautiful. He wondered why he had heard her called a plain woman. The
+      heightened colour brought to her face by her anger had, he thought,
+      transfigured her. He liked her direct, forceful way of putting the matter
+      of the colonel&rsquo;s affair, and felt keenly the compliment implied by her
+      having come to him. &ldquo;She has self-respect,&rdquo; he told himself, and felt a
+      thrill of pride in her attitude as though it had been inspired by himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been hearing of you a great deal,&rdquo; she continued, glancing up at
+      him and smiling. &ldquo;At our house you are brought to the table with the soup
+      and taken away with the liqueur. My father interlards his table talk, and
+      introduces all of his wise new axioms on economy and efficiency and
+      growth, with a constant procession of &lsquo;Sam says&rsquo; and &lsquo;Sam thinks.&rsquo; And the
+      men who come to the house talk of you also. Teddy Foreman says that at
+      directors&rsquo; meetings they all sit about like children waiting for you to
+      tell them what to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She threw out her hand with an impatient little gesture. &ldquo;I am in a hole,&rdquo;
+       she said. &ldquo;I might handle my father but I cannot handle that woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While she had been talking to him Sam looked past her and out at a window.
+      When her eyes wandered from his face he looked again at her brown firm
+      cheeks. From the beginning of the interview he had been intending to help
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me the lady&rsquo;s address,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go look her over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Three evenings later Sam took Miss Luella London to a midnight supper at
+      one of the town&rsquo;s best restaurants. She knew the motive of his taking her,
+      as he had been quite frank in the few minutes&rsquo; talk near the stage door of
+      the theatre when the engagement was made. As they ate, they talked of the
+      plays at the Chicago theatres, and Sam told her a story of an amateur
+      performance that had once taken place in the hall over Geiger&rsquo;s drug store
+      in Caxton when he was boy. In the performance Sam had taken the rôle of a
+      drummer boy killed on the field of battle by a swaggering villain in a
+      grey uniform, and John Telfer, in the rôle of villain, had become so in
+      earnest that, a pistol not exploding at a critical moment, he had chased
+      Sam about the stage trying to hit him with the butt of the weapon while
+      the audience roared with delight at the realism of Telfer&rsquo;s rage and at
+      the frightened boy begging for mercy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Luella London laughed heartily at Sam&rsquo;s story and then, the coffee being
+      served, she fingered the handle of the cup and a shrewd look came into her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now you are a big business man and have come to see me about Colonel
+      Rainey,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam lighted a cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just how much are you counting on this marriage between yourself and the
+      colonel?&rdquo; he asked bluntly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The actress laughed and poured cream into her coffee. A line came and went
+      on her forehead between her eyes. Sam thought she looked capable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking of what you told me at the stage door,&rdquo; she said,
+      and a childlike smile played about her lips. &ldquo;Do you know, Mr. McPherson,
+      I can&rsquo;t just figure you. I can&rsquo;t just see how you get into this. Where are
+      your credentials, anyway?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, keeping his eyes upon her face, took a jump into the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s this way,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m something of an adventurer myself. I fly
+      the black flag. I come from where you do. I had to reach out my hand and
+      take what I wanted. I do not blame you in the least, but it just happens
+      that I saw Colonel Tom Rainey first. He is my game and I do not propose to
+      have you fooling around. I am not bluffing. You have got to get off him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaning forward, he stared at her intently, and then lowered his voice.
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got your record. I know the man you used to live with. He&rsquo;s going to
+      help me get you if you do not drop it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting back in his chair Sam watched her gravely. He had taken the odd
+      chance to win quickly by a bluff and had won. But Luella London was not to
+      be defeated without a struggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You lie,&rdquo; she cried, half springing from her chair. &ldquo;Frank has never&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, Frank has,&rdquo; answered Sam, turning as though to call a waiter; &ldquo;I
+      will have him here in ten minutes if you wish to be shown.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Picking up a fork the woman began nervously picking holes in the table
+      cloth and a tear appeared upon her cheek. She took a handkerchief from a
+      bag that hung hooked over the back of a chair at the side of the table and
+      wiped her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right! All right!&rdquo; she said, bracing herself, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll drop it. If
+      you&rsquo;ve dug up Frank Robson you&rsquo;ve got me. He&rsquo;ll do anything you say for a
+      piece of money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some minutes the two sat in silence. A tired look had come into the
+      woman&rsquo;s eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish I was a man,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I get whipped at everything I tackle
+      because I&rsquo;m a woman. I&rsquo;m getting past my money-making days in the theatre
+      and I thought the colonel was fair game.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is,&rdquo; answered Sam dispassionately, &ldquo;but you see I beat you to it. He&rsquo;s
+      mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glancing cautiously about the room, he took a roll of bills from his
+      pocket and began laying them one at a time upon the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you&rsquo;ve done a good piece of work. You should have
+      won. For ten years half the society women of Chicago have been trying to
+      marry their daughters or their sons to the Rainey fortune. They had
+      everything to help them, wealth, good looks, and a standing in the world.
+      You have none of these things. How did you do it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anyway,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not going to see you trimmed. I&rsquo;ve got ten
+      thousand dollars here, as good Rainey money as ever was printed. You sign
+      this paper and then put the roll in your purse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s square,&rdquo; said Luella London, signing, and with the light coming
+      back into her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam beckoned to the proprietor of the restaurant whom he knew and had him
+      and a waiter sign as witnesses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Luella London put the roll of bills into her purse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you give me that money for when you had me beat anyway?&rdquo; she
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam lighted a fresh cigar and folding the paper put it in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I like you and I admire your skill,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and anyway I did
+      not have you beaten until right now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat studying the people getting up from the tables and going through
+      the door to waiting carriages and automobiles, the well-dressed women with
+      assured airs serving Sam&rsquo;s mind to make a contrast for the woman who sat
+      with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I presume you are right about women,&rdquo; he said musingly, &ldquo;it must be a
+      stiff game for you if you like winning on your own hook.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Winning! We don&rsquo;t win.&rdquo; The lips of the actress drew back showing her
+      white teeth. &ldquo;No woman ever won who tried to play a straight fighting game
+      for herself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice grew tense and the lines upon her forehead reappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Woman can&rsquo;t stand alone,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;she is a sentimental fool. She
+      reaches out her hand to some man and that in the end beats her. Why, even
+      when she plays the game as I played it against the colonel some rat of a
+      man like Frank Robson, for whom she has given up everything worth while to
+      a woman, sells her out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at her hand, covered with rings, lying on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s not misunderstand each other,&rdquo; he said quietly, &ldquo;do not blame Frank
+      for this. I never knew him. I just imagined him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A puzzled look came into the woman&rsquo;s eyes and a flush rose in her cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You grafter!&rdquo; she sneered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam called to a passing waiter and ordered a fresh bottle of wine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the use being sore?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s simple enough. You staked
+      against a better mind. Anyway you have the ten thousand, haven&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Luella reached for her purse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll look. Haven&rsquo;t you decided to steal it back
+      yet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m coming to that,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;don&rsquo;t hurry me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For several minutes they sat eyeing each other, and then, with an earnest
+      ring in his voice and a smile on his lips, Sam began talking again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m no Frank Robson and I do not like giving a
+      woman the worst of it. I have been studying you and I can&rsquo;t see you
+      running around loose with ten thousand dollars of real money on you. You
+      do not fit into the picture and the money will not last a year in your
+      hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give it to me,&rdquo; he urged; &ldquo;let me invest it for you. I&rsquo;m a winner. I&rsquo;ll
+      double it for you in a year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The actress stared past Sam&rsquo;s shoulder to where a group of young men sat
+      about a table drinking and talking loudly. Sam began telling an anecdote
+      of an Irish baggage man in Caxton. When he had finished he looked at her
+      and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As that shoemaker looked to Jerry Donlin so you, as the colonel&rsquo;s wife,
+      looked to me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I had to make you get out of my flower bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A gleam of resolution came into the wandering eyes of Luella London and
+      she took the purse from the back of the chair and brought out the roll of
+      bills.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a sport,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and I&rsquo;m going to lay a bet on the best horse I
+      ever saw. You may trim me, but I always would take a chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning, she called a waiter and, handing him a bill from her purse, threw
+      the roll on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take the pay for the spread and the wine we have had out of that,&rdquo; she
+      said, handing him the loose bill and then turning to Sam. &ldquo;You ought to
+      beat the world. Anyway your genius gets recognition from me. I pay for
+      this party and when you see the colonel say good-bye to him for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day, at his request, Sue Rainey called at the offices of the Arms
+      Company and Sam handed her the paper signed by Luella London. It was an
+      agreement on her part to divide with Sam, half and half, any money she
+      might be able to blackmail out of Colonel Rainey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel&rsquo;s daughter glanced from the paper to Sam&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought so,&rdquo; she said, and a puzzled look came into her eyes. &ldquo;But I do
+      not understand this. What does this paper do and what did you pay for it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The paper,&rdquo; Sam answered, &ldquo;puts her in a hole and I paid ten thousand
+      dollars for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue Rainey laughed and taking a checkbook from her handbag laid it on the
+      desk and sat down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you get your half?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I get it all,&rdquo; answered Sam, and then leaning back in his chair launched
+      into an explanation. When he had told her of the talk in the restaurant
+      she sat with the checkbook lying before her and with the puzzled look
+      still in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without giving her time for comment, Sam plunged into the midst of what
+      had been in his mind to say to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The woman will not bother the colonel any more,&rdquo; he declared; &ldquo;if that
+      paper won&rsquo;t hold her something else will. She respects me and she is
+      afraid of me. We had a talk after she had signed the paper and she gave me
+      the ten thousand dollars to invest for her. I promised to double it for
+      her within a year and I want to make good. I want you to double it now.
+      Make the check for twenty thousand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue Rainey wrote the check, making it payable to bearer, and pushed it
+      across the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot say that I understand yet,&rdquo; she confessed. &ldquo;Did you also fall in
+      love with her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam grinned. He was wondering whether he would be able to get into words
+      just what he wanted to tell her of the actress soldier of fortune. He
+      looked across the table at her frank grey eyes and then on an impulse
+      decided that he would tell it straight out as though she had been a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I like ability and good brains and that woman
+      has them. She isn&rsquo;t a good woman, but nothing in her life has made her
+      want to be good. All her life she has been going the wrong way, and now
+      she wants to get on her feet and squared around. That&rsquo;s what she was after
+      the colonel for. She did not want to marry him, she wanted to make him
+      give her the start she was after. I got the best of her because somewhere
+      there is a snivelling little whelp of a man who has taken all the good and
+      the fineness out of her and who now stands ready to sell her out for a few
+      dollars. I imagined there would be such a man when I saw her and I bluffed
+      my way through to him. But I do not want to whip a woman, even in such an
+      affair, through the cheapness of some man. I want to do the square thing
+      by her. That&rsquo;s why I asked you to make that check for twenty thousand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue Rainey rose and stood by the desk looking down at him. He was thinking
+      how wonderfully clear and honest her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what about the colonel?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;What will he think of all this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam walked around the desk and took her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll have to agree not to consider him,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We really did that
+      you know when we started this thing. I think we can depend upon Miss
+      London&rsquo;s putting the finishing touches on the job.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Miss London did. She sent for Sam a week later and put tweny-five
+      hundred dollars into his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s not to invest for me,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that&rsquo;s for yourself. By the
+      agreement I signed with you we were to split anything I got out of the
+      colonel. Well, I went light. I only got five thousand dollars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the money in his hand Sam stood by the side of a little table in her
+      room looking at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you tell the colonel?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I called him up here to my room last night and lying here in bed I told
+      him that I had just discovered I was the victim of an incurable disease. I
+      told him that within a month I would be in bed for keeps and asked him to
+      marry me at once and to take me away with him to some quiet place where I
+      could die in his arms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Coming over to Sam, Luella London put a hand upon his arm and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He began to beg off and make excuses,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;and then I brought
+      out his letters to me and talked straight. He wilted at once and paid the
+      five thousand dollars I asked for the letters without a murmur. I might
+      have made it fifty and with your talent you ought to get all he has in six
+      months.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook hands with her and told her of his success in doubling the money
+      she had put into his hands. Then putting the twenty-five hundred dollars
+      in his pocket he went back to his desk. He did not see her again and when,
+      through a lucky market turn, he had increased the twenty thousand dollars
+      she had left with him to twenty-five, he placed it in the hands of a trust
+      company for her and forgot the incident. Years later he heard that she was
+      running a fashionable dressmaking establishment in a western city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Colonel Tom Rainey, who had for months talked of nothing but factory
+      efficiency and of what he and young Sam McPherson were going to do in the
+      way of enlarging the business, began the next morning a tirade against
+      women that lasted the rest of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sue Rainey had long touched the fancy of the youths of Chicago society
+      who, while looking at her trim little figure and at the respectable size
+      of the fortune behind it, were yet puzzled and disconcerted by her
+      attitude toward themselves. On the wide porches at golf clubs, where young
+      men in white trousers lounged and smoked cigarettes, and in the down-town
+      clubs, where the same young men spent winter afternoons playing Kelly
+      pool, they spoke of her, calling her an enigma. &ldquo;She&rsquo;ll end by being an
+      old maid,&rdquo; they declared, and shook their heads at the thought of so good
+      a connection dangling loosely in the air just without their reach. From
+      time to time, one of the young men tore himself loose from the group that
+      contemplated her, and, with an opening volley of books, candy, flowers and
+      invitations to theatres, charged down upon her, only to have the youthful
+      ardour of his attack cooled by her prolonged attitude of indifference.
+      When she was twenty-one, a young English cavalry officer, who came to
+      Chicago to ride in the horse show had, for some weeks, been seen much in
+      her company and a report of their engagement had been whispered through
+      the town and talked of about the nineteenth hole at the country clubs. The
+      rumour proved to be without foundation, the attraction to the cavalry
+      officer having been a certain brand of rare old wine the colonel had
+      stored in his cellar and a feeling of brotherhood with the swaggering old
+      gun maker, rather than the colonel&rsquo;s quiet little daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the beginning of his acquaintanceship with her, and all during the
+      days when he stirred things up in the offices and shops of the gun
+      company, tales of the assiduous and often needy young men who were camped
+      on her trail reached Sam&rsquo;s ears. They would be in at the office to see and
+      talk with the colonel, who had several times confided to Sam that his
+      daughter Sue was already past the age at which right-minded young women
+      should marry, and in the absence of the father two or three of them had
+      formed a habit of stopping for a word with Sam, whom they had met through
+      the colonel or Jack Prince. They declared that they were &ldquo;squaring
+      themselves with the colonel.&rdquo; Not a difficult thing to do, Sam thought, as
+      he drank the wine, smoked the cigars, and ate the dinners of all without
+      prejudice. Once, at luncheon, Colonel Tom discussed these young men with
+      Sam, pounding on a table so that the glasses jumped about, and calling
+      them damned upstarts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For his own part, Sam did not feel that he knew Sue Rainey, and although,
+      after their first meeting one evening at the Rainey house, he had been
+      pricked by a mild curiosity concerning her, no opportunity to satisfy it
+      had presented itself. He knew that she was athletic, travelled much, rode,
+      shot, and sailed a boat; and he had heard Jack Prince speak of her as a
+      woman of brains, but, until the incident of the colonel and Luella London
+      threw them for the moment into the same enterprise and started him
+      thinking of her with real interest, he had seen and talked with her for
+      but brief passing moments brought about by their mutual interest in the
+      affairs of her father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Janet Eberly&rsquo;s sudden death, and while he was yet in the midst of
+      his grief at her loss, Sam had his first long talk with Sue Rainey. It was
+      in Colonel Tom&rsquo;s office, and Sam, walking hurriedly in, found her sitting
+      at the colonel&rsquo;s desk and staring out of the window at a broad expanse of
+      flat roofs. A man, climbing a flag pole to replace a slipped rope, caught
+      his attention and standing by the window looking at the minute figure
+      clinging to the swaying pole, he began talking of the absurdity of human
+      endeavour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel&rsquo;s daughter listened respectfully to his rather obvious
+      banalities and getting up from her chair came to stand beside him. Sam
+      turned slyly to look at her firm brown cheeks as he had looked on the
+      morning when she had come to see him about Luella London and was struck by
+      the thought that she in some faint way reminded him of Janet Eberly. In a
+      moment, and rather to his own surprise, he burst into a long speech
+      telling of Janet, of the tragedy of her loss and something of the beauty
+      of her life and character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The nearness of his loss and the nearness also of what he thought might be
+      a sympathetic listener spurred him and he found himself getting a kind of
+      relief for the aching sense of loss for his dead comrade by heaping
+      praises upon her life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had finished saying what was in his mind, he stood by the window
+      feeling awkward and embarrassed. The man who climbed the flag pole having
+      put the rope through the ring at the top slid suddenly down the pole and
+      thinking for the moment that he had fallen Sam made a quick clutch at the
+      air with his hand. His gripping fingers closed over Sue Rainey&rsquo;s hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned, amused by the incident, and began making a halting explanation.
+      There were tears in Sue Rainey&rsquo;s eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish I had known her,&rdquo; she said and drew her hand from between his
+      fingers. &ldquo;I wish you had known me better that I also might have known your
+      Janet. They are rare&mdash;such women. They are worth much to know. Most
+      women like most men&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made an impatient gesture with her hand and Sam, turning, walked
+      toward the door. He felt that he might not trust himself to answer her.
+      For the first time since coming to manhood he felt that tears might at any
+      moment come into his eyes. Grief for the loss of Janet surged through him
+      disconcerting and engulfing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been doing you an injustice,&rdquo; said Sue Rainey, looking at the
+      floor. &ldquo;I have thought of you as something different from what you are.
+      There is a story I heard of you which gave me a wrong impression.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam smiled. Having conquered the commotion within himself, he laughed and
+      explained the incident of the man who had slid down the pole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was the story you heard?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a story a young man told at our house,&rdquo; she explained
+      hesitatingly, refusing to be carried away from her mood of seriousness.
+      &ldquo;It was about a little girl you saved from drowning and a purse made up
+      and given you. Why did you take the money?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at her squarely. The story was one that Jack Prince had delight
+      in telling. It concerned an incident of his early business life in the
+      city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One afternoon, when he was still in the employ of the commission firm, he
+      had taken a party of men for a trip on an excursion steamer on the lake.
+      He had a project into which he wanted them to go with him and had taken
+      them aboard the steamer to get them together and present the merits of his
+      scheme. During the trip a little girl had fallen overboard and Sam,
+      springing after her, had brought her safely aboard the boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the excursion steamer a cheer had arisen. A young man in a
+      broad-brimmed cowboy hat ran about taking up a collection. People crowded
+      forward to grasp Sam&rsquo;s hand and he had accepted the money collected and
+      had put it in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the men aboard the boat were several who, while they did not draw
+      back from going into Sam&rsquo;s project, had thought his taking the money not
+      manly. They had told the story, and it had come to the ears of Jack
+      Prince, who never tired of repeating it and always ended the story with
+      the request that the listener ask Sam why he had taken the money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now in Colonel Tom&rsquo;s office facing Sue Rainey, Sam made the explanation
+      that had so delighted Jack Prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The crowd wanted to give me the money,&rdquo; he said, slightly perplexed. &ldquo;Why
+      shouldn&rsquo;t I have taken it? I did not save the little girl for the money,
+      but because she was a little girl; and the money paid for my ruined
+      clothes and the expenses of the trip.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With his hand on the doorknob he looked steadily at the woman before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I wanted the money,&rdquo; he announced, a ring of defiance in his voice.
+      &ldquo;I have always wanted money, any money I could get.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam went back to his own office and sat down at his desk. He had been
+      surprised by the cordiality and friendliness Sue Rainey had shown toward
+      him. On an impulse, he wrote a letter, defending his position in the
+      matter of the money taken on the excursion steamer and setting forth
+      something of the attitude of his mind toward money and business affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot see myself believing in the rot most business men talk,&rdquo; he
+      wrote at the end of the letter. &ldquo;They are full of sentiment and ideals
+      which are not true. Having a thing to sell they always say it is the best,
+      although it may be third rate. I do not object to that. What I do object
+      to is the way they have of nursing a hope within themselves that the third
+      rate thing is first rate until the hope becomes a belief. In the talk I
+      had with that actress Luella London I told her that I myself flew the
+      black flag. Well, I do. I would lie about goods to sell them, but I would
+      not lie to myself. I will not stultify my own mind. If a man crosses
+      swords with me in a business deal and I come out of the affair with the
+      money, it is no sign that I am the greater rascal, rather it is a sign
+      that I am the keener man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the note lying before him on the desk Sam wondered why he had written
+      it. It seemed to him an accurate and straightforward statement of the
+      business creed he had adopted for himself, but a rather absurd note to
+      write to a woman. And then, not allowing himself time to reconsider his
+      action, he addressed an envelope and going out into the general offices
+      dropped it into the mail chute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will let her know where I stand anyway,&rdquo; he thought, with a return of
+      the defiant mood in which he had told her the motive of his action on the
+      boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within the next ten days after the talk in Colonel Tom&rsquo;s office Sam saw
+      Sue Rainey several times coming to or going from her father&rsquo;s office.
+      Once, meeting in the little lobby by the office entrance, she stopped and
+      put out her hand which Sam took awkwardly. He had a feeling that she would
+      not have regretted an opportunity to continue the sudden little intimacy
+      that had sprung up between them in the few minutes&rsquo; talk of Janet Eberly.
+      The feeling did not come from vanity but from a belief in Sam that she was
+      in some way lonely and wanting companionship. Although she had been much
+      courted she lacked, he thought, the talent for comradeship or quick
+      friendliness. &ldquo;Like Janet she is more than half intellect,&rdquo; he told
+      himself, and felt a pang of regret for the slight disloyalty of the
+      further thought that there was in Sue a something more substantial and
+      solid than there had been in Janet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Sam began wondering whether or not he would like to marry Sue
+      Rainey. His mind played with the idea. He took it with him to bed, and it
+      went with him all day in his hurried trips through offices and shops. The
+      thought having come to him persisted, and he began seeing her in a new
+      light. The odd half awkward little movements of her hands, and their
+      expressiveness, the brown fine texture of her cheeks, the clearness and
+      honesty of her grey eyes, the quick sympathy and understanding of his
+      feeling for Janet, and the subtle flattery of the notion he had got that
+      she was interested in him&mdash;all of these things came and went in his
+      mind while he ran through columns of figures and laid plans for the
+      expansion of the business of the Arms Company. Unconsciously he began to
+      make her a part of his plans for the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later, Sam discovered that during the days after the first talk together
+      the thought of a marriage between them was in Sue&rsquo;s mind also. After the
+      talk she went home and stood for an hour before the glass studying herself
+      and she once told Sam that in her bed that night she shed tears because
+      she had never been able to arouse in a man the note of tenderness that had
+      been in his voice when he talked to her of Janet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then two months after the first talk they had another. Sam, who had
+      not allowed his grief over the loss of Janet or his nightly efforts to
+      drown the sting of it in hard drinking, to check the big forward movement
+      that he felt he was getting into the work of the offices and shops, sat
+      one afternoon deeply absorbed in a pile of factory cost sheets. His shirt
+      sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his white muscular forearms. He
+      was absorbed, intent upon the sheets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I stepped in,&rdquo; said a voice above his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glancing up quickly, Sam sprang to his feet. &ldquo;She must have been there
+      some minutes looking down at me,&rdquo; he thought, and had a thrill of pleasure
+      in the thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into his mind came the contents of the letter he had written her, and he
+      wondered if after all he had been a fool, and whether the thoughts of a
+      marriage with her were but vagaries. &ldquo;Perhaps it would not be attractive
+      to either her or myself when we came up to it,&rdquo; he decided.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I stepped in,&rdquo; she began again. &ldquo;I have been thinking. Some things you
+      said&mdash;in the letter and when you talked of your friend Janet who died&mdash;some
+      things of men and women and work. You may not remember them. I&mdash;I got
+      interested. I&mdash;are you a socialist?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe not,&rdquo; Sam answered, wondering what had given her that thought.
+      &ldquo;Are you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed and shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just what are you?&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;What do you believe? I am curious to
+      know. I thought your note&mdash;you will pardon me&mdash;I thought it a
+      kind of pretence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam winced. A shadow of doubt of the sincerity of his business philosophy
+      crossed his mind accompanied by the swaggering figure of Windy McPherson.
+      He came around the desk and leaning against it looked at her. His
+      secretary had gone out of the room and they were alone together. Sam
+      laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a man in the town where I was raised used to say that I was a
+      little mole working underground, intent upon worms,&rdquo; he said, and then,
+      waving his arms toward the papers on the desk, added, &ldquo;I am a business
+      man. Isn&rsquo;t that enough? If you could go with me through some of these cost
+      sheets you would agree they are needed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned and faced her again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What should I be doing with beliefs?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I think you have them&mdash;some kind of beliefs,&rdquo; she insisted,
+      &ldquo;you must have them. You get things done. You should hear the men talk of
+      you. Sometimes at the house they are quite foolish about what a wonderful
+      fellow you are and what you are doing here. They say that you drive on and
+      on. What drives you? I want to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the moment Sam half suspected that she was secretly laughing at him.
+      Finding her quite serious he started to reply and then stopped, regarding
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence between them went on and on. A clock on the wall ticked
+      loudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stepped nearer to her and stood looking down into the face she slowly
+      turned up to his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to have a talk with you,&rdquo; he said, and his voice broke. He had the
+      illusion of a hand gripping at his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a flash he had definitely decided that he would try to marry her. Her
+      interest in the motives of his life had clinched the sort of half decision
+      he had made. In an illuminating moment during the prolonged silence
+      between them he had seen her in a new light. The feeling of vague intimacy
+      brought to him by his thoughts of her became a fixed belief that she
+      belonged to him&mdash;was a part of him&mdash;and he was charmed with her
+      manner, and her person, standing there, as with a gift given him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then into his mind came a hundred other thoughts, clamouring thoughts,
+      come out of the hidden parts of him. He began to think that she could lead
+      the way on a road he wanted to travel. He thought of her wealth and what
+      it would mean to a man filled with his hunger for power. And through these
+      thoughts shot others. Something in her had taken hold of him&mdash;something
+      that had been also in Janet. He was curious concerning her curiosity about
+      his beliefs, and wanted to question her concerning her own beliefs. He
+      could see none of Colonel Tom&rsquo;s blustering incompetence in her and thought
+      her filled with truth as a deep spring is filled with clear water. He
+      believed she would give him something, something that all his life he had
+      been wanting. An old aching hunger that had haunted his nights as a boy
+      came back and he thought that at her hand it might be fed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I must read a book about socialism,&rdquo; he said lamely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again they stood in silence, she looking at the floor, he past her head
+      and out at the window. He could not bring himself to speak again of the
+      proposed talk. He had a boyish dread of having her notice the tremor in
+      his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Colonel Tom came into the room, bursting with an idea Sam had given him at
+      the lunch hour and which in working its way into his mind had become to
+      the colonel&rsquo;s entirely honest belief an idea of his own. The interruption
+      brought to Sam an intense feeling of relief and he began talking of the
+      colonel&rsquo;s idea as though it had taken him unawares.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue, walking to a window, began tying and untying the curtain cord. When
+      Sam, raising his eyes, looked at her, he caught her eyes watching him
+      intently and she smiled, continuing to look at him squarely. It was his
+      eyes that first broke away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From that day Sam&rsquo;s mind was afire with thoughts of Sue Rainey. In his
+      room he sat, or going into Grant Park stood by the lake, looking at the
+      silent, moving water as he had looked in the days when he first came to
+      the city. He did not dream of having her in his arms or of kissing her
+      lips; he thought, instead, with a glowing heart, of a life lived with her.
+      He wanted to walk beside her through the streets, to have her come
+      suddenly in at his office door, to look into her eyes and to have her
+      question him, as she had questioned, concerning his beliefs and his hopes.
+      He thought that in the evening he would like to go to a house of his own
+      and find her sitting there waiting for him. All the charm of his aimless,
+      half-dissolute way of life died in him, and he believed that with her he
+      could begin to live more fully and completely. From the moment when he had
+      definitely decided that he wanted Sue as a wife, Sam stopped overdrinking,
+      going to his room or walking through the streets or in the parks instead
+      of seeking his old companions in the clubs and drinking places. Sometimes
+      pushing his bed to the window overlooking the lake, he would undress
+      immediately after dinner and opening the window would spend half the night
+      watching the lights of boats far away over the water and thinking of her.
+      He would imagine her in the room, moving here and there, and coming
+      occasionally to put her hand in his hair and look down at him as Janet had
+      done, helping by her sane talk and quiet ways to get his life straightened
+      out for good living.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when he had fallen asleep the face of Sue Rainey came to visit his
+      dreams. One night he thought she had become blind and sat in the room with
+      sightless eyes saying over and over like one demented, &ldquo;Truth, truth, give
+      me back the truth that I may see,&rdquo; and he awoke sick with horror at the
+      thought of the look of suffering that had been in her face. Never did Sam
+      dream of having her in his arms or of raining kisses on her lips and neck
+      as he had dreamed of other women who in the past had won his favour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For all that he thought of her so constantly and built so confidently his
+      dream of a life to be spent with her, months passed before he saw her
+      again. Through Colonel Tom he learned that she had gone for a visit to the
+      East and he went earnestly about his work, keeping his mind on his
+      business during the day and only in the evening allowing himself to become
+      absorbed in thoughts of her. He had a feeling that although he had said
+      nothing she knew of his desire for her and that she wanted time to think
+      it over. Several times in the evening in his room he wrote her long
+      letters filled with minute, boyish explanations of his thoughts and
+      motives, letters which after writing he immediately destroyed. A woman of
+      the west side, with whom he had once had an affair, met him one day on the
+      street, and put her hand familiarly on his arm and for the moment
+      reawakened in him an old desire. After leaving her he did not go back to
+      the office, but taking a south-bound car, spent the afternoon walking in
+      Jackson Park, watching the children at play on the grass, sitting on
+      benches under the trees, getting out of his body and his mind the
+      insistent call of the flesh that had come back to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then in the evening, he came suddenly upon Sue riding a spirited black
+      horse in a bridle path at the upper end of the park. It was just at the
+      grey beginning of night. Stopping the horse, she sat looking at him and
+      going to her he put a hand on the bridle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might have that talk,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled down at him and the colour began to rise in her brown cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking of it,&rdquo; she said, the familiar serious look coming
+      into her eyes. &ldquo;After all what have we to say to each other?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam watched her steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a lot of things to say to you,&rdquo; he announced. &ldquo;That is to say&mdash;well&mdash;I
+      have, if things are as I hope.&rdquo; She got off the horse and they stood
+      together by the side of the path. Sam never forgot the few minutes of
+      silence that followed. The wide prospects of green sward, the golf player
+      trudging wearily toward them through the uncertain light, his bag upon his
+      shoulder, the air of physical fatigue with which he walked, bending
+      slightly forward, the faint, soft sound of waves washing over a low beach,
+      and the intense waiting look on the face she turned up to him, made an
+      impression on his mind that stayed with him through life. It seemed to him
+      that he had arrived at a kind of culmination, a starting point, and that
+      all the vague shadowy uncertainties that had, in reflective moments,
+      flitted through his mind, were to be brushed away by some act, some word,
+      from the lips of this woman. With a rush he realised how consistently he
+      had been thinking of her and how enormously he had been counting on her
+      falling in with his plans, and the realisation was followed by a sickening
+      moment of fear. How little he actually knew of her and of her way of
+      thought. What assurance had he that she would not laugh, jump back upon
+      the horse, and ride away? He was afraid as he had never been afraid
+      before. Dumbly his mind groped about for a way to begin. Expressions he
+      had caught and noted in her strong serious little face when he had
+      achieved but a mild curiosity concerning her came back to visit his mind
+      and he tried desperately to build an instant idea of her from these. And
+      then turning his face from her he plunged directly into his thoughts of
+      the past months as though she had been sharing talking to the colonel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking we might marry, you and I,&rdquo; he said, and cursed
+      himself for the blundering bluntness of the declaration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do get things done, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; she replied, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should you have been thinking anything of the sort?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I want to live with you,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I have been talking to the
+      colonel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About marrying me?&rdquo; She seemed about to begin laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hurried on. &ldquo;No, not that. We talked about you. I could not let him
+      alone. He might have known. I kept making him talk. I made him tell me
+      about your ideas. I felt I had to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam faced her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He thinks your ideas absurd. I do not. I like them. I like you. I think
+      you are beautiful. I do not know whether I love you or not, but for weeks
+      I have been thinking of you and clinging to you and saying over and over
+      to myself, &lsquo;I want to live my life with Sue Rainey.&rsquo; I did not expect to
+      go at it this way. You know me. What you do not know I will tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sam McPherson, you are a wonder,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and I do not know but that I
+      will marry you in the end, but I can&rsquo;t tell now. I want to know a lot of
+      things. I want to know if you are ready to believe what I believe and to
+      live for what I want to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The horse, growing restless, began tugging at the bridle and she spoke to
+      him sharply. She plunged into a description of a man she had seen on the
+      lecture platform during her visit to the East and Sam looked at her with
+      puzzled eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was beautiful,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He was past sixty but looked like a boy of
+      twenty-five, not in his body, but in an air of youth that hung over him.
+      He stood there before the people talking, quiet, able, efficient. He was
+      clean. He had lived clean, body and mind. He had been companion and
+      co-worker with William Morris, and once he had been a mine boy in Wales,
+      but he had got hold of a vision and lived for it. I did not hear what he
+      said, but I kept thinking, &lsquo;I want a man like that.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you accept my beliefs and live for what I want to live?&rdquo; she
+      persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at the ground. It seemed to him that he was going to lose her,
+      that she would not marry him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not accepting beliefs or ends in life blindly,&rdquo; he said stoutly,
+      &ldquo;but I want them. What are your beliefs? I want to know. I think I haven&rsquo;t
+      any myself. When I reach for them they are gone. My mind shifts and
+      changes. I want something solid. I like solid things. I want you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When can we meet and talk everything over thoroughly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; answered Sam bluntly, some look in her face changing his whole
+      viewpoint. Suddenly it seemed as though a door had been opened, letting in
+      a strong light upon the darkness of his mind. His confidence had come back
+      to him. He wanted to strike and keep on striking. The blood rushed through
+      his body and his brain began working rapidly. He felt sure of ultimate
+      success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking her hand, and leading the horse, he began walking with her along
+      the path. Her hand trembled in his and as though answering a thought in
+      his mind she looked up at him and said,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not different from other women, although I do not accept your offer.
+      This is a big moment for me, perhaps the biggest moment of my life. I want
+      you to know that I feel that, though I do want certain things more than I
+      want you or any other man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a suggestion of tears in her voice and Sam had a feeling that
+      the woman in her wanted him to take her into his arms, but something
+      within him told him to wait and to help her by waiting. Like her he wanted
+      something more than the feel of a woman in his arms. Ideas rushed through
+      his head; he thought that she was going to give him some bigger idea than
+      he had known. The figure she had drawn for him of the old man who stood on
+      the platform, young and beautiful, the old boyish need of a purpose in
+      life, the dreams of the last few weeks&mdash;all of these were a part of
+      the eager curiosity in him. They were like hungry little animals waiting
+      to be fed. &ldquo;We must have it all out here and now,&rdquo; he told himself. &ldquo;I
+      must not let myself be swept away by a rush of feeling and I must not let
+      her be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that I haven&rsquo;t tenderness for you. I am filled
+      with it. But I want to have our talk. I want to know what you expect me to
+      believe and how you want me to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt her hand stiffen in his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whether or not we are worth while to each other,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then she began to talk, telling him in a quiet steady voice that
+      steadied something in him what she wanted to make out of her life. Her
+      idea was one of service to mankind through children. She had seen girl
+      friends of hers, with whom she had gone to school, grow up and marry. They
+      had wealth and education, fine well-trained bodies, and they had been
+      married only to live lives more fully devoted to pleasure. One or two who
+      had married poor men had only done so to satisfy a passion in themselves,
+      and after marriage had joined the others in the hungry pursuit of
+      pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They do nothing at all,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;to repay the world for the things
+      given them, the wealth and well-trained bodies and the disciplined minds.
+      They go through life day after day and year after year wasting themselves
+      and come in the end to nothing but indolent, slovenly vanity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had thought it all out and had tried to plan for herself a life with
+      other ends, and wanted a husband in accord with her ideas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That isn&rsquo;t so difficult,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I can find a man whom I can control
+      and who will believe as I believe. My money gives me that power. But I
+      want him to be a real man, a man of ability, a man who does things for
+      himself, one fitted by his life and his achievements to be the father of
+      children who do things. And so I began thinking about you. I got the men
+      who come to the house to talk of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hung her head and laughed like a bashful boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know much of the story of your early life out in that Iowa town,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;I got the story of your life and your achievements out there from
+      some one who knew you well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea seemed wonderfully simple and beautiful to Sam. It seemed to add
+      tremendously to the dignity and nobility of his feeling for her. He
+      stopped in the path and swung her about facing him. They were alone in
+      that end of the park. The soft darkness of the summer night had settled
+      over them. In the grass at their feet a cricket sang loudly. He made a
+      movement to take her into his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is wonderful,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait,&rdquo; she demanded, putting her hand against his shoulder. &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t so
+      simple. I am wealthy. You are able and you have a kind of undying energy
+      in you. I want to give both my wealth and your ability to children&mdash;our
+      children. That will not be easy for you. It means giving up your dreams of
+      power. Perhaps I shall lose courage. Women do after two or three have
+      come. You will have to furnish that. You will have to make a mother of me
+      and keep making a mother of me. You will have to be a new kind of father
+      with something maternal in you. You will have to be patient and studious
+      and kind. You will have to think of these things at night instead of
+      thinking of your own advancement. You will have to live wholly for me
+      because I am to be their mother, giving me your strength and courage and
+      your good sane outlook on things. And then when they come you will have to
+      give all these things to them day after day in a thousand little ways.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam took her into his arms and for the first time in his memory the hot
+      tears stood in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The horse, unattended, wheeled, threw up his head and trotted off down the
+      path. They let him go, walking along after him hand in hand like two happy
+      children. At the entrance to the park they came up to him, held by a park
+      policeman. She got on the horse and Sam stood beside her looking up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell the colonel in the morning,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What will he say?&rdquo; she murmured, musingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damned ingrate,&rdquo; Sam mimicked the colonel&rsquo;s blustering throat tones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed and picked up the reins. Sam laid his hand on hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How soon?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her head down near his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll waste no time,&rdquo; she said, blushing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then in the presence of a park policeman, in the street by the
+      entrance to the park with the people passing up and down, Sam had his
+      first kiss from Sue Rainey&rsquo;s lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After she rode away Sam walked. He had no sense of the passing of time,
+      wandering through street after street, rearranging and readjusting his
+      outlook on life. What she had said had stirred every vestige of sleeping
+      nobility in him. He thought that he had got hold of the thing he had
+      unconsciously been seeking all his life. His dreams of control of the
+      Rainey Arms Company and the other big things he had planned in business
+      seemed, in the light of their talk, so much nonsense and vanity. &ldquo;I will
+      live for this! I will live for this!&rdquo; he kept saying over and over to
+      himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue&rsquo;s
+      arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish
+      together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting in the
+      darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and thought
+      they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame
+      houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his
+      boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving
+      forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the
+      arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must go to her&mdash;I must go to her at her house&mdash;now&mdash;tonight&mdash;and
+      tell her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It cleanses me! this cleanses me!&rdquo; he said to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He remembered the men who had sat about the stove in Wildman&rsquo;s grocery
+      when he was a boy and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered how
+      he, as a boy in the city, had run through the crowded streets fleeing from
+      the terror of lust. He began to understand how distorted, how strangely
+      perverted, his whole attitude toward women and sex had been. &ldquo;Sex is a
+      solution, not a menace&mdash;it is wonderful,&rdquo; he told himself without
+      knowing fully the meaning of the word that had sprung to his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, at last, he turned into Michigan Avenue and went toward his
+      apartment, the late moon was just mounting the sky and a clock in one of
+      the sleeping houses was striking three.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One evening, six weeks after the talk in the gathering darkness in Jackson
+      Park, Sue Rainey and Sam McPherson sat on the deck of a Lake Michigan
+      steamer watching the lights of Chicago blink out in the distance. They had
+      been married that afternoon in Colonel Tom&rsquo;s big house on the south side;
+      and now they sat on the deck of the boat, being carried out into darkness,
+      vowed to motherhood and to fatherhood, each more or less afraid of the
+      other. They sat in silence, looking at the blinking lights and listening
+      to the low voices of their fellow passengers, also sitting in the chairs
+      along the deck or strolling leisurely about, and to the wash of the water
+      along the sides of the boat, eager to break down a little reserve that the
+      solemnity of the marriage service had built up between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A picture floated in Sam&rsquo;s mind. He saw Sue, all in white, radiant and
+      wonderful, coming toward him down a broad stairway, toward him, the
+      newsboy of Caxton, the smuggler of game, the roisterer, the greedy
+      moneygetter. All during those six weeks he had been waiting for this hour
+      when he should sit beside the little grey-clad figure, getting from her
+      the help he wanted in the reconstruction of his life. Without being able
+      to talk as he had thought of talking, he yet felt assured and easy in his
+      mind. In the moment when she had come down the stairway he had been half
+      overcome by a feeling of intense shame, a return of the shame that had
+      swept over him that night when she had given her word and he had walked
+      hour after hour through the streets. It had seemed to him that from among
+      the guests standing about should arise a voice crying, &ldquo;Stop! Do not go
+      on! Let me tell you of this fellow&mdash;this McPherson!&rdquo; And then he had
+      seen her holding to the arm of swaggering, pretentious Colonel Tom and he
+      had taken her hand to become one with her, two curious, feverish,
+      strangely different human beings, taking a vow in the name of their God,
+      with the flowers banked about them and the eyes of people upon them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam had gone to Colonel Tom the morning after that evening in Jackson
+      Park, there had been a scene. The old gun maker had blustered and roared
+      and forbidden, pounding on his desk with his fist. When Sam remained cool
+      and unimpressed, he had stormed out of the room slamming the door and
+      shouting, &ldquo;Upstart! Damned upstart!&rdquo; and Sam had gone smiling back to his
+      desk, mildly disappointed. &ldquo;I told Sue he would say &lsquo;Ingrate,&rsquo;&rdquo; he
+      thought, &ldquo;I am losing my skill at guessing just what he will do and say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel&rsquo;s rage had been short-lived. Within a week he was boasting of
+      Sam to chance callers as &ldquo;the best business man in America,&rdquo; and in the
+      face of a solemn promise given Sue was telling news of the approaching
+      marriage to every newspaper man he knew. Sam suspected him of secretly
+      calling on the telephone those newspapers whose representatives had not
+      crossed his trail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the six waiting weeks there had been little of love making between
+      Sue and Sam. They had talked instead, or, going into the country or to the
+      parks, had walked under the trees consumed with a curious eager passion of
+      suspense. The idea she had given him in the park grew in Sam&rsquo;s brain. To
+      live for the young things that would presently come to them, to be simple,
+      direct, and natural, like the trees or the beasts of the field, and then
+      to have the native honesty of such a life illuminated and ennobled by a
+      mutual intelligent purpose to make their young something finer and better
+      than the things in Nature by the intelligent use of their own good minds
+      and bodies. In the shops and on the streets the hurrying men and women
+      took on a new significance to him. He wondered what secret mighty purpose
+      might be in their lives, and read a newspaper report of an engagement or a
+      marriage with a little jump of the heart. He looked at the girls and the
+      women at work over the typewriting machines in the office, with
+      questioning eyes, asking himself why they did not seek marriage openly and
+      determinedly, and saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material,
+      as a machine for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in
+      the great workshop of the universe. &ldquo;Marriage is a port, a beginning, a
+      point of departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage
+      of life,&rdquo; he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. &ldquo;All that
+      goes before is but a preparation, a building. The pains and the triumphs
+      of all unmarried people are but the good oak planks being driven into
+      place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage.&rdquo; Or, again, one night
+      when they were in a rowboat on the lagoon in the park and all about them
+      in the darkness was the plash of oars in the water, the screams of excited
+      girls, and the sound of voices calling, he let the boat float in against
+      the shores of a little island and crept along the boat to kneel, with his
+      head in her lap and whisper, &ldquo;It is not the love of a woman that grips me,
+      Sue, but the love of life. I have had a peep into the great mystery. This&mdash;this
+      is why we are here&mdash;this justifies us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that she sat beside him, her shoulder against his own, being carried
+      away with him into darkness and privacy, the personal side of his love for
+      her ran through Sam like a flame and, turning, he drew her head down upon
+      his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet, Sam,&rdquo; she whispered, &ldquo;not with these hundreds of people sleeping
+      and drinking and thinking and going about their affairs almost within
+      touch of our hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They got up and walked along the swaying deck. Out of the north the clean
+      wind called to them, the stars looked down upon them, and in the darkness
+      in the bow of the boat they parted for the night silently, speechless with
+      happiness and with a dear, unmentioned secret between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At dawn they landed at a little lumbering town, where boat, blankets, and
+      camping kit had gone before. A river flowed down out of the woods passing
+      the town, going under a bridge and turning the wheel of a sawmill that
+      stood by the shore of the river facing the lake. The clean sweet smell of
+      the new-cut logs, the song of the saws, the roar of the water tumbling
+      over a dam, the cries of the blue-shirted lumbermen working among the
+      floating logs above the dam, filled the morning air, and above the song of
+      the saws sang another song, a breathless, waiting song, the song of love
+      and of life singing in the hearts of husband and wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a little roughly-built lumberman&rsquo;s hotel they ate breakfast in a room
+      overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced
+      woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the
+      breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing the
+      door behind her. Through the open window they looked at the cold
+      swiftly-flowing river and at a freckled-faced boy who carried packages
+      wrapped in blankets and put them in a long canoe tied to a little wharf
+      beside the hotel. They ate and sat staring at each other like two strange
+      boys, saying nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the river he sank his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the
+      current. During the six weeks&rsquo; waiting in Chicago she had taught him the
+      essentials of the canoeist&rsquo;s art and, now, as he shot the canoe under the
+      bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a
+      superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the prow of
+      the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and
+      straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine
+      trees, and piles of cut logs lay at the foot of the hills along the shore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At sunset they landed in a little cleared space at the foot of a hill and
+      on the top of the hill, with the wind blowing across it, they made their
+      first camp. Sam brought boughs and spread them, lapped like feathers in
+      the wings of a bird, and carried blankets up the hill, while Sue, at the
+      foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared their first
+      cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out her rifle and
+      gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness making the
+      lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the young night,
+      with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold wind blowing
+      into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under the trees to
+      where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the stormy waters of a
+      great sea before their eyes, and lay down together for their first long
+      tender embrace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a special kind of fine pleasure in getting one&rsquo;s first knowledge
+      of the great outdoors in the company of a woman a man loves and to have
+      that woman an expert, with a keen appetite for the life, adds point and
+      flavour to the experience. In his busy striving, nickel-seeking boyhood in
+      the town surrounded by hot cornfields, and in his young manhood of
+      scheming and money hunger in the city, Sam had not thought of vacations
+      and resting places. He had walked on country roads with John Telfer and
+      Mary Underwood, listening to their talk, absorbing their ideas, blind and
+      deaf to the little life in the grass, in the leafy branches of the trees
+      and in the air about him. In clubs, and about hotels and barrooms in the
+      city, he had heard men talk of life in the open, and had said to himself,
+      &ldquo;When my time comes I will taste these things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And now he did taste them, lying on his back on the grass along the river,
+      floating down quiet little side streams in the moonlight, listening to the
+      night call of birds, or watching the flight of frightened wild things as
+      he pushed the canoe into the quiet depths of the great forest about them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At night, under the little tent they had brought, or beneath the blankets
+      under the stars, he slept lightly, awakening often to look at Sue lying
+      beside him. Perhaps the wind had blown a wisp of hair across her face and
+      her breath played with it, tossing it about; perhaps just the quiet of her
+      expressive little face charmed and held him, so that he turned reluctantly
+      to sleep again thinking that he might, with pleasure, go on looking at her
+      all night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Sue the days also passed lightly. She also awoke in the night and lay
+      looking at the man sleeping beside her, and once she told Sam that when he
+      awoke she feigned sleep dreading to rob him of the pleasure that she knew
+      these secret love passages gave to both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were not alone in those northern woods. Everywhere along the rivers
+      and on the shores of little lakes they found people, to Sam a new kind of
+      people, who dropped all the ordinary things of life, and ran away to the
+      woods and the streams to spend long happy months in the open. He
+      discovered with surprise that these adventurers were men of modest
+      fortunes, small manufacturers, skilled workingmen, retail merchants. One
+      with whom he talked was a grocer from a town in Ohio, and when Sam asked
+      him if the coming to the woods with his family for an eight-weeks stay did
+      not endanger the success of his business he agreed with Sam that it did,
+      nodding his head and laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there would be a lot more danger in not leaving it,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the
+      danger of having my boys grow up to be men without my having any real fun
+      with them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Among all of the people they met Sue passed with a sort of happy freedom
+      that confounded Sam, as he had formed a habit of thinking of her always as
+      one shut within herself. Many of the people they saw she knew, and he came
+      to believe that she had chosen the place for their love making because she
+      admired and held in high favour the lives of these people of the
+      out-of-doors and wanted her lover to be in some way like them. Out of the
+      solitude of the woods, along the shores of little lakes, they called to
+      her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show her husband,
+      and among them she sat talking of other seasons and of the inroads of the
+      lumber men upon their paradise. &ldquo;The Burnhams were this year on the shores
+      of Grant Lake, the two school teachers from Pittsburgh would come early in
+      August, the Detroit man with the crippled son was building a cabin on the
+      shores of Bone River.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sat among them in silence, renewing constantly his admiration for the
+      wonder of Sue&rsquo;s past life. She, the daughter of Colonel Tom, the woman
+      rich in her own right, to have made her friends among these people; she,
+      who had been pronounced an enigma by the young men of Chicago, to have
+      been secretly all of these years the companion and fellow spirit of these
+      campers by the lakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For six weeks they led a wandering, nomadic life in that half wild land,
+      for Sue six weeks of tender love making, and of the expression of every
+      thought and impulse of her fine nature, for Sam six weeks of readjustment
+      and freedom, during which he learned to sail a boat, to shoot, and to get
+      the fine taste of that life into his being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then one morning they came again to the little lumber town at the
+      mouth of the river and sat upon the pier waiting for the Chicago boat.
+      They were bound once more into the world, and to that life together that
+      was the foundation of their marriage and that was to be the end and aim of
+      their two lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Sam&rsquo;s life from boyhood had been, on the whole, barren and empty of
+      many of the sweeter things, his life during the next year was strikingly
+      full and complete. In the office he had ceased being the pushing upstart
+      tramping on the toes of tradition and had become the son of Colonel Tom,
+      the voter of Sue&rsquo;s big stock holdings, the practical, directing head and
+      genius of the destinies of the company. Jack Prince&rsquo;s loyalty had been
+      rewarded, and a huge advertising campaign made the name and merits of the
+      Rainey Arms Company&rsquo;s wares known to all reading Americans. The muzzles of
+      Rainey-Whittaker rifles, revolvers, and shotguns looked threateningly out
+      at one from the pages of the great popular magazines, brown fur-clad
+      hunters did brave deeds before one&rsquo;s eyes, kneeling upon snow-topped crags
+      preparing to speed winged death to waiting mountain sheep; huge
+      open-mouthed bears rushed down from among the type at the top of the pages
+      and seemed about to devour cool deliberate sportsmen who stood undaunted,
+      swinging their trusty Rainey-Whittakers into place, and presidents,
+      explorers, and Texas gun fighters loudly proclaimed the merits of
+      Rainey-Whittakers to a gun-buying world. It was for Sam and for Colonel
+      Tom a time of big dividends, mechanical progress, and contentment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stayed diligently at work in the offices and in the shops, but kept
+      within himself a reserve of strength and resolution that might have gone
+      into the work. With Sue he took up golf and morning rides on horseback,
+      and with Sue he sat during the long evenings, reading aloud, absorbing her
+      ideas and her beliefs. Sometimes for days they were like two children,
+      going off together to walk on country roads and to sleep in country
+      hotels. On these walks they went hand in hand or, bantering each other,
+      raced down long hills to lie panting in the grass by the roadside when
+      they were out of breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Near the end of the first year she told him one night of the realisation
+      of their hopes and they sat through the evening alone by the fire in her
+      room, filled with the white wonder of it, renewing to each other all the
+      fine vows of their early love-making days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam never succeeded in recapturing the flavour of those days. Happiness is
+      a thing so vague, so indefinite, so dependent on a thousand little turns
+      of the events of the day, that it only visits the most fortunate and at
+      rare intervals, but Sam thought that he and Sue touched almost ideal
+      happiness constantly during that time. There were weeks and even months of
+      their first year together that later passed out of Sam&rsquo;s memory entirely,
+      leaving only a sense of completeness and well being. He could remember,
+      perhaps, a winter walk in the moonlight by the frozen lake, or a visitor
+      who sat and talked an evening away by their fire. But at the end he had to
+      come back to this: that something sang in his heart all day long and that
+      the air tasted better, the stars shone more brightly, and the wind and the
+      rain and the hail upon the window panes sang more sweetly in his ears. He
+      and the woman who lived with him had wealth, position, and infinite
+      delight in the presence and the persons of each other, and a great idea
+      burned like a lamp in a window at the end of the road they travelled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile, in the world about him events came and went. A president was
+      elected, the grey wolves were being hunted out of the Chicago city
+      council, and a strong rival to his company flourished in his own city. In
+      other days he would have been down upon this rival fighting, planning,
+      working for its destruction. Now he sat at Sue&rsquo;s feet, dreaming and
+      talking to her of the brood that under their care should grow into
+      wonderful reliant men and women. When Lewis, the talented sales manager of
+      the Edwards Arms Company, got the business of a Kansas City jobber, he
+      smiled, wrote a sharp letter to his man in that territory, and went for an
+      afternoon of golf with Sue. He had completely and wholly accepted Sue&rsquo;s
+      conception of life. &ldquo;We have wealth for any emergency,&rdquo; he said to
+      himself, &ldquo;and we will live our lives for service to mankind through the
+      children that will presently come into our house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After their marriage Sam found that Sue, for all her apparent coldness and
+      indifference, had in Chicago, as in the northern woods, her own little
+      circle of men and women. Some of these people Sam had met during the
+      engagement, and now they began gradually coming to the house for an
+      evening with the McPhersons. Sometimes there would be several of them for
+      a quiet dinner at which there was much good talk, and after which Sue and
+      Sam sat for half the night, continuing some vein of thought brought to
+      them. Among the people who came to them, Sam shone resplendent. In some
+      indefinable way he thought they paid court to him and the thought
+      flattered him immensely. The college professor who had talked brilliantly
+      through an evening turned to Sam for approval of his conclusions, a writer
+      of tales of cowboy life asked him to help him over a difficulty in the
+      stock market, and a tall black-haired painter paid him the rare compliment
+      of repeating one of Sam&rsquo;s remarks as his own. It was as though, in spite
+      of their talk, they thought him the most gifted of them all, and for a
+      time he was puzzled by their attitude. Jack Prince came, sat at one of the
+      dinner parties, and explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have got what they want and cannot get&mdash;the money,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the evening when Sue told him the great news they gave a dinner. It
+      was a sort of welcoming party for the coming guest, and, while the people
+      at the table ate and talked, Sue and Sam, from opposite ends of the table,
+      lifted high their glasses and, looking into each other&rsquo;s eyes, drank off
+      the health of him who was to come, the first of the great family, the
+      family that was to have two lives lived for its success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the table sat Colonel Tom with his broad white shirt front, his white,
+      pointed beard, and his grandiloquent flow of talk; at Sue&rsquo;s side sat Jack
+      Prince, pausing in his open admiration of Sue to cast an eye on the
+      handsome New York girl at Sam&rsquo;s end of the table or to puncture, with a
+      flash of his terse common sense, some balloon of theory launched by
+      Williams of the University, who sat on the other side of Sue; the artist,
+      who hoped for a commission to paint Colonel Tom, sat opposite him
+      bewailing the dying out of fine old American families; and a serious-faced
+      little German scientist sat beside Colonel Tom smiling as the artist
+      talked. The man, Sam fancied, was laughing at them both, perhaps at all of
+      them. He did not mind. He looked at the scientist and at the other faces
+      up and down the table and then at Sue. He saw her directing and leading
+      the talk; he saw the play of muscles about her strong neck and the fine
+      firmness of her straight little body, and his eyes grew moist and a lump
+      came into his throat at the thought of the secret that lay between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then his mind ran back to another night in Caxton when first he sat
+      eating among strange people at Freedom Smith&rsquo;s table. He saw again the
+      tomboy girl and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom&rsquo;s hand
+      in the close little stable; he saw the absurd housepainter trying to blow
+      the bugle in the street; and the mother talking to her boy of death
+      through the summer evening; the fat foreman making the record of his loves
+      on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commission man rubbing his
+      hands before a group of Greek hucksters, and then this&mdash;this home
+      with its safety and its secret high aim and him sitting there at the head
+      of it all. Like the novelist, it seemed to him that he should admire and
+      bow his head before the romance of destiny. He thought his station, his
+      wife, his country, his end in life, when rightly seen, the very apex of
+      life on the earth, and to him in his pride it seemed that he was in some
+      way the master and maker of it all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Late one evening, some weeks after the McPhersons had given the dinner
+      party in secret celebration of the future arrival of what was to be the
+      first of the great family, they came together down the steps of a north
+      side house to their waiting carriage. They had spent, Sam thought, a
+      delightful evening. The Grovers were people of whose friendship he was
+      particularly proud and since his marriage with Sue he had taken her often
+      for an evening to the house of the venerable surgeon. Doctor Grover was a
+      scholar, a man of note in the medical world, and a rapid and absorbing
+      talker and thinker on any subject that aroused his interest. A certain
+      youthful enthusiasm in his outlook on life had attracted to him the
+      devotion of Sue, who, since meeting him through Sam, had counted him a
+      marked addition to their little group of friends. His wife, a
+      white-haired, plump little woman, was, though apparently somewhat
+      diffident, in reality his intellectual equal and companion, and Sue in a
+      quiet way had taken her as a model in her own effort toward complete
+      wifehood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the evening, spent in a rapid exchange of opinions and ideas
+      between the two men, Sue had sat in silence. Once when he looked at her
+      Sam thought that he had surprised an annoyed look in her eyes and was
+      puzzled by it. During the remainder of the evening her eyes refused to
+      meet his and she looked instead at the floor, a flush mounting her cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the door of the carriage Frank, Sue&rsquo;s coachman, stepped on the hem of
+      her gown and tore it. The tear was slight, the incident Sam thought
+      entirely unavoidable, and as much due to a momentary clumsiness on the
+      part of Sue as to the awkwardness of Frank. The man had for years been a
+      loyal servant and a devoted admirer of Sue&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and taking Sue by the arm started to help her in at the
+      carriage door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too much gown for an athlete,&rdquo; he said, pointlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a flash Sue turned and faced the coachman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Awkward brute,&rdquo; she said, through her teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stood on the sidewalk dumb with astonishment as Frank turned and
+      climbed to his seat without waiting to close the carriage door. He felt as
+      he might have felt had he, as a boy, heard profanity from the lips of his
+      mother. The look in Sue&rsquo;s eyes as she turned them on Frank struck him like
+      a blow and in a moment his whole carefully built-up conception of her and
+      of her character had been shaken. He had an impulse to slam the carriage
+      door after her and walk home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They drove home in silence, Sam feeling as though he rode beside a new and
+      strange being. In the light of passing street lamps he could see her face
+      held straight ahead and her eyes staring stonily at the curtain in front.
+      He didn&rsquo;t want to reproach her; he wanted to take hold of her arm and
+      shake her. &ldquo;I should like to take the whip from in front of Frank&rsquo;s seat
+      and give her a sound beating,&rdquo; he told himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the house Sue jumped out of the carriage and, running past him in at
+      the door, closed it after her. Frank drove off toward the stables and when
+      Sam went into the house he found Sue standing half way up the stairs
+      leading to her room and waiting for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I presume you do not know that you have been openly insulting me all
+      evening,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Your beastly talk there at the Grovers&mdash;it was
+      unbearable&mdash;who are these women? Why parade your past life before
+      me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam said nothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at her
+      and then, turning, just as she, running up the stairs, slammed the door of
+      her own room, he went into the library. A wood fire burned in the grate
+      and he sat down and lighted his pipe. He did not try to think the thing
+      out. He felt that he was in the presence of a lie and that the Sue who had
+      lived in his mind and in his affections no longer existed, that in her
+      place there was this other woman, this woman who had insulted her own
+      servant and had perverted and distorted the meaning of his talk during the
+      evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting by the fire filling and refilling his pipe, Sam went carefully
+      over every word, gesture, and incident of the evening at the Grovers and
+      could get hold of no part of it that he thought might in fairness serve as
+      an excuse for the outburst. In the upper part of the house he could hear
+      Sue moving restlessly about and he had satisfaction in the thought that
+      her mind was punishing her for so strange a seizure. He and Grover had
+      perhaps been somewhat carried away, he told himself; they had talked of
+      marriage and its meaning and had both declared somewhat hotly against the
+      idea that the loss of virginity in women was in any sense a bar to
+      honourable marriage, but he had said nothing that he thought could have
+      been twisted into an insult to Sue or to Mrs. Grover. He had thought the
+      talk rather good and clearly thought out and had come out of the house
+      exhilarated and secretly preening himself with the thought that he had
+      talked unusually forcefully and well. In any event what had been said had
+      been said before in Sue&rsquo;s presence and he thought that he could remember
+      her having, in the past, expressed similar ideas with enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hour after hour he sat in the chair before the dying fire. He dozed and
+      his pipe dropped from his hand and fell upon the stone hearth. A kind of
+      dumb misery and anger was in him as over and over endlessly his mind kept
+      reviewing the events of the evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What has made her think she can do that to me?&rdquo; he kept asking himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He remembered certain strange silences and hard looks from her eyes during
+      the past weeks, silences and looks that in the light of the events of the
+      evening became pregnant with meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has a temper, a beast of a temper. Why shouldn&rsquo;t she have been square
+      and told me?&rdquo; he asked himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clock had struck three when the library door opened quietly and Sue,
+      clad in a dressing gown through which the new roundness of her lithe
+      little figure was plainly apparent, came into the room. She ran across to
+      him and putting her head down on his knee wept bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Sam!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I think I am going insane. I have been hating you as
+      I have not hated since I was an evil-tempered child. A thing I worked
+      years to suppress in me has come back. I have been hating myself and the
+      baby. For days I have been fighting the feeling in me, and now it has come
+      out and perhaps you have begun hating me. Can you love me again? Will you
+      ever forget the meanness and the cheapness of it? You and poor innocent
+      Frank&mdash;Oh, Sam, the devil was in me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Reaching down, Sam took her into his arms and cuddled her like a child. A
+      story he had heard of the vagaries of women at such times came back to him
+      and was as a light illuminating the darkness of his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand now,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is a part of the burden you carry for us
+      both.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some weeks after the outbreak at the carriage door events ran smoothly
+      in the McPherson house. One day as he stood in the stable door Frank came
+      round the corner of the house and, looking up sheepishly from under his
+      cap, said to Sam: &ldquo;I understand about the missus. It is the baby coming.
+      We have had four of them at our house,&rdquo; and Sam, nodding his head, turned
+      and began talking rapidly of his plans to replace the carriages with
+      automobiles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the house, in spite of the clearing up of the matter of Sue&rsquo;s
+      ugliness at the Grovers, a subtle change had taken place in the
+      relationship of the two. Although they were together facing the first of
+      the events that were to be like ports-of-call in the great voyage of their
+      lives, they were not facing it with the same mutual understanding and
+      kindly tolerance with which they had faced smaller things in the past&mdash;a
+      disagreement over the method of shooting a rapid in a river or the
+      entertainment of an undesirable guest. The inclination to fits of temper
+      loosens and disarranges all the little wires of life. The tune will not
+      get itself played. One stands waiting for the discord, strained, missing
+      the harmony. It was so with Sam. He began feeling that he must keep a
+      check upon his tongue and that things of which they had talked with great
+      freedom six months earlier now annoyed and irritated his wife when brought
+      into an after-dinner discussion. To Sam, who, during his life with Sue,
+      had learned the joy of free, open talk upon any subject that came into his
+      mind and whose native interest in life and in the motives of men and women
+      had blossomed in the large leisure and independence of the last year, this
+      was trying. It was, he thought, like trying to hold free and open
+      communion with the people of an orthodox family, and he fell into a habit
+      of prolonged silences, a habit that later, he found, once formed,
+      unbelievably hard to break.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day in the office a situation arose that seemed to demand Sam&rsquo;s
+      presence in Boston on a certain date. For months he had been carrying on a
+      trade war with some of the eastern manufacturers in his line and an
+      opportunity for the settlement of the trouble in a way advantageous to
+      himself had, he thought, arisen. He wanted to handle the matter himself
+      and went home to explain to Sue. It was at the end of a day when nothing
+      had occurred to irritate her and she agreed with him that he should not be
+      compelled to trust so important a matter to another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am no child, Sam. I will take care of myself,&rdquo; she said, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam wired his New York man asking him to make the arrangements for the
+      meeting in Boston and picked up a book to spend the evening reading aloud
+      to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, coming home the next evening he found her in tears and when he
+      tried to laugh away her fears she flew into a black fit of anger and ran
+      out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam went to the &lsquo;phone and called his New York man, thinking to instruct
+      him in regard to the conference in Boston and to give up his own plans for
+      the trip. When he had got his man on the wire, Sue, who had been standing
+      outside the door, rushed in and put her hand over the mouthpiece of the
+      &lsquo;phone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sam! Sam!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Do not give up the trip! Scold me! Beat me! Do
+      anything, but do not let me go on making a fool of myself and destroying
+      your peace of mind! I shall be miserable if you stay at home because of
+      what I have said!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Over the &lsquo;phone came the insistent voice of Central and putting her hand
+      aside Sam talked to his man, letting the engagement stand and making some
+      detail of the conference answer as his need of calling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Sue was repentant and again after her tears they sat before the fire
+      until his train time, talking like lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Buffalo in the morning came a wire from her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come back. Let business go. Cannot stand it,&rdquo; she had wired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he sat reading the wire the porter brought another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please, Sam, pay no attention to any wire from me. I am all right and
+      only half a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam was irritated. &ldquo;It is deliberate pettiness and weakness,&rdquo; he thought,
+      when an hour later the porter brought another wire demanding his immediate
+      return. &ldquo;The situation calls for drastic action and perhaps one good
+      stinging reproof will stop it for all time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Going into the buffet car he wrote a long letter calling her attention to
+      the fact that a certain amount of freedom of action was due him, and
+      saying that he intended to act upon his own judgment in the future and not
+      upon her impulses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having begun to write Sam went on and on. He was not interrupted, no
+      shadow crossed the face of his beloved to tell him he was hurting and he
+      said all that was in his mind to say. Little sharp reproofs that had come
+      into his mind but that had been left unsaid now got themselves said and
+      when he had dumped his overloaded mind into the letter he sealed and
+      mailed it at a passing station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within an hour after the letter had left his hands Sam regretted it. He
+      thought of the little woman bearing the burden for them both, and things
+      Grover had told him of the unhappiness of women in her condition came back
+      to haunt his mind so that he wrote and sent off to her a wire asking her
+      not to read the letter he had mailed and assuring her that he would hurry
+      through the Boston conference and get back to her at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam returned he knew that in an evil moment Sue had opened and read
+      the letter sent from the train and was surprised and hurt by the
+      knowledge. The act seemed like a betrayal. He said nothing, going about
+      his work with a troubled mind and watching with growing anxiety her
+      alternate fits of white anger and fearful remorse. He thought her growing
+      worse daily and became alarmed for her health.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, then, after a talk with Grover he began to spend more and more time
+      with her, forcing her to take with him daily, long walks in the open air.
+      He tried valiantly to keep her mind fixed on cheerful things and went to
+      bed happy and relieved when a day ended that did not bring a stormy
+      passage between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were days during that period when Sam thought himself near insanity.
+      With a light in her grey eyes that was maddening Sue would take up some
+      minor thing, a remark he had made or a passage he had quoted from some
+      book, and in a dead, level, complaining tone would talk of it until his
+      head reeled and his fingers ached from the gripping of his hands to keep
+      control of himself. After such a day he would steal off by himself and,
+      walking rapidly, would try through pure physical fatigue to force his mind
+      to give up the remembrance of the persistent, complaining voice. At times
+      he would give way to fits of anger and strew impotent oaths along the
+      silent street, or, in another mood, would mumble and talk to himself,
+      praying for strength and courage to keep his own head during the ordeal
+      through which he thought they were passing together. And when he returned
+      from such a walk and from such a struggle with himself it often occurred
+      that he would find her waiting in the arm chair before the fire in her
+      room, her mind clear and her little face wet with the tears of her
+      repentance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then the struggle ended. With Doctor Grover it had been arranged that
+      Sue should be taken to the hospital for the great event, and they drove
+      there hurriedly one night through the quiet streets, the recurring pains
+      gripping Sue and her hands clutching his. An exalted cheerfulness had hold
+      of them. Face to face with the actual struggle for the new life Sue was
+      transfigured. Her voice rang with triumph and her eyes glistened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to do it,&rdquo; she cried; &ldquo;my black fear is gone. I shall give you
+      a child&mdash;a man child. I shall succeed, my man Sam. You shall see. It
+      will be beautiful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the pain gripped she gripped at his hand, and a spasm of physical
+      sympathy ran through him. He felt helpless and ashamed of his
+      helplessness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the entrance to the hospital grounds she put her face down upon his
+      knees so that the hot tears ran through his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor, poor old Sam, it has been horrible for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the hospital Sam walked up and down in the corridor through the
+      swinging doors at the end of which she had been taken. Every vestige of
+      regret for the trying months now lying behind had passed, and he paced up
+      and down the corridor feeling that he had come to one of those huge
+      moments when a man&rsquo;s brain, his grasp of affairs, his hopes and plans for
+      the future, all of the little details and trivialities of his life, halt,
+      and he waits anxious, breathless, expectant. He looked at a little clock
+      on a table at the end of the corridor, half expecting it to stop also and
+      wait with him. His marriage hour that had seemed so big and vital seemed
+      now, in the quiet corridor, with the stone floor and the silent
+      white-clad, rubber-shod nurses passing up and down and in the presence of
+      this greater event, to have shrunk enormously. He walked up and down
+      peering at the clock, looking at the swinging door and biting at the stem
+      of his empty pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then through the swinging door came Grover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can get the child, Sam, but to get it we shall have to take a chance
+      with her. Do you want to do that? Do not wait. Decide.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sprang past him toward the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You bungler,&rdquo; he cried, and his voice rang through the long quiet
+      corridor. &ldquo;You do not know what this means. Let me go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Doctor Grover, catching him by the arm, swung him about. The two men stood
+      facing each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You stay here,&rdquo; said the doctor, his voice remaining quiet and firm; &ldquo;I
+      will attend to things. Your going in there would be pure folly now. Now
+      answer me&mdash;do you want to take the chance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! No!&rdquo; Sam shouted. &ldquo;No! I want her&mdash;Sue&mdash;alive and well,
+      back through that door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A cold gleam came into his eyes and he shook his fist before the doctor&rsquo;s
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not try deceiving me about this. By God, I will&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning, Doctor Grover ran back through the swinging door leaving Sam
+      staring blankly at his back. A nurse, one whom he had seen in Doctor
+      Grover&rsquo;s office, came out of the door and taking his arm, walked beside
+      him up and down the corridor. Sam put his arm around her shoulder and
+      talked. An illusion that it was necessary to comfort her came to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not worry,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;She will be all right. Grover will take care of
+      her. Nothing can happen to little Sue.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The nurse, a small, sweet-faced, Scotch woman, who knew and admired Sue,
+      wept. Some quality in his voice had touched the woman in her and the tears
+      ran in a little stream down her cheeks. Sam continued talking, the woman&rsquo;s
+      tears helping him to regain his grip upon himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mother is dead,&rdquo; he said, an old sorrow revisiting him. &ldquo;I wish that
+      you, like Mary Underwood, would be a new mother to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the time came that he could be taken to the room where Sue lay, his
+      self-possession had returned to him and his mind had begun blaming the
+      little dead stranger for the unhappiness of the past months and for the
+      long separation from what he thought was the real Sue. Outside the door of
+      the room into which she had been taken he stopped, hearing her voice, thin
+      and weak, talking to Grover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unfit&mdash;Sue McPherson unfit,&rdquo; said the voice, and Sam thought it was
+      filled with an infinite weariness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He ran through the door and dropped on his knees by her bed. She turned
+      her eyes to him smiling bravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The next time we&rsquo;ll make it,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second child born to the young McPhersons arrived out of time. Again
+      Sam walked, this time through the corridor of his own house and without
+      the consoling presence of the sweet-faced Scotch woman, and again he shook
+      his head at Doctor Grover who came to him consoling and reassuring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the death of the second child Sue lay for months in bed. In his
+      arms, in her own room, she wept openly in the presence of Grover and the
+      nurses, crying out against her unfitness. For several days she refused to
+      see Colonel Tom, harbouring in her mind the notion that he was in some way
+      responsible for her physical inability to bear living children, and when
+      she got up from her bed, she remained for months white and listless but
+      grimly determined upon another attempt for the little life she so wanted
+      to feel in her arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the days of her carrying the second baby she had again the fierce
+      ugly attacks of temper that had shattered Sam&rsquo;s nerves, but having learned
+      to understand, he went quietly about his work, trying as far as in him lay
+      to close his ears to the stinging, hurtful things she sometimes said; and
+      the third time, it was agreed between them that if they were again
+      unsuccessful they would turn their minds to other things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If we do not succeed this time we might as well count ourselves through
+      with each other for good,&rdquo; she said one day in one of the fits of cold
+      anger that were a part of child bearing with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That second night when Sam walked in the hospital corridor he was beside
+      himself. He felt like a young recruit called to face an unseen enemy and
+      to stand motionless and inactive in the presence of the singing death that
+      ran through the air. He remembered a story, told when he was a child by a
+      fellow soldier who had come to visit his father, of the prisoners at
+      Andersonville creeping in the darkness past armed sentries to a little
+      pool of stagnant water beyond the dead line, and felt that he too was
+      creeping unarmed and helpless in the neighbourhood of death. In a
+      conference at his house between the three some weeks before, it had been
+      decided, after tearful insistence on the part of Sue and a stand on the
+      part of Grover, who declared that he would not remain on the case unless
+      permitted to use his own judgment, that an operation should be performed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take the chances that need be taken,&rdquo; Sam had said to Grover after the
+      conference; &ldquo;she will never stand another defeat. Give her the child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the corridor it seemed to Sam that hours had passed and still he stood
+      motionless waiting. His feet felt cold and he had the impression that they
+      were wet although the night was dry and a moon shone outside. When, from a
+      distant part of the hospital, a groan reached his ears he shook with
+      fright and had an inclination to cry out. Two young interns clad in white
+      passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old Grover is doing a Caesarian section,&rdquo; said one of them; &ldquo;he is
+      getting out of date. Hope he doesn&rsquo;t bungle it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In Sam&rsquo;s ears rang the remembrance of Sue&rsquo;s voice, the Sue who that first
+      time had gone into the room behind the swinging doors with the determined
+      smile on her face. He thought he could see again the white face looking up
+      from the wheeled cot on which they had taken her through the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid, Dr. Grover&mdash;I am afraid I am unfit,&rdquo; he had heard her
+      say as the door closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then Sam did a thing for which he cursed himself the rest of his life.
+      On an impulse, and maddened by the intolerable waiting, he walked to the
+      swinging doors and, pushing them open, stepped into the operating room
+      where Grover was at work upon Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was long and narrow, with floors, walls and ceiling of white
+      cement. A great glaring light, suspended from the ceiling, threw its rays
+      directly down on a white-clad figure lying on a white metal operating
+      table. On the walls of the room were other glaring lights set in shining
+      glass reflectors. And, here and there through an intense, expectant
+      atmosphere, moved and stood silently a group of men and women, faceless,
+      hairless, with only their strangely vivid eyes showing through the white
+      masks that covered their faces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam, standing motionless by the door, looked about with wild, half-seeing
+      eyes. Grover worked rapidly and silently, taking from time to time little
+      shining instruments from a swinging table close at his hand. The nurse
+      standing beside him looked up toward the light and began calmly threading
+      a needle. And in a white basin on a little stand at the side of the room
+      lay the last of Sue&rsquo;s tremendous efforts toward new life, the last of
+      their dreams of the great family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam closed his eyes and fell. His head, striking against the wall, aroused
+      him and he struggled to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without stopping his work, Grover began swearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn it, man, get out of here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam groped with his hand for the door. One of the white-clad, ghoulish
+      figures started toward him. And then with his head reeling and his eyes
+      closed he backed through the door and, running along the corridor and down
+      a flight of broad stairs, reached the open air and darkness. He had no
+      doubt of Sue&rsquo;s death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is gone,&rdquo; he muttered, hurrying bareheaded along the deserted
+      streets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through street after street he ran. Twice he came out upon the shores of
+      the lake, and, then turning, went back into the heart of the city through
+      streets bathed in the warm moonlight. Once he turned quickly at a corner
+      and stepping into a vacant lot stood behind a high board fence as a
+      policeman strolled along the street. Into his head came the idea that he
+      had killed Sue and that the blue-clad figure walking with heavy tread on
+      the stone pavement was seeking him to take him back to where she lay white
+      and lifeless. Again he stopped, before a little frame drugstore on a
+      corner, and sitting down on the steps before it cursed God openly and
+      defiantly like an angry boy defying his father. Some instinct led him to
+      look at the sky through the tangle of telegraph wires overhead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on and do what you dare!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I will not follow you now. I
+      shall never try to find you after this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he began laughing at himself for the instinct that had led him
+      to look at the sky and to shout out his defiance and, getting up, wandered
+      on. In his wanderings he came to a railroad track where a freight train
+      groaned and rattled over a crossing. When he came up to it he jumped upon
+      an empty coal car, falling as he climbed, and cutting his face upon the
+      sharp pieces of coal that lay scattered about the bottom of the car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The train ground along slowly, stopping occasionally, the engine shrieking
+      hysterically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time he got out of the car and dropped to the ground. On all sides
+      of him were marshes, the long rank marsh grasses rolling and tossing in
+      the moonlight. When the train had passed he followed it, walking
+      stumblingly along. As he walked, following the blinking lights at the end
+      of the train, he thought of the scene in the hospital and of Sue lying
+      dead for that&mdash;that ping livid and shapeless on the table under the
+      lights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where the solid ground ran up to the tracks Sam sat down under a tree.
+      Peace came over him. &ldquo;This is the end of things,&rdquo; he thought, and was like
+      a tired child comforted by its mother. He thought of the sweet-faced nurse
+      who had walked with him that other time in the corridor of the hospital
+      and who had wept because of his fears, and then of the night when he had
+      felt the throat of his father between his fingers in the squalid little
+      kitchen. He ran his hands along the ground. &ldquo;Good old ground,&rdquo; he said. A
+      sentence came into his mind followed by the figure of John Telfer
+      striding, stick in hand, along a dusty road. &ldquo;Here is spring come and time
+      to plant out flowers in the grass,&rdquo; he said aloud. His face felt swollen
+      and sore from the fall in the freight car and he lay down on the ground
+      under a tree and slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he woke it was morning and grey clouds were drifting across the sky.
+      Within sight, down a road, a trolley car went past into the city. Before
+      him, in the midst of the marsh, lay a low lake, and a raised walk, with
+      boats tied to the posts on which it stood, ran down to the water. He went
+      down the walk, bathed his bruised face in the water, and boarding a car
+      went back into the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the morning air a new thought took possession of him. The wind ran
+      along a dusty road beside the car track, picking up little handfuls of
+      dust and playfully throwing them about. He had a strained, eager feeling
+      like some one listening for a faint call out of the distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;I know what it is, it is my wedding day. I am
+      to marry Sue Rainey to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the house he found Grover and Colonel Tom standing in the breakfast
+      room. Grover looked at his swollen, distorted face. His voice trembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor devil!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You have had a night!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and slapped Colonel Tom on the shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will have to begin getting ready,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The wedding is at ten.
+      Sue will be getting anxious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grover and Colonel Tom took him by the arm and began leading him up the
+      stairs, Colonel Tom weeping like a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Silly old fool,&rdquo; thought Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, two weeks later, he again opened his eyes to consciousness Sue sat
+      beside his bed in a reclining chair, her little thin white hand in his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get the baby!&rdquo; he cried, believing anything possible. &ldquo;I want to see the
+      baby!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laid her head down on the pillow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was gone when you saw it,&rdquo; she said, and put an arm about his neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the nurse came back she found them, their heads together upon the
+      pillow, crying weakly like two tired children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The blow given the plan of life so carefully thought out and so eagerly
+      accepted by the young McPhersons threw them back upon themselves. For
+      several years they had been living upon a hill top, taking themselves very
+      seriously and more than a little preening themselves with the thought that
+      they were two very unusual and thoughtful people engaged upon a worthy and
+      ennobling enterprise. Sitting in their corner immersed in admiration of
+      their own purposes and in the thoughts of the vigorous, disciplined, new
+      life they were to give the world by the combined efficiency of their two
+      bodies and minds they were, at a word and a shake of the head from Doctor
+      Grover, compelled to remake the outline of their future together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All about them the rush of life went on, vast changes were impending in
+      the industrial life of the people, cities were doubling and tripling their
+      population, a war was being fought, and the flag of their country flew in
+      the ports of strange seas, while American boys pushed their way through
+      the tangled jungles of strange lands carrying in their hands
+      Rainey-Whittaker rifles. And in a huge stone house, set in a broad expanse
+      of green lawns near the shores of Lake Michigan, Sam McPherson sat looking
+      at his wife, who in turn looked at him. He was trying, as she also was
+      trying, to adjust himself to the cheerful acceptance of their new prospect
+      of a childless life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking at Sue across the dinner table or seeing her straight, wiry body
+      astride a horse riding beside him through the parks, it seemed to Sam
+      unbelievable that a childless womanhood was ever to be her portion, and
+      more than once he had an inclination to venture again upon an effort for
+      the success of their hopes. But when he remembered her still white face
+      that night in the hospital, her bitter, haunting cry of defeat, he turned
+      with a shudder from the thought, feeling that he could not go with her
+      again through that ordeal; that he could not again allow her to look
+      forward through weeks and months toward the little life that never came to
+      lie upon her breast or to laugh up into her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet Sam, son of that Jane McPherson who had won the admiration of the
+      men of Caxton by her ceaseless efforts to keep her family afloat and clean
+      handed, could not sit idly by, living upon the income of his own and Sue&rsquo;s
+      money. The stirring, forward-moving world called to him; he looked about
+      him at the broad, significant movements in business and finance, at the
+      new men coming into prominence and apparently finding a way for the
+      expression of new big ideas, and felt his youth stirring in him and his
+      mind reaching out to new projects and new ambitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Given the necessity for economy and a hard long-drawn-out struggle for a
+      livelihood and competence, Sam could conceive of living his life with Sue
+      and deriving something like gratification from just her companionship, and
+      her partnership in his efforts&mdash;here and there during the waiting
+      years he had met men who had found such gratification&mdash;a foreman in
+      the shops or a tobacconist from whom he bought his cigars&mdash;but for
+      himself he felt that he had gone with Sue too far upon another road to
+      turn that way now with anything like mutual zeal or interest. At bottom,
+      his mind did not run strongly toward the idea of the love of women as an
+      end in life; he had loved, and did love, Sue with something approaching
+      religious fervour, but the fervour was more than half due to the ideas she
+      had given him and to the fact that with him she was to have been the
+      instrument for the realisation of those ideas. He was a man with children
+      in his loins and he had given up his struggles for business eminence for
+      the sake of preparing himself for a kind of noble fatherhood of children,
+      many children, strong children, fit gifts to the world for two
+      exceptionally favoured lives. In all of his talks with Sue this idea had
+      been present and dominant. He had looked about him and in the arrogance of
+      his youth and in the pride of his good body and mind had condemned all
+      childless marriages as a selfish waste of good lives. With her he had
+      agreed that such lives were without point and purpose. Now he remembered
+      that in the days of her audacity and daring she had more than once
+      expressed the hope that in case of a childless issue to their marriage one
+      or the other of them would have the courage to cut the knot that tied them
+      and venture into another effort at right living at any cost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the months after Sue&rsquo;s last recovery, and during the long evenings, as
+      they sat together or walked under the stars in the park, the thought of
+      these talks was often in Sam&rsquo;s mind and he found himself beginning to
+      speculate on her present attitude and to wonder how bravely she would meet
+      the idea of a separation. In the end he decided that no such thought was
+      in her mind, that face to face with the tremendous actuality she clung to
+      him with a new dependence, and a new need of his companionship. The
+      conviction of the absolute necessity of children as a justification for a
+      man and woman living together had, he thought, burned itself more deeply
+      into his brain than into hers; to him it clung, coming back again and
+      again to his mind, causing him to turn here and there restlessly, making
+      readjustments, seeking new light. The old gods being dead he sought new
+      gods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime he sat in his house facing his wife, losing himself in the
+      books recommended to him years before by Janet, thinking his own thoughts.
+      Often in the evening he would look up from his book or from his
+      preoccupied staring at the fire to find her eyes looking at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talk, Sam; talk,&rdquo; she would say; &ldquo;do not sit there thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Or at another time she would come to his room at night and putting her
+      head down on the pillow beside his would spend hours planning, weeping,
+      begging him to give her again his love, his old fervent, devoted love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Sam tried earnestly and honestly to do, going with her for long walks
+      when the new call, the business had begun to make to him, would have kept
+      him at his desk, reading aloud to her in the evening, urging her to shake
+      off her old dreams and to busy herself with new work and new interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the days in the office he went in a kind of half stupor. An old
+      feeling of his boyhood coming back to him, it seemed to him, as it had
+      seemed when he walked aimlessly through the streets of Caxton after the
+      death of his mother, that there remained something to be done, an
+      accounting to be made. Even at his desk with the clatter of typewriters in
+      his ears and the piles of letters demanding his attention, his mind
+      slipped back to the days of his courtship with Sue and to those days in
+      the north woods when life had beat strong within him, and every young,
+      wild thing, every new growth renewed the dream that filled his being.
+      Sometimes on the street, or walking in the park with Sue, the cries of
+      children at play cut across the sombre dulness of his mind and he shrank
+      from the sound and a kind of bitter resentment took possession of him.
+      When he looked covertly at Sue she talked of other things, apparently
+      unconscious of his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then a new phase of life presented itself. To his surprise he found
+      himself looking with more than passing interest at women in the streets,
+      and an old hunger for the companionship of strange women came back to him,
+      in some way coarsened and materialised. One evening at the theatre a
+      woman, a friend of Sue&rsquo;s and the childless wife of a business friend of
+      his own, sat beside him. In the darkness of the playhouse her shoulder
+      nestled down against his. In the excitement of a crisis on the stage her
+      hand slipped into his and her fingers clutched and held his fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Animal desire seized and shook him, a feeling without sweetness, brutal,
+      making his eyes burn. When between the acts the theatre was again flooded
+      with light he looked up guiltily to meet another pair of eyes equally
+      filled with guilty hunger. A challenge had been given and received.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In their car, homeward bound, Sam put the thoughts of the woman away from
+      him and taking Sue in his arms prayed silently for some help against he
+      knew not what.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I will go to Caxton in the morning and have a talk with Mary
+      Underwood,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After his return from Caxton Sam set about finding some new interest to
+      occupy Sue&rsquo;s mind. He had spent an afternoon talking to Valmore, Freedom
+      Smith, and Telfer and thought there was a kind of flatness in their jokes
+      and in their ageing comments on each other. Then he had gone from them for
+      his talk with Mary. Half through the night they had talked, Sam getting
+      forgiveness for not writing and getting also a long friendly lecture on
+      his duty toward Sue. He thought she had in some way missed the point. She
+      had seemed to suppose that the loss of the children had fallen singly upon
+      Sue. She had not counted upon him, and he had depended upon her doing just
+      that. He had come as a boy to his mother wanting to talk of himself and
+      she had wept at the thought of the childless wife and had told him how to
+      set about making her happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I will set about it,&rdquo; he thought on the train coming home; &ldquo;I will
+      find for her this new interest and make her less dependent upon me. Then I
+      also will take hold anew and work out for myself a programme for a way of
+      life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One afternoon when he came home from the office he found Sue filled indeed
+      with a new idea. With glowing cheeks she sat beside him through the
+      evening and talked of the beauties of a life devoted to social service.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking things out,&rdquo; she said, her eyes shining. &ldquo;We must
+      not allow ourselves to become sordid. We must keep to the vision. We must
+      together give the best in our lives and our fortunes to mankind. We must
+      make ourselves units in the great modern movements for social uplift.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at the fire and a chill feeling of doubt ran through him. He
+      could not see himself as a unit in anything. His mind did not run out
+      toward the thought of being one of the army of philanthropists or rich
+      social uplifters he had met talking and explaining in the reading rooms of
+      clubs. No answering flame burned in his heart as it had burned that
+      evening by the bridle path in Jackson Park when she had expounded another
+      idea. But the thought of a need of new interest for her coming to him, he
+      turned to her smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It sounds all right but I know nothing of such things,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that evening Sue began to get a hold upon herself. The old fire came
+      back into her eyes and she went about the house with a smile upon her face
+      and talked through the evenings to her silent, attentive husband of the
+      life of usefulness, the full life. One day she told him of her election to
+      the presidency of a society for the rescue of fallen women, and he began
+      seeing her name in the newspapers in connection with various charity and
+      civic movements. At the house a new sort of men and women began appearing
+      at the dinner table; a strangely earnest, feverish, half fanatical people,
+      Sam thought, with an inclination toward corsetless dresses and uncut hair,
+      who talked far into the night and worked themselves into a sort of
+      religious zeal over what they called their movement. Sam found them likely
+      to run to startling statements, noticed that they sat on the edges of
+      their chairs when they talked, and was puzzled by their tendency toward
+      making the most revolutionary statements without pausing to back them up.
+      When he questioned a statement made by one of these people, he came down
+      upon him with a rush that quite carried him away and then, turning to the
+      others, looked at them wisely like a cat that has swallowed a mouse. &ldquo;Ask
+      us another question if you dare,&rdquo; their faces seemed to be saying, while
+      their tongues declared that they were but students of the great problem of
+      right living.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With these new people Sam never made any progress toward real
+      understanding and friendship. For a time he tried honestly to get some of
+      their own fervent devotions to their ideas and to be impressed by what
+      they said of their love of man, even going with them to some of their
+      meetings, at one of which he sat among the fallen women gathered in, and
+      listened to a speech by Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The speech did not make much of a hit, the fallen women moving restlessly
+      about. A large woman, with an immense nose, did better. She talked with a
+      swift, contagious zeal that was very stirring, and, listening to her, Sam
+      was reminded of the evening when he sat before another zealous talker in
+      the church at Caxton and Jim Williams, the barber, tried to stampede him
+      into the fold with the lambs. While the woman talked a plump little member
+      of the <i>demi monde</i> who sat beside Sam wept copiously, but at the end
+      of the speech he could remember nothing of what had been said and he
+      wondered if the weeping woman would remember.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To express his determination to continue being Sue&rsquo;s companion and
+      partner, Sam during one winter taught a class of young men at a settlement
+      house in the factory district of the west side. The class in his hands was
+      unsuccessful. He found the young men heavy and stupid with fatigue after
+      the day of labour in the shops and more inclined to fall asleep in their
+      chairs, or wander away, one at a time, to loaf and smoke on a nearby
+      corner, than to stay in the room listening to the man reading or talking
+      before them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When one of the young women workers came into the room, they sat up and
+      seemed for the moment interested. Once Sam heard a group of them talking
+      of these women workers on a landing in a darkened stairway. The experience
+      startled Sam and he dropped the class, admitting to Sue his failure and
+      his lack of interest and bowing his head before her accusation of a lack
+      of the love of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later by the fire in his own room he tried to draw for himself a moral
+      from the experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should I love these men?&rdquo; he asked himself. &ldquo;They are what I might
+      have been. Few of the men I have known have loved me and some of the best
+      and cleanest of them have worked vigorously for my defeat. Life is a
+      battle in which few men win and many are defeated and in which hate and
+      fear play their part with love and generosity. These heavy-featured young
+      men are a part of the world as men have made it. Why this protest against
+      their fate when we are all of us making more and more of them with every
+      turn of the clock?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During the next year, after the fiasco of the settlement house class, Sam
+      found himself drifting more and more rapidly away from Sue and her new
+      viewpoint of life. The growing gulf between them showed itself in a
+      thousand little household acts and impulses, and every time he looked at
+      her he thought her more apart from him and less a part of the real life
+      that went on within him. In the old days there had been something intimate
+      and familiar in her person and in her presence. She had seemed like a part
+      of him, like the room in which he slept or the coat he wore on his back,
+      and he had looked into her eyes as thoughtlessly and with as little fear
+      of what he might find there as he looked at his own hands. Now when his
+      eyes met hers they dropped, and one or the other of them began talking
+      hurriedly like a person who has a consciousness of something he must
+      conceal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down town Sam took up anew his old friendship and intimacy with Jack
+      Prince, going with him to clubs and drinking places and often spending
+      evenings among the clever, money-wasting young men who laughed and made
+      deals and talked their way through life at Jack&rsquo;s side. Among these young
+      men a business associate of Jack&rsquo;s caught his attention and in a few weeks
+      an intimacy had sprung up between Sam and this man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Maurice Morrison, Sam&rsquo;s new friend, had been discovered by Jack Prince
+      working as a sub-editor on a country daily down the state. There was, Sam
+      thought, something of the Caxton dandy, Mike McCarthy, in the man,
+      combined with prolonged and fervent, although somewhat periodic attacks of
+      industry. In his youth he had written poetry and at one time had studied
+      for the ministry, and in Chicago, under Jack Prince, he had developed into
+      a money maker and led the life of a talented, rather unscrupulous man of
+      the world. He kept a mistress, often overdrank, and Sam thought him the
+      most brilliant and convincing talker he had ever heard. As Jack Prince&rsquo;s
+      assistant he had charge of the Rainey Company&rsquo;s large advertising
+      expenditure, and the two men being thrown often together a mutual regard
+      grew up between them. Sam believed him to be without moral sense; he knew
+      him to be able and honest and he found in the association with him a fund
+      of odd little sweetnesses of character and action that lent an
+      inexpressible charm to the person of his friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was through Morrison that Sam had his first serious misunderstanding
+      with Sue. One evening the brilliant young advertising man dined at the
+      McPhersons&rsquo;. The table, as usual, was filled with Sue&rsquo;s new friends, among
+      them a tall, gaunt man who, with the arrival of the coffee, began in a
+      high-pitched, earnest voice to talk of the coming social revolution. Sam
+      looked across the table and saw a light dancing in Morrison&rsquo;s eyes. Like a
+      hound unleashed he sprang among Sue&rsquo;s friends, tearing the rich to pieces,
+      calling for the onward advance of the masses, quoting odds and ends of
+      Shelley and Carlyle, peering earnestly up and down the table, and at the
+      end quite winning the hearts of the women by a defence of fallen women
+      that stirred the blood of even his friend and host.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam was amused and a trifle annoyed. The whole thing was, he knew, no more
+      than a piece of downright acting with just the touch of sincerity in it
+      that was characteristic of the man but that had no depth or real meaning.
+      During the rest of the evening he watched Sue, wondering if she too had
+      fathomed Morrison and what she thought of his having taken the role of
+      star from the long gaunt man, who had evidently been booked for that part
+      and who sat at the table and wandered afterward among the guests, annoyed
+      and disconcerted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late that night Sue came into his room and found him reading and smoking
+      by the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheeky of Morrison, dimming your star,&rdquo; he said, looking at her and
+      laughing apologetically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue looked at him doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came in to thank you for bringing him,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;I thought him
+      splendid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at her and for a moment was tempted to let the matter pass. And
+      then his old inclination to be always open and frank with her asserted
+      itself and he closed the book and rising stood looking down at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The little beast was guying your crowd,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I do not want him
+      to guy you. Not that he wouldn&rsquo;t try. He has the audacity for anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A flush arose to her cheeks and her eyes gleamed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is not true, Sam,&rdquo; she said coldly. &ldquo;You say that because you are
+      becoming hard and cold and cynical. Your friend Morrison talked from his
+      heart. It was beautiful. Men like you, who have a strong influence over
+      him, may lead him away, but in the end a man like that will come to give
+      his life to the service of society. You should help him; not assume an
+      attitude of unbelief and laugh at him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stood upon the hearth smoking his pipe and looking at her. He was
+      thinking how easy it would have been in the first year after their
+      marriage to have explained Morrison. Now he felt that he was but making a
+      bad matter worse, but went on determined to stick to his policy of being
+      entirely honest with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Sue,&rdquo; he began quietly, &ldquo;be a good sport. Morrison was joking.
+      I know the man. He is the friend of men like me because he wants to be and
+      because it pays him to be. He is a talker, a writer, a talented,
+      unscrupulous word-monger. He is making a big salary by taking the ideas of
+      men like me and expressing them better than we can ourselves. He is a good
+      workman and a generous, open-hearted fellow with a lot of nameless charm
+      in him, but a man of convictions he is not. He could talk tears into the
+      eyes of your fallen women, but he would be a lot more likely to talk good
+      women into their state.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam put a hand upon her shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be sensible and do not be offended,&rdquo; he went on: &ldquo;take the fellow for
+      what he is and be glad for him. He hurts little and cheers a lot. He could
+      make a convincing argument in favour of civilisation&rsquo;s return to
+      cannibalism, but really, you know, he spends most of his time thinking and
+      writing of washing machines and ladies&rsquo; hats and liver pills, and most of
+      his eloquence after all only comes down to &lsquo;Send for catalogue, Department
+      K&rsquo; in the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue&rsquo;s voice was colourless with passion when she replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is unbearable. Why did you bring the fellow here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sat down and picked up his book. In his impatience he lied to her for
+      the first time since their marriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First, because I like him and second, because I wanted to see if I
+      couldn&rsquo;t produce a man who could outsentimentalise your socialist
+      friends,&rdquo; he said quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue turned and walked out of the room. In a way the action was final and
+      marked the end of understanding between them. Putting down his book Sam
+      watched her go and some feeling he had kept for her and that had
+      differentiated her from all other women died in him as the door closed
+      between them. Throwing the book aside he sprang to his feet and stood
+      looking at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old goodfellowship appeal is dead,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;From now on we will
+      have to explain and apologise like two strangers. No more taking each
+      other for granted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning out the light he sat again before the fire to think his way
+      through the situation that faced him. He had no thought that she would
+      return. That last shot of his own had crushed the possibility of that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fire was getting low in the grate and he did not renew it. He looked
+      past it toward the darkened windows and heard the hum of motor cars along
+      the boulevard below. Again he was the boy of Caxton hungrily seeking an
+      end in life. The flushed face of the woman in the theatre danced before
+      his eyes. He remembered with shame how he had, a few days before, stood in
+      a doorway and followed with his eyes the figure of a woman who had lifted
+      her eyes to him as they passed in the street. He wished that he might go
+      out of the house for a walk with John Telfer and have his mind filled with
+      eloquence of the standing corn, or sit at the feet of Janet Eberly as she
+      talked of books and of life. He got up and turning on the lights began
+      preparing for bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know what I will do,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I will go to work. I will do some real
+      work and make some more money. That&rsquo;s the place for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And to work he went, real work, the most sustained and clearly thought-out
+      work he had done. For two years he was out of the house at dawn for a long
+      bracing walk in the fresh morning air, to be followed by eight, ten and
+      even fifteen hours in the office and shops; hours in which he drove the
+      Rainey Arms Company&rsquo;s organisation mercilessly and, taking openly every
+      vestige of the management out of the hands of Colonel Tom, began the plans
+      for the consolidation of the American firearms companies that later put
+      his name on the front pages of the newspapers and got him the title of a
+      Captain of Finance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a widespread misunderstanding abroad regarding the motives of
+      many of the American millionaires who sprang into prominence and affluence
+      in the days of change and sudden bewildering growth that followed the
+      close of the Spanish War. They were, many of them, not of the brute trader
+      type, but were, instead, men who thought and acted quickly and with a
+      daring and audacity impossible to the average mind. They wanted power and
+      were, many of them, entirely unscrupulous, but for the most part they were
+      men with a fire burning within them, men who became what they were because
+      the world offered them no better outlet for their vast energies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson had been untiring and without scruples in the first hard,
+      quick struggle to get his head above the great unknown body of men there
+      in the city. He had turned aside from money getting when he heard what he
+      took to be a call to a better way of life. Now with the fires of youth
+      still in him and with the training and discipline that had come from two
+      years of reading, of comparative leisure and of thought, he was prepared
+      to give the Chicago business world a display of that tremendous energy
+      that was to write his name in the industrial history of the city as one of
+      the first of the western giants of finance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Going to Sue, Sam told her frankly of his plans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want a free hand in the handling of your stock in the company,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;I cannot lead this new life of yours. It may help and sustain you
+      but it gets no hold on me. I want to be myself now and lead my own life in
+      my own way. I want to run the company, really run it. I cannot stand idly
+      by and let life go past. I am hurting myself and you standing here looking
+      on. Also I am in a kind of danger of another kind that I want to avoid by
+      throwing myself into hard, constructive work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without question Sue signed the papers he brought her. A flash of her old
+      frankness toward him came back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not blame you, Sam,&rdquo; she said, smiling bravely. &ldquo;Things have not
+      gone right, as we both know, but if we cannot work together at least let
+      us not hurt each other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam returned to give himself again to affairs, the country was just
+      at the beginning of the great wave of consolidation which was finally to
+      sweep all of the financial power of the country into a dozen pairs of
+      competent and entirely efficient hands. With the sure instinct of the born
+      trader Sam had seen this movement coming and had studied it. Now he began
+      to act. Going to that same swarthy-faced lawyer who had drawn the contract
+      for him to secure control of the medical student&rsquo;s twenty thousand dollars
+      and who had jokingly invited him to become one of a band of train robbers,
+      he told him of his plans to begin working toward a consolidation of all
+      the firearms companies of the country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Webster wasted no time in joking now. He laid out the plans, adjusted and
+      readjusted them to suit Sam&rsquo;s shrewd suggestions, and when a fee was
+      mentioned shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want in on this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You will need me. I am made for this game
+      and have been waiting for a chance to get at it. Just count me in as one
+      of the promoters if you will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam nodded his head. Within a week he had formed a pool of his own
+      company&rsquo;s stock controlling, as he thought, a safe majority and had begun
+      working to form a similar pool in the stock of his only big western rival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This last job was not an easy one. Lewis, the Jew, had been making
+      constant headway in that company just as Sam had made headway in the
+      Rainey Company. He was a money maker, a sales manager of rare ability,
+      and, as Sam knew, a planner and executor of business coups of the first
+      class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam did not want to deal with Lewis. He had respect for the man&rsquo;s ability
+      in driving sharp bargains and felt that he would like to have the whip in
+      his own hands when it came to the point of dealing with him. To this end
+      he began visiting bankers and the men who were head of big western trust
+      companies in Chicago and St. Louis. He went about his work slowly, feeling
+      his way and trying to get at each man by some effective appeal, buying the
+      use of vast sums of money by a promise of common stock, the bait of a big
+      active bank account, and, here and there, by the hint of a directorship in
+      the big new consolidated company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time the project moved slowly; indeed there were weeks and months
+      when it did not appear to move at all. Working in secret and with extreme
+      caution Sam encountered many discouragements and went home in the evening
+      day after day to sit among Sue&rsquo;s guests with a mind filled with his own
+      plans and with an indifferent ear turned to the talk of revolution, social
+      unrest, and the new class consciousness of the masses, that rattled and
+      crackled up and down his dinner table. He thought that it must be trying
+      to Sue. He was so evidently not interested in her interests. At the same
+      time he thought that he was working toward what he wanted out of life and
+      went to bed at night believing that he was finding, and would find, a kind
+      of peace in just thinking clearly along one line day after day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day Webster, who had wanted to be in on the deal, came to Sam&rsquo;s office
+      and gave his project its first great boost toward success. He, like Sam,
+      thought he saw clearly the tendencies of the times, and was greedy for the
+      block of common stock that Sam had promised should come to him with the
+      completion of the enterprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not using me,&rdquo; he said, sitting down before Sam&rsquo;s desk. &ldquo;What is
+      blocking the deal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam began to explain and when he had finished Webster laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s get at Tom Edwards of the Edward Arms Company direct,&rdquo; he said, and
+      then, leaning over the desk, &ldquo;Edwards is a vain little peacock and a
+      second rate business man,&rdquo; he declared emphatically. &ldquo;Get him afraid and
+      then flatter his vanity. He has a new wife with blonde hair and big soft
+      blue eyes. He wants prominence. He is afraid to venture upon big things
+      himself but is hungry for the reputation and gain that comes through big
+      deals. Use the method the Jew has used; show him what it means to the
+      yellow-haired woman to be the wife of the president of the big
+      consolidated Arms Company. THE EDWARDS CONSOLIDATED, eh? Get at Edwards.
+      Bluff him and flatter him and he is your man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam wondered. Edwards was a small grey-haired man of sixty with something
+      dry and unresponsive about him. Being a silent man, he had created an
+      impression of remarkable shrewdness and ability. After a lifetime spent in
+      hard labour and in the practice of the most rigid economy he had come up
+      to wealth, and had got into the firearms business through Lewis, and it
+      was counted one of the brightest stars in that brilliant Hebrew&rsquo;s crown
+      that he had been able to lead Edwards with him in his daring and audacious
+      handling of the company&rsquo;s affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at Webster across the desk and thought of Tom Edwards as the
+      figurehead of the firearms trust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was saving the frosting on the cake for my own Tom,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;it was a
+      thing I wanted to hand the colonel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us see Edwards this evening,&rdquo; said Webster dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam nodded, and late that night made the deal that gave him control of the
+      two important western companies and put him in position to move on the
+      eastern companies with every prospect of complete success. To Edwards he
+      went with an exaggerated report of the support he had already got for his
+      project, and having frightened him offered him the presidency of the new
+      company and promised that it should be incorporated under the name of The
+      Edwards Consolidated Firearms Company of America.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The eastern companies fell quickly. With Webster Sam tried on them the old
+      dodge of telling each that the other two had agreed to come in, and it
+      worked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the coming in of Edwards and the options given by the eastern
+      companies Sam began to get also the support of the LaSalle Street bankers.
+      The firearms trust was one of the few big consolidations managed wholly in
+      the west, and after two or three of the bankers had agreed to help finance
+      Sam&rsquo;s plan the others began asking to be taken into the underwriting
+      syndicate he and Webster had formed. Within thirty days after the closing
+      of the deal with Tom Edwards Sam felt that he was ready to act.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For several months Colonel Tom had known something of the plans Sam had on
+      foot, and had made no protest. He had in fact given Sam to understand that
+      his stock would be voted with Sue&rsquo;s, controlled by Sam, and with the stock
+      of the other directors who knew of and hoped to share in the profits of
+      Sam&rsquo;s deal. The old gunmaker had all of his life believed that the other
+      American firearms companies were but shadows destined to disappear before
+      the rising sun of the Rainey Company, and thought of Sam&rsquo;s project as an
+      act of providence to further this desirable end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment of his acquiescence in Webster&rsquo;s plan, for landing Tom
+      Edwards, Sam had a moment of doubt, and now, with the success of his
+      project in sight, he began to wonder how the blustering old man would look
+      upon Edwards as the titular head of the big company and upon the name of
+      Edwards in the title of the company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For two years Sam had seen little of the colonel, who had given up all
+      pretence to an active part in the management of the business and who,
+      finding Sue&rsquo;s new friends disconcerting, seldom appeared at the house,
+      living at the clubs, playing billiards all day long, or sitting in the
+      club windows boasting to chance listeners of his part in the building of
+      the Rainey Arms Company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a mind filled with doubt Sam went home and put the matter before Sue.
+      She was dressed and ready for an evening at the theatre with a party of
+      friends and the talk was brief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will not mind,&rdquo; she said indifferently. &ldquo;Go ahead and do what you want
+      to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam rode back to the office and called his lieutenants about him. He felt
+      that the thing might as well be done and over, and with the options in his
+      hands, and the ability he thought he had to control his own company, he
+      was ready to come out into the open and get the deal cleaned up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The morning papers that carried the story of the proposed big new
+      consolidation of firearms companies carried also an almost life-size
+      halftone of Colonel Tom Rainey, a slightly smaller one of Tom Edwards, and
+      grouped about these, small pictures of Sam, Lewis, Prince, Webster, and
+      several of the eastern men. By the size of the half-tone, Sam, Prince, and
+      Morrison had tried to reconcile Colonel Tom to Edwards&rsquo; name in the title
+      of the new company and to Edwards&rsquo; coming election as president. The story
+      also played up the past glories of the Rainey Company and its directing
+      genius, Colonel Tom. One phrase, written by Morrison, brought a smile to
+      Sam&rsquo;s lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This grand old patriarch of American business, retired now from active
+      service, is like a tired giant, who, having raised a brood of young
+      giants, goes into his castle to rest and reflect and to count the scars
+      won in many a hard-fought battle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Morrison laughed as he read it aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It ought to get the colonel,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but the newspaper man who prints
+      it should be hung.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will print it all right,&rdquo; said Jack Prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And they did print it; going from newspaper office to newspaper office
+      Prince and Morrison saw to that, using their influence as big buyers of
+      advertising space and even insisting upon reading proof on their own
+      masterpiece.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it did not work. Early the next morning Colonel Tom appeared at the
+      offices of the arms company with blood in his eye, and swore that the
+      consolidation should not be put through. For an hour he stormed up and
+      down in Sam&rsquo;s office, his outbursts of wrath varied by periods of
+      childlike pleading for the retention of the name and glory of the Raineys.
+      When Sam shook his head and went with the old man to the meeting that was
+      to pass upon his action and sell the Rainey Company, he knew that he had a
+      fight on his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The meeting was a stormy one. Sam made a talk telling what had been done
+      and Webster, voting some of Sam&rsquo;s proxies, made a motion that Sam&rsquo;s offer
+      for the old company be accepted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then Colonel Tom fired his guns. Walking up and down in the room
+      before the men, sitting at a long table or in chairs tilted against the
+      walls, he began talking with all of his old flamboyant pomposity of the
+      past glories of the Rainey Company. Sam watched him quietly thinking of
+      the exhibition as something detached and apart from the business of the
+      meeting. He remembered a question that had come into his head when he was
+      a schoolboy and had got his first peep into a school history. There had
+      been a picture of Indians at the war dance and he had wondered why they
+      danced before rather than after battle. Now his mind answered the
+      question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If they had not danced before they might never have got the chance,&rdquo; he
+      thought, and smiled to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I call upon you men here to stick to the old colours,&rdquo; roared the
+      colonel, turning and making a direct attack upon Sam. &ldquo;Do not let this
+      ungrateful upstart, this son of a drunken village housepainter, that I
+      picked up from among the cabbages of South Water Street, win you away from
+      your loyalty to the old leader. Do not let him steal by trickery what we
+      have won only by years of effort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The colonel, leaning on the table, glared about the room. Sam felt
+      relieved and glad of the direct attack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It justifies what I am going to do,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Colonel Tom had finished Sam gave a careless glance at the old man&rsquo;s
+      red face and trembling fingers. He had no doubt that the outburst of
+      eloquence had fallen upon deaf ears and without comment put Webster&rsquo;s
+      motion to the vote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To his surprise two of the new employé directors voted their stock with
+      Colonel Tom&rsquo;s, and a third man, voting his own stock as well as that of a
+      wealthy southside real estate man, did not vote. On a count the stock
+      represented stood deadlocked and Sam, looking down the table, raised his
+      eyebrows to Webster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Move we adjourn for twenty-four hours,&rdquo; snapped Webster, and the motion
+      carried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at a paper lying before him on the table. During the count of
+      the vote he had been writing over and over on the sheet of paper this
+      sentence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The best men spend their lives seeking truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Colonel Tom walked out of the room like a conqueror, declining to speak to
+      Sam as he passed, and Sam looked down the table at Webster and made a
+      motion with his head toward the man who had not voted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within an hour Sam&rsquo;s fight was won. Pouncing upon the man representing the
+      stock of the south-side investor, he and Webster did not go out of the
+      room until they had secured absolute control of the Rainey Company and the
+      man who had refused to vote had put twenty-five thousand dollars into his
+      pocket. The two employeé directors Sam marked for slaughter. Then after
+      spending the afternoon and early evening with the representatives of the
+      eastern companies and their attorneys he drove home to Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was past nine o&rsquo;clock when his car stopped before the house and, going
+      at once to his room, he found Sue sitting before his fire, her arms thrown
+      above her head and her eyes staring at the burning coals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Sam stood in the doorway looking at her a wave of resentment swept over
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old coward,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;he has brought our fight here to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hanging up his coat he filled his pipe and drawing up a chair sat beside
+      her. For five minutes Sue sat staring into the fire. When she spoke there
+      was a touch of hardness in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When everything is said, Sam, you do owe a lot to father,&rdquo; she observed,
+      refusing to look at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam said nothing and she went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not that I think we made you, father and I. You are not the kind of man
+      that people make or unmake. But, Sam, Sam, think what you are doing. He
+      has always been a fool in your hands. He used to come home here when you
+      were new with the company and talk of what he was doing. He had a whole
+      new set of ideas and phrases; all that about waste and efficiency and
+      orderly working toward a definite end. It did not fool me. I knew the
+      ideas, and even the phrases he used to express them, were not his and I
+      was not long finding out they were yours, that it was simply you
+      expressing yourself through him. He is a big helpless child, Sam, and he
+      is old. He hasn&rsquo;t much longer to live. Do not be hard, Sam. Be merciful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice did not tremble but tears ran down her rigid face and her
+      expressive hands clutched at her dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can nothing change you? Must you always have your own way?&rdquo; she added,
+      still refusing to look at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not true, Sue, that I always want my own way, and people do change
+      me; you have changed me,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I have not changed you. I found you hungry for something and you
+      thought I could feed it. I gave you an idea that you took hold of and made
+      your own. I do not know where I got it, from some book or hearing some one
+      talk, I suppose. But it belonged to you. You built it and fostered it in
+      me and coloured it with your own personality. It is your idea to-day. It
+      means more to you than all this firearms trust that the papers are full
+      of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned to look at him, and put out her hand and laid it in his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not been brave,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I am standing in your way. I have had
+      a hope that we would get back to each other. I should have freed you but I
+      hadn&rsquo;t the courage, I hadn&rsquo;t the courage. I could not give up the dream
+      that some day you would really take me back to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Getting out of her chair she dropped to her knees and putting her head in
+      his lap, shook with sobs. Sam sat stroking her hair. Her agitation was so
+      great that her muscular little back shook with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked past her at the fire and tried to think clearly. He was not
+      greatly moved by her agitation, but with all his heart he wanted to think
+      things out and get at the right and the honest thing to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a time of big things,&rdquo; he said slowly and with an air of one
+      explaining to a child. &ldquo;As your socialists say, vast changes are going on.
+      I do not believe that your socialists really sense what these changes
+      mean, and I am not sure that I do or that any man does, but I know they
+      mean something big and I want to be in them and a part of them; all big
+      men do; they are struggling like chicks in the shell. Why, look here! What
+      I am doing has to be done and if I do not do it another man will. The
+      colonel has to go. He will be swept aside. He belongs to something old and
+      outworn. Your socialists, I believe, call it the age of competition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But not by us, not by you, Sam,&rdquo; she plead. &ldquo;After all, he is my father.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A stern look came into Sam&rsquo;s eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It does not ring right, Sue,&rdquo; he said coldly; &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sprang to her feet and stood before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not quote that crowd,&rdquo; she burst out. &ldquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s why they talk so bitterly.
+      They are afraid and ashamed that they are afraid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like the workers in the shop?&rdquo; he asked, musingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what do you want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, Sue girl, I will do it,&rdquo; he said, and pushed her through the
+      door. &ldquo;Now let me sit down by myself and think things out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The men who make machines do not hesitate,&rdquo; he said to himself; &ldquo;even
+      though a thousand fat-hearted men stood in their way they would go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A line of Tennyson&rsquo;s came into his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the nation&rsquo;s airy navies grappling in the central blue,&rdquo; he quoted,
+      thinking of an article he had read predicting the coming of airships.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of the lives of the workers in steel and iron and of the things
+      they had done and would do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;freedom. Steel and iron do not run home to carry
+      the struggle to women sitting by the fire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked up and down the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fat old coward. Damned fat old coward,&rdquo; he muttered over and over to
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At his desk he found a message from Webster. &ldquo;The old turkey cock has
+      fled,&rdquo; it said; &ldquo;we should have saved the twenty-five thousand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s lips to tell of his changed plans but he hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will see you at your office in an hour,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was never a part of all this,&rdquo; he said, turning and looking at the
+      towering city before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Love,&rdquo; he said, still looking toward the city, &ldquo;is a matter of truth, not
+      lies and pretence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the meeting that afternoon the project went through without a
+      dissenting voice. Colonel Tom being absent, the two employé 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;At the end I could not be an ass, even for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The story of Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The annual advertising expenditure of the firearms trust ran into millions
+      and Sam&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lewis, the Jew, the only one of Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have the better of it, Lewis,&rdquo; he said one day in a reflective mood;
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might have had the work you are doing. I planned and schemed with that
+      end in view,&rdquo; he added, lighting a cigar and going out at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the money hunger got you,&rdquo; laughed Lewis, looking after him, &ldquo;the
+      hunger that gets Jews and Gentiles and all who feed it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was ill for a year and without an income,&rdquo; wrote Telfer. Sam noticed
+      that the man&rsquo;s hand had begun to tremble. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if Sue is dead, too,&rdquo; he muttered, remembering his dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sat at his desk, fingering the yellow paper lying before him and
+      fighting to get his head clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old coward. The damned old coward,&rdquo; he muttered; &ldquo;any one could have
+      done that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Lewis came into Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, do not blame yourself for that,&rdquo; he said, with quick understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; Sam muttered; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;The best men spend
+      their lives seeking truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &lsquo;phoning wildly about town to find him, and was with the help of
+      another banker supporting the market and taking Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no attempt to answer Sue&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The greatest man is he whose deeds affect the greatest number of lives,&rdquo;
+       the speaker had said, and the thought had stuck in Sam&rsquo;s mind. Now walking
+      along the street carrying his travelling bag, he remembered the sermon and
+      the thought and shook his head in doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I have done here in this city must have affected thousands of
+      lives,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to think of the quest on which he had started and had keen
+      satisfaction in the thought of what he should do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will begin all over and come up to Truth through work,&rdquo; he told
+      himself. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving his bag in the care of the farmer&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These are the Americans,&rdquo; he began telling himself, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the train he sat beside the old man and the two fell into quiet talk&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ed,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have raised seven sons and made them all good workmen and they are all
+      doing well,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the old man Sam talked of God and of a man&rsquo;s effort to get truth out of
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have thought of it a lot,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God is a spirit and lives in the growing corn,&rdquo; said the old man,
+      pointing out the window at the passing fields.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began talking of churches and of ministers, against whom he was filled
+      with bitterness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are dodgers. They do not get at things. They are damned dodgers,
+      pretending to be good,&rdquo; he declared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been drinking,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I want to work hard day after day so
+      that my muscles may become firm and sleep come to me at night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man thought that his son could find Sam a place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s a driver&mdash;Ed is,&rdquo; he said, laughing, &ldquo;and he won&rsquo;t pay you
+      much. Ed don&rsquo;t let go of money. He&rsquo;s a tight one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll let you carry timbers and drive nails,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that will harden
+      you up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way over the bridge he talked of the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a live place,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we are getting people in here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at that!&rdquo; he exclaimed, chewing at the cigar and pointing to the
+      waterfall that foamed and roared almost under the bridge. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a lot
+      of power there and where there&rsquo;s power there will be a city.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At Ed&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is my wife,&rdquo; said Ed, introducing Sam with a wave of his hand and
+      passing around the end of the desk to stand by her side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ed&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Their son,&rdquo; he whispered cautiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Selling something?&rdquo; asked a large red-haired young man, rolling a quid of
+      tobacco in his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; replied Sam shortly, &ldquo;going to work for Ed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a little while the florid-faced man came and put his head through
+      the barroom door into the office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come on, boys,&rdquo; he said, smiling and nodding right and left, &ldquo;the drinks
+      are on me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The men got up and filed into the bar, the old man and Sam remaining
+      seated in their chairs. They began talking in undertones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll start &lsquo;em thinking&mdash;these men,&rdquo; said the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From his pocket he took a pamphlet and gave it to Sam. It was a crudely
+      written attack upon rich men and corporations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some brains in the fellow who wrote that,&rdquo; said the old carpenter,
+      rubbing his hands together and smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We want to make this a live town,&rdquo; said the voice of Ed, earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man, leaning over and putting his hand beside his mouth, began
+      whispering to Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet there is a capitalist deal back of that power scheme,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded his head up and down and smiled knowingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If there is Ed will be in on it,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t lose Ed. He&rsquo;s a
+      slick one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took the pamphlet from Sam&rsquo;s hand and put it in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a socialist,&rdquo; he explained, &ldquo;but don&rsquo;t say anything. Ed&rsquo;s against
+      &lsquo;em.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, so long, boys,&rdquo; he shouted heartily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Bill&rsquo;s sure all right,&rdquo; said the red-haired young man, evidently
+      expressing the opinion of the men in regard to the florid-faced man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A small bent old man with sunken cheeks got up and walking across the room
+      leaned against the cigar case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you ever hear this one?&rdquo; he asked, looking about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was a good one, eh?&rdquo; he commented, turning to Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Truth,&rdquo; he muttered, looking through the window to the dimly-lighted
+      street. &ldquo;Do these men seek truth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day he went to work, wearing a suit of clothes bought from Ed. He
+      worked with Ed&rsquo;s father, carrying timbers and driving nails as directed by
+      him. In the gang with him were four men, boarders at Ed&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I suppose Ed tends to that. He&rsquo;s a slick one, Ed
+      is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They wanted to see if I had juice in me,&rdquo; he explained, strutting beside
+      Sam with an amusing little swagger of his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All during that month and into the next Sam stayed with the old man&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One Sunday one of the men of his gang came to Sam&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought of it,&rdquo; he said over and over again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you?&rdquo; he asked bluntly. &ldquo;We know you are no working man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam told him a half-truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The doctor says it will not do,&rdquo; he explained to the two men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The red-haired man called Jake began talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are going to have a fight with Ed,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what we came up
+      here to talk about. We want to know where you stand. We are going to see
+      if we can&rsquo;t make him pay as well for the work here as men are paid for the
+      same work in Chicago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam lay back upon the grass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Go ahead. If I can help I will. I&rsquo;m not so fond of
+      Ed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a list of the names of men we think will stick together and vote
+      together on the bond issue,&rdquo; he explained, turning to Sam. &ldquo;Ed&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s done a lot of town work here and there&rsquo;s been graft in all of it,&rdquo;
+       explained Jake emphatically. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s time he was being made to do the right
+      thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While they talked Sam sat watching the men&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Getting up, Jake took Sam&rsquo;s arm and they walked down the ravine, Jake
+      explaining the situation in the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The game,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&rsquo;s been up
+      here at the hotel with Bill talking to Ed. I&rsquo;ve figured out what they are
+      up to.&rdquo; Sam sat down upon a log and laughed heartily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Crofts, eh?&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How would you do that?&rdquo; asked Jake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam sat down on a log and looked at the river flowing past the mouth of
+      the ravine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just fight,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Let me show you something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This fortune in the river rightly managed will pay the expenses of
+      government and give you control of a great source of revenue forever,&rdquo; he
+      wrote. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Across the head of the pamphlet Sam wrote the
+      caption, &ldquo;A River Paved With Gold,&rdquo; and handed it to Jake, who read it and
+      whistled softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I will take this and have it printed. It will make Bill
+      and Ed sit up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam took a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To pay for the printing,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And when we have them licked I am the
+      man who will take the four per cent bonds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake scratched his head. &ldquo;How much do you suppose the deal is worth to
+      Crofts?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A million, or he would not bother,&rdquo; Sam answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This would make Bill and Ed squirm, eh?&rdquo; he laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps here in this town I shall make a start toward what I am after,&rdquo;
+       he thought, his heart filled with happiness and the songs of the tipsy
+      workmen ringing in his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All through the next few weeks there was an air of something astir among
+      the men of Sam&rsquo;s gang and about Ed&rsquo;s hotel. During the evening Jake went
+      among the men talking in low tones, and once he took a three days&rsquo; 
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the campaign,&rdquo; he said, winking and hurrying away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will come to something&mdash;this will&mdash;you&rsquo;ll see,&rdquo; he declared
+      to Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ed wants you,&rdquo; he said, and Sam noticed that his voice trembled and his
+      hand shook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the buggy Ed and Sam rode in silence. Again Ed chewed at an unlighted
+      cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to talk with you,&rdquo; he had said as Sam climbed into the buggy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam struggled furiously to escape Ed&rsquo;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&rsquo;s vice-like
+      grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Ed turned and, pushing Sam before him, threw him through the
+      office door and into the street. In falling his head struck against a
+      hitching post and he lay stunned. When he partially recovered from the
+      fall Sam got up and walked along the street. His face was swollen and
+      bruised and his nose bled. The street was deserted and the assault upon
+      him had been unnoticed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went to a hotel on Main Street&mdash;a more pretentious place than
+      Ed&rsquo;s, near the bridge leading to the station&mdash;and as he passed in he
+      saw, through an open door, Jake, the red-haired man, leaning against the
+      bar and talking to Bill, the man with the florid face. Sam, paying for a
+      room, went upstairs and to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the bed, with cold bandages on his bruised face, he tried to get the
+      situation in hand. Hatred for Ed ran through his veins. His hands
+      clenched, his brain whirled, and the brutal, passionate faces of the woman
+      and the boy danced before his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll fix them, the brutal bullies,&rdquo; he muttered aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then the thought of his quest came back to his mind and quieted him.
+      Through the window came the roar of the waterfall, broken by noises of the
+      street. As he fell asleep they mingled with his dreams, sounding soft and
+      quiet like the low talk of a family about the fire of an evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was awakened by a noise of pounding on his door. At his call the door
+      opened and the face of the old carpenter appeared. Sam laughed and sat up
+      in bed. Already the cold bandages had soothed the throbbing of his bruised
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go away,&rdquo; begged the old man, rubbing his hands together nervously. &ldquo;Get
+      out of town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his hand to his mouth and talked in a hoarse whisper, looking back
+      over his shoulder through the open door. Sam, getting out of bed, began
+      filling his pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t beat Ed, you fellows,&rdquo; added the old man, backing out at the
+      door. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s a slick one, Ed is. You better get out of town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam called a boy and gave him a note to Ed asking for his clothes and for
+      the bag in his room, and to the boy he gave a large bill, asking him to
+      pay anything due. When the boy came back bringing the clothes and the bag
+      he returned the bill unbroken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They&rsquo;re scared about something up there,&rdquo; he said, looking at Sam&rsquo;s
+      bruised face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam dressed carefully and went down into the street. He remembered that he
+      had never seen a printed copy of the political pamphlet written in the
+      ravine and realised that Jake had used it to make money for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now I shall try something else,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was early evening and crowds of men coming down the railroad track from
+      the plough works turned to right and left as they reached Main Street. Sam
+      walked among them, climbing a little hilly side street to a number he had
+      got from a clerk at the drug store before which the socialist had talked.
+      He stopped at a little frame house and a moment after knocking was in the
+      presence of the man who had talked night after night from the box in the
+      street. Sam had decided to see what could be done through him. The
+      socialist was a short, fat man, with curly grey hair, shiny round cheeks,
+      and black broken teeth. He sat on the edge of his bed and looked as if he
+      had slept in his clothes. A corncob pipe lay smoking among the covers of
+      the bed, and during most of the talk he sat with one shoe held in his hand
+      as though about to put it on. About the room in orderly piles lay stack
+      after stack of paper-covered books. Sam sat down in a chair by the window
+      and told his mission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a big thing, this power steal that is going on here,&rdquo; he explained.
+      &ldquo;I know the man back of it and he would not bother with a small affair. I
+      know they are going to make the city build the millrace and then steal it.
+      It will be a big thing for your party about here if you take hold and stop
+      them. Let me tell you how it can be done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He explained his plan, and told of Crofts and of his wealth and dogged,
+      bullying determination. The socialist seemed beside himself. He pulled on
+      the shoe and began running hurriedly about the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The time for the election,&rdquo; Sam went on, &ldquo;is almost here. I have looked
+      into this thing. We must beat this bond issue and then put through a
+      square one. There is a train out of Chicago at seven o&rsquo;clock, a fast
+      train. You get fifty speakers out here. I will pay for a special train if
+      necessary and I will hire a band and help stir things up. I can give you
+      facts enough to shake this town to the bottom. You come with me and &lsquo;phone
+      to Chicago. I will pay everything. I am McPherson, Sam McPherson of
+      Chicago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The socialist ran to a closet and began pulling on his coat. The name
+      affected him so that his hand trembled and he could scarcely get his arm
+      into the coat sleeve. He began to apologise for the appearance of the room
+      and kept looking at Sam with the air of one not able to believe what he
+      had heard. As the two men walked out of the house he ran ahead holding
+      doors open for Sam&rsquo;s passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you will help us, Mr. McPherson?&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;You, a man of
+      millions, will help us in this fight?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had a feeling that the man was going to kiss his hand or do something
+      equally ridiculous. He had the air of a club door man gone off his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the hotel Sam stood in the lobby while the fat man waited in a
+      telephone booth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will have to &lsquo;phone Chicago, I will simply have to &lsquo;phone Chicago. We
+      socialists don&rsquo;t do anything like this offhand, Mr. McPherson,&rdquo; he had
+      explained as they walked along the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the socialist came out of the booth he stood before Sam shaking his
+      head. His whole attitude had changed, and he looked like a man caught
+      doing a foolish or absurd thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing doing, nothing doing, Mr. McPherson,&rdquo; he said, starting for the
+      hotel door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the door he stopped and shook his finger at Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It won&rsquo;t work,&rdquo; he said, emphatically. &ldquo;Chicago is too wise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam turned and went back to his room. His name had killed his only chance
+      to beat Crofts, Jake, Bill and Ed. In his room he sat looking out of the
+      window into the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where shall I take hold now?&rdquo; he asked himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning out the lights he sat listening to the roar of the waterfall and
+      thinking of the events of the last week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had a time,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;I have tried something and even though
+      it did not work it has been the best fun I have had for years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The hours slipped away and night came on. He could hear men shouting and
+      laughing in the street, and going downstairs he stood in a hallway at the
+      edge of the crowd that gathered about the socialist. The orator shouted
+      and waved his hand. He seemed as proud as a young recruit who has just
+      passed through his first baptism of fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He tried to make a fool of me&mdash;McPherson of Chicago&mdash;the
+      millionaire&mdash;one of the capitalist kings&mdash;he tried to bribe me
+      and my party.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the crowd the old carpenter was dancing in the road and rubbing his
+      hands together. With the feeling of a man who had finished a piece of work
+      or turned the last leaf of a book, Sam went back to his hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the morning I shall be on my way,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A knock came at the door and the red-haired man came in. He closed the
+      door softly and winked at Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ed made a mistake,&rdquo; he said, and laughed. &ldquo;The old man told him you were
+      a socialist and he thought you were trying to spoil the graft. He is
+      scared about that beating you got and mighty sorry. He&rsquo;s all right&mdash;Ed
+      is&mdash;and he and Bill and I have got the votes. What made you stay
+      under cover so long? Why didn&rsquo;t you tell us you were McPherson?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam saw the hopelessness of any attempt to explain. Jake had evidently
+      sold out the men. Sam wondered how.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know you can deliver the votes?&rsquo;&rdquo; he asked, trying to lead
+      Jake on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake rolled the quid in his mouth and winked again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was easy enough to fix the men when Ed, Bill and I got together,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;You know about the other. There&rsquo;s a clause in the act authorising
+      the bond issue, a sleeper, Bill calls it. You know more about that than I
+      do. Anyway the power will be turned over to the man we say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how do I know you can deliver the votes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake threw out his hand impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do they know?&rdquo; he asked sharply. &ldquo;What they want is more wages.
+      There&rsquo;s a million in the power deal and they can&rsquo;t any more realise a
+      million than they can tell what they want to do in Heaven. I promised Ed&rsquo;s
+      fellows the city scale. Ed can&rsquo;t kick. He&rsquo;ll make a hundred thousand as it
+      stands. Then I promised the plough works gang a ten per cent raise. We&rsquo;ll
+      get it for them if we can, but if we can&rsquo;t, they won&rsquo;t know it till the
+      deal is put through.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam walked over and held open the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good night,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jake looked annoyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t you even going to make a bid against Crofts?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;We ain&rsquo;t
+      tied to him if you do better by us. I&rsquo;m in this thing because you put me
+      in. That piece you wrote up the river scared &lsquo;em stiff. I want to do the
+      right thing by you. Don&rsquo;t be sore about Ed. He wouldn&rsquo;t a done it if he&rsquo;d
+      known.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head and stood with his hand still on the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good night,&rdquo; he said again. &ldquo;I am not in it. I have dropped it. No use
+      trying to explain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For weeks and months Sam led a wandering vagabond life, and surely a
+      stranger or more restless vagabond never went upon the road. In his pocket
+      he had at almost any time from one to five thousand dollars, his bag went
+      on from place to place ahead of him, and now and then he caught up with
+      it, unpacked it, and wore a suit of his former Chicago clothes upon the
+      streets of some town. For the most part, however, he wore the rough
+      clothes bought from Ed, and, when these were gone, others like them, with
+      a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a pair of heavy boots
+      lacing half way up the legs. Among the people, he passed for a rather
+      well-set-up workman with money in his pocket going his own way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During all those months of wandering, and even when he had returned to
+      something nearer his former way of life, his mind was unsettled and his
+      outlook on life disturbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that he, among all
+      men, was a unique, an innovation. Day after day his mind ground away upon
+      his problem and he was determined to seek and to keep on seeking until he
+      found for himself a way of peace. In the towns and in the country through
+      which he passed he saw the clerks in the stores, the merchants with
+      worried faces hurrying into banks, the farmers, brutalised by toil,
+      dragging their weary bodies homeward at the coming of night, and told
+      himself that all life was abortive, that on all sides of him it wore
+      itself out in little futile efforts or ran away in side currents, that
+      nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward giving point to the
+      tremendous sacrifice involved in just living and working in the world. He
+      thought of Christ going about seeing the world and talking to men, and
+      thought that he too would go and talk to them, not as a teacher, but as
+      one seeking eagerly to be taught. At times he was filled with longing and
+      inexpressible hopes and, like the boy of Caxton, would get out of bed, not
+      now to stand in Miller&rsquo;s pasture watching the rain on the surface of the
+      water, but to walk endless miles through the darkness getting the blessed
+      relief of fatigue into his body and often paying for and occupying two
+      beds in one night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam wanted to go back to Sue; he wanted peace and something like
+      happiness, but most of all he wanted work, real work, work that would
+      demand of him day after day the best and finest in him so that he would be
+      held to the need of renewing constantly the better impulses of his mind.
+      He was at the top of his life, and the few weeks of hard physical exertion
+      as a driver of nails and a bearer of timbers had begun to restore his body
+      to shapeliness and strength, so that he was filled anew with all of his
+      native restlessness and energy; but he was determined that he would not
+      again pour himself out in work that would react upon him as had his money
+      making, his dream of beautiful children, and this last half-formed dream
+      of a kind of financial fatherhood to the Illinois town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The incident with Ed and the red-haired man had been his first serious
+      effort at anything like social service achieved through controlling or
+      attempting to influence the public mind, for his was the type of mind that
+      runs to the concrete, the actual. As he sat in the ravine talking to Jake,
+      and, later, coming home in the boat under the multitude of stars, he had
+      looked up from among the drunken workmen and his mind had seen a city
+      built for a people, a city independent, beautiful, strong, and free, but a
+      glimpse of a red head through a barroom door and a socialist trembling
+      before a name had dispelled the vision. After his return from hearing the
+      socialist, who in his turn was hedged about by complicated influences, and
+      in those November days when he walked south through Illinois, seeing the
+      late glory of the trees and breathing the fine air, he laughed at himself
+      for having had the vision. It was not that the red-haired man had sold him
+      out, it was not the beating given him by Ed&rsquo;s sullen-faced son or the
+      blows across the face at the hands of his vigorous wife&mdash;it was just
+      that at bottom he did not believe the people wanted reform; they wanted a
+      ten per cent raise in wages. The public mind was a thing too big, too
+      complicated and inert for a vision or an ideal to get at and move deeply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, walking on the road and struggling to find truth even within
+      himself, Sam had to come to something else. At bottom he was no leader, no
+      reformer. He had not wanted the free city for a free people, but as a work
+      to be done by his own hand. He was McPherson, the money maker, the man who
+      loved himself. The fact, not the sight of Jake hobnobbing with Bill or the
+      timidity of the socialist, had blocked his way to work as a political
+      reformer and builder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tramping south between the rows of shocked corn he laughed at himself.
+      &ldquo;The experience with Ed and Jake has done something for me,&rdquo; he thought.
+      &ldquo;They bullied me. I have been a kind of bully myself and what has happened
+      has been good medicine for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam walked the roads of Illinois, Ohio, New York, and other states,
+      through hill country and flat country, in the snow drifts of winter and
+      through the storms of spring, talking to people, asking their way of life
+      and the end toward which they worked. At night he dreamed of Sue, of his
+      boyhood struggles in Caxton, of Janet Eberly sitting in her chair and
+      talking of writers of books, or, visualising the stock exchange or some
+      garish drinking place, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster,
+      Morrison, and Prince intent and eager as he laid before them some scheme
+      of money making. Sometimes at night he awoke, seized with horror, seeing
+      Colonel Tom with the revolver pressed against his head; and sitting in his
+      bed, and all through the next day he talked aloud to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The damned old coward,&rdquo; he shouted into the darkness of his room or into
+      the wide peaceful prospect of the countryside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible.
+      It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing
+      to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent, so
+      completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet,&rdquo; thought Sam, &ldquo;he has found strength to whip me, the man of
+      ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight I
+      put upon the little play world in which he had been king.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed beard
+      sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead, and
+      into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance of a
+      thought he had got from a book of Janet&rsquo;s or from some talk he had heard,
+      perhaps at his own dinner table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying
+      dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving
+      past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that issued
+      from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam, hurrying and
+      seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to the old
+      commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his forces to
+      withstand an attack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping
+      night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and
+      daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction from
+      the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed feet on
+      the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon his body and
+      subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind, chilled by the
+      winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun. In the spring he
+      swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the cattle grazing in
+      the fields and the white clouds floating across the sky, and constantly
+      his legs became harder and his body more flat and sinewy. Once he slept
+      for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a woods and in the morning was
+      awakened by a farmer&rsquo;s dog licking his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other
+      roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no
+      incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or on
+      the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he talked
+      and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in life, sought
+      no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the romance went
+      out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and stupid, they were,
+      almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they wanted passionately to
+      get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding life with its problems
+      and responsibilities. They always talked of the big cities, of &ldquo;Chi&rdquo; and
+      &ldquo;Cinci&rdquo; and &ldquo;Frisco,&rdquo; and were bent upon getting to one of these places.
+      They condemned the rich and begged and stole from the poor, talked
+      swaggeringly of their personal courage and ran whimpering and begging
+      before country constables. One of them, a tall, leering youth in a grey
+      cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the edge of a village in Indiana,
+      tried to rob him. Full of his new strength and with the thought of Ed&rsquo;s
+      wife and the sullen-faced son in his mind, Sam sprang upon him and had
+      revenge for the beating received in the office of Ed&rsquo;s hotel by beating
+      this fellow in his turn. When the tall youth had partially recovered from
+      the beating and had staggered to his feet, he ran off into the darkness,
+      stopping when well out of reach to hurl a stone that splashed in the mud
+      of the road at Sam&rsquo;s feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everywhere Sam sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He had a
+      kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of some
+      simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman, with whom he
+      talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana, interested him so
+      that he went into a train with her and travelled all night in the day
+      coach, listening to her talk of her three sons, one of whom had weak lungs
+      and had, with two younger brothers, taken up government land in the west.
+      The woman had been with them for some months, helping them to get a start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was raised on a farm and knew things they could not know,&rdquo; she told
+      Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of
+      fellow passengers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had
+      driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a house,
+      and had grown brown and strong at the work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has
+      gained eleven pounds,&rdquo; she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her
+      heavy, muscular forearms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle factory
+      in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods store, with
+      her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her hearer&rsquo;s
+      interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the west and the
+      loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they sometimes made her
+      heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved success, although he
+      did not see how her experience could serve as a guide to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth,&rdquo; he said, taking
+      her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through southern
+      Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse, asked, &ldquo;Where
+      are you going?&rdquo; adding genially, &ldquo;I may be able to give you a lift.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man&rsquo;s manner or in his
+      dress suggesting the man of God, he assumed a bantering air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am on my way to the New Jerusalem,&rdquo; he said seriously. &ldquo;I am one who
+      seeks God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when he
+      saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam&rsquo;s mouth, he turned the wheels
+      of his buggy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem,&rdquo; he
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road,
+      told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward
+      which he might work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard
+      necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will
+      bring me bread and butter, but because I need to be doing something that
+      will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to
+      serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I got
+      at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me, and I
+      want to find that way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister, who was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary at
+      Springfield, Ohio, and had come out of college with a very serious outlook
+      on life, took Sam to his house and together they sat talking half the
+      night. He had a wife, a country girl with a babe lying at her breast, who
+      got supper for them, and who, after supper, sat in the shadows in a corner
+      of the living-room listening to their talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe and the minister poked at a
+      coal fire that burned in a stove. They talked of God and of what the
+      thought of God meant to men; but the young minister did not try to give
+      Sam an answer to his problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly
+      dissatisfied and unhappy in his way of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no spirit of God here,&rdquo; he said, poking viciously at the coals
+      in the stove. &ldquo;The people here do not want me to talk to them of God. They
+      have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has put them
+      here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind of glorified
+      Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished this life of
+      work and of putting money in the savings bank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the country
+      with him and talking of God. In the evening they sat in the house,
+      continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man preach in
+      his church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked
+      vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and
+      unnatural.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man,&rdquo; thought Sam, &ldquo;has no feeling for public address and is not
+      treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation, the
+      ideas he has expounded to me in his house.&rdquo; He decided there was something
+      to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week after week and
+      who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came to
+      him as he stood on the little porch before the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you would go away,&rdquo; she said, standing with her babe in her arms
+      and looking at the porch floor. &ldquo;You stir him up and make him
+      dissatisfied.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness.
+      There had been tears in the wife&rsquo;s eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and eating
+      with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses where
+      they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked in a new
+      place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and several of
+      his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the men of the
+      threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot of them day
+      after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk, crept into the
+      loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began another day of
+      heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a swim in some creek
+      and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees of an orchard
+      sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of talk, talk that
+      never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they would try to
+      settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at some farm during
+      the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man in the crew never
+      talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long Sunday afternoons and
+      whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The threshing outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe,
+      who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the men
+      all day, drove about the country half the night making deals with farmers
+      for other days of threshing. Sam thought that he looked constantly on the
+      point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one of the men, who had
+      been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that at the end of the
+      season their employer did not have enough money left from his season of
+      work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines and that he
+      continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One has to keep going,&rdquo; said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him
+      on the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When told to keep Sam&rsquo;s wage until the end of the season he looked
+      relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried
+      and said that he had no money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a
+      little time,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him
+      from the shadows at the back of the barn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one else?&rdquo;
+       he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joe looked indignant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man wants independence,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a
+      stream, and tearing up Joe&rsquo;s note watched the torn pieces of it float away
+      upon the brown water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The days
+      on which something happened or on which something outside himself
+      interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours
+      of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in a
+      kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get at
+      people who came into his way and to discover something of their way of
+      life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed,
+      staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the sidewalks
+      of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an idea came
+      into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once the
+      practicability of living by following the idea, and although the practice
+      brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the difficulties of the
+      problem he was striving to work out, it brought him many strange
+      experiences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town in
+      eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a railroad
+      track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the sidewalk. It
+      was a stormy night in September at the end of his first year of wandering
+      and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after buying drinks for the
+      labourer and cigars for himself, several men came in and stood by the bar
+      drinking together. As they drank they became more and more friendly,
+      slapping each other on the back, singing songs and boasting. One of them
+      got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The proprietor, a round-faced man
+      with one dead eye, who had himself been drinking freely, put a bottle upon
+      the bar and coming up to Sam, began complaining that he had no bartender
+      and had to work long hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drink what you want, boys, and then I&rsquo;ll tell you what you owe,&rdquo; he said
+      to the men standing along the bar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room, and
+      looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had for
+      the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen, Sam
+      said to himself, &ldquo;I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At least
+      I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with this
+      tramping on the road and thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an
+      obscure place had made its proprietor what is called &ldquo;well fixed.&rdquo; It had
+      a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the main
+      street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks was
+      but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men from the
+      freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand about drinking
+      beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at the side door was
+      prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door, took drinks and
+      hurried out again, looking up the alley and running quickly when they
+      found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and when Sam had worked
+      for a few days in the place he once made the mistake of reaching for the
+      bottle when he heard the door open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let them ask for it,&rdquo; said the proprietor gruffly. &ldquo;Do you want to insult
+      a man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On Saturday the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and
+      at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks.
+      When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these men
+      and put the bottle before them, saying, &ldquo;Drink all you want of the stuff.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment by
+      the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat pockets
+      and looking at the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bar flies,&rdquo; the proprietor explained laconically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it into
+      stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into bottles
+      as they became empty. He kept on display in glass cases bottles of well
+      known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for one of these
+      brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from beneath the bar, a
+      bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of his own mixture. As Al
+      sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know nothing the bartender&rsquo;s art
+      and stood all day handing out Al&rsquo;s poisonous stuff and the foaming glasses
+      of beer the workingmen drank in the evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the
+      proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam most.
+      Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over their
+      shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at Sam
+      apologetically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold,&rdquo; they would say,
+      as though repeating a formula.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre
+      notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life&rsquo;s
+      unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day&rsquo;s duty, and his
+      curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in at
+      the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked them
+      why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the
+      telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam&rsquo;s question an
+      impertinence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You fool, don&rsquo;t you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?&rdquo;
+       Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in the
+      centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and women going
+      through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to overcome a
+      feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening before. He
+      had come into town over a poorly made clay road running through barren
+      hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores of a river,
+      swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges of the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before him in the distance he had looked into the windows of a huge
+      factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene that
+      lay before him. Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers
+      ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the glare of the furnace
+      fire lighting now one, now another of them, sharply. At his feet the
+      tumbling waters that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated him.
+      Looking closely at the racing waters his head, light from physical
+      weariness, reeled, and in fear of falling he had been compelled to grip
+      firmly the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a house
+      across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens sat on
+      a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly fitting
+      accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard itself two
+      bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they sprang into the
+      fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming exhausted, they fell to
+      picking and scratching among the rubbish in the yard, and when they had a
+      little recovered renewed the struggle. For an hour Sam had looked at the
+      scene, letting his eyes wander from the river to the grey sky and to the
+      factory belching forth its black smoke. He had thought that the two feebly
+      struggling fowls, immersed in their pointless struggle in the midst of
+      such mighty force, epitomised much of man&rsquo;s struggle in the world, and,
+      turning, had gone along the sidewalks and to the village hotel, feeling
+      old and tired. Now on the bench in the little park, with the early morning
+      sun shining down through the glistening rain drops clinging to the red
+      leaves of the trees, he began to lose the sense of depression that had
+      clung to him through the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying
+      workers, and stopped to sit beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the road, brother?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fools and slaves,&rdquo; he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women
+      passing on the sidewalk. &ldquo;See them going like beasts to their bondage?
+      What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of
+      dogs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are all fools and slaves,&rdquo; said Sam, stoutly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There, you talk sense,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Welcome to our town, stranger. We have
+      no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity among
+      them. Come and have breakfast with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a
+      graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he
+      was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of
+      which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud of
+      the fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I refuse to work! I scorn it!&rdquo; he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in
+      the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the socialist
+      party in his native town, and boasted of the leadership he had already
+      achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried because of
+      his connection with the movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She wants me to be respectable,&rdquo; he said sadly, and added, &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the
+      use trying to explain to a woman? I can&rsquo;t get her to see the difference
+      between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I&rsquo;ve given up
+      trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by
+      getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He talked of a strike going on among some girl employés of a Jewish
+      shirtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began
+      asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to
+      the scene of the strike.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shirtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and on
+      the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up and
+      down. A flashily dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his hands
+      in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft and
+      looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came a stream
+      of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the empty air. When
+      Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs, shouting oaths
+      over his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam joined the three girls, and began talking to them, walking up and down
+      with them before the grocery store.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing to win?&rdquo; he asked when they had told him of their
+      grievances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We do what we can!&rdquo; said a Jewish girl with broad hips, great motherly
+      breasts, and fine, soft, brown eyes, who appeared to be a leader and
+      spokesman among the strikers. &ldquo;We walk up and down here and try to get a
+      word with the strikebreakers the boss has brought in from other towns,
+      when they go in and come out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank, the University man, spoke up. &ldquo;We are putting up stickers
+      everywhere,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I myself have put up hundreds of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took from his coat pocket a printed slip, gummed on one side, and told
+      Sam that he had been putting them on walls and telegraph poles about town.
+      The thing was vilely written. &ldquo;Down with the dirty scabs&rdquo; was the heading
+      in bold, black letters across the top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam was shocked at the vileness of the caption and at the crude brutality
+      of the text printed on the slip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you call women workers names like that?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have taken our work from us,&rdquo; the Jewish girl answered simply and
+      began again, telling the story of her sister strikers and of what the low
+      wage had meant to them and to their families. &ldquo;To me it does not so much
+      matter; I have a brother who works in a clothing store and he can support
+      me, but many of the women in our union have only their wage here with
+      which to feed their families.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam&rsquo;s mind began working on the problem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here,&rdquo; he declared, &ldquo;is something definite to do, a battle in which I
+      will pit myself against this employer for the sake of these women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put away from him his experience in the Illinois town, telling himself
+      that the young woman walking beside him would have a sense of honour
+      unknown to the red-haired young workman who had sold him out to Bill and
+      Ed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I failed with my money,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;now I will try to help these girls
+      with my energy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning to the Jewish girl he made a quick decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will help you get your places back,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving the girls he went across the street to a barber shop where he
+      could watch the entrance to the factory. He wanted to think out a method
+      of procedure and wanted also to look at the girl strikebreakers as they
+      came to work. After a time several girls came along the street and turned
+      in at the stairway. The flashily dressed Hebrew with the cigar still in
+      his mouth was again by the stairway entrance. The three pickets running
+      forward accosted the file of girls going up the stairs, one of whom, a
+      young American girl with yellow hair, turned and shouted something over
+      her shoulder. The man called Frank shouted back and the Hebrew took the
+      cigar out of his mouth and laughed heartily. Sam filled and lighted his
+      pipe, a dozen plans for helping the striking girls running through his
+      mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the morning he went into the grocery store on the corner, a saloon
+      in the neighbourhood, and returned to the barber shop talking to men of
+      the strike. He ate his lunch alone, still thinking of the three girls
+      patiently walking up and down before the stairway. Their ceaseless walking
+      seemed to him a useless waste of energy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They should be doing something more definite,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After lunch he joined the soft-eyed Jewish girl and together they walked
+      along the street talking of the strike.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You cannot win this strike by just calling nasty names,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I do
+      not like that &lsquo;dirty scab&rsquo; sticker Frank had in his pocket. It cannot help
+      you and only antagonises the girls who have taken your places. Here in
+      this part of town the people want to see you win. I have talked to the men
+      who come into the saloon and the barber shop across the street and you
+      already have their sympathy. You want to get the sympathy of the girls who
+      have taken your places. Calling them dirty scabs only makes martyrs of
+      them. Did the yellow-haired girl call you a name this morning?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Jewish girl looked at Sam and laughed bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather; she called me a loud-mouthed street walker.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They continued their walk along the street, across the railroad track and
+      a bridge, and into a quiet residence street. Carriages stood at the curb
+      before the houses, and pointing to these and to the well-kept houses Sam
+      said, &ldquo;Men have bought these things for their women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A shadow fell across the girl&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose all of us want what these women have,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;We do not
+      really want to fight and to stand on our own feet, not when we know the
+      world. What a woman really wants is a man,&rdquo; she added shortly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam began talking and told her of a plan that had come into his mind. He
+      had remembered how Jack Prince and Morrison used to talk about the appeal
+      of the direct personal letter and how effectively it was used by mail
+      order houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will have a mail order strike here,&rdquo; he said and went on to lay before
+      her the details of his plan. He proposed that she, Frank, and some others
+      of the striking girls, should go about town getting the names and the mail
+      addresses of the girl strikebreakers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get also the names of the keepers of the boarding houses at which these
+      girls live and the names of the men and women who live in the same
+      houses,&rdquo; he suggested. &ldquo;Then you get the striking girls and women together
+      and have them tell me their stories. We will write letters day after day
+      to the girl strikebreakers, to the women who keep the boarding houses, and
+      to the people who live in the houses and sit at table with them. We won&rsquo;t
+      call names. We will tell the story of what being beaten in this fight
+      means to the women in your union, tell it simply and truthfully as you
+      told it to me this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will cost such a lot,&rdquo; said the Jewish girl, shaking her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam took a roll of bills from his pocket and showed it to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will pay,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; she asked, looking at him sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I am a man wanting work just as you want work,&rdquo; he replied, and
+      then went on hurriedly, &ldquo;It is a long story. I am a rich man wandering
+      about the world seeking Truth. I will not want that known. Take me for
+      granted. You won&rsquo;t be sorry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Within an hour he had engaged a large room, paying a month&rsquo;s rent in
+      advance, and into the room chairs and table and typewriters had been
+      brought. He put an advertisement in the evening paper for girl
+      stenographers, and a printer, hurried by a promise of extra pay, ran out
+      for him several thousand letter heads across the top of which in bold,
+      black type ran the words, &ldquo;The Girl Strikers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That night Sam held, in the room he had engaged, a meeting of the girl
+      strikers, explaining to them his plan and offering to pay all expenses of
+      the fight he proposed to make for them. They clapped their hands and
+      shouted approvingly, and Sam began laying out his campaign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the girls he told off to stand in front of the factory morning and
+      evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will have other help for you there,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Before you go home
+      to-night there will be a printer here with a bundle of pamphlets I am
+      having printed for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Advised by the soft-eyed Jewish girl, he told off others to get additional
+      names for the mailing list he wanted, getting many important ones from
+      girls in the room. Six of the girls he asked to come in the morning to
+      help him with addressing and mailing letters. The Jewish girl he told to
+      take charge of the girls at work in the room&mdash;on the morrow to become
+      also an office&mdash;and to superintend getting the names.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank rose at the back of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you anyway?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man with money and the ability to win this strike,&rdquo; Sam told him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing it for?&rdquo; demanded Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because he believes in these women and wants to help,&rdquo; she explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rot,&rdquo; said Frank, going out at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was snowing when the meeting ended, and Sam and the Jewish girl
+      finished their talk in the hallway leading to her room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what Harrigan, the union leader from Pittsburgh, will say to
+      this,&rdquo; she told him. &ldquo;He appointed Frank to lead and direct the strike
+      here. He doesn&rsquo;t like interference and he may not like your plan. But we
+      working women need men, men like you who can plan and do things. There are
+      too many men living on us. We need men who will work for all of us as the
+      men work for the women in the carriages and automobiles.&rdquo; She laughed and
+      put out a hand to him. &ldquo;See what you have got yourself into? I want you to
+      be a husband to our entire union.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning four girl stenographers went to work in Sam&rsquo;s strike
+      headquarters, and he wrote his first strike letter, a letter telling the
+      story of a striking girl named Hadaway, whose young brother was sick with
+      tuberculosis. Sam did not put any flourishes in the letter; he felt that
+      he did not need to. He thought that with twenty or thirty such letters,
+      each telling briefly and truthfully the story of one of the striking
+      girls, he should be able to show one American town how its other half
+      lived. He gave the letter to the four girl stenographers with the mailing
+      list he already had and started them writing it to each of the names.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At eight o&rsquo;clock a man came in to install a telephone and girl strikers
+      began bringing in new names for the mailing list. At nine o&rsquo;clock three
+      more stenographers appeared and were put to work, and girls who had been
+      in began sending more names over the &lsquo;phone. The Jewish girl walked up and
+      down, giving orders, making suggestions. From time to time she ran to
+      Sam&rsquo;s desk and suggested other sources of names for the mailing list. Sam
+      thought that if the other working girls were timid and embarrassed before
+      him this one was not. She was like a general on the field of battle. Her
+      soft brown eyes glowed, her mind worked rapidly, and her voice had a ring
+      in it. At her suggestion Sam gave the girls at the typewriters lists
+      bearing the names of town officials, bankers and prominent business men,
+      and the wives of all these, also presidents of various women&rsquo;s clubs,
+      society women, and charitable organizations. She called reporters from the
+      town&rsquo;s two daily papers and had them interview Sam, and at her suggestion
+      he gave them copies of the Hadaway girl letter to print.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Print it,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and if you cannot use it as news, make it an
+      advertisement and bring the bill to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At eleven o&rsquo;clock Frank came into the room bringing a tall Irishman, with
+      sunken cheeks, black, unclean teeth, and an overcoat too small for him.
+      Leaving him standing by the door, Frank walked across the room to Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come to lunch with us,&rdquo; he said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder
+      toward the tall Irishman. &ldquo;I picked him up,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Best brain that&rsquo;s
+      been in town for years. He&rsquo;s a wonder. Used to be a Catholic priest. He
+      doesn&rsquo;t believe in God or love or anything. Come on out and hear him talk.
+      He&rsquo;s great.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am too busy. There is work to be done here. We are going to win this
+      strike.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank looked at him doubtfully and then about the room at the busy girls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what Harrigan will think of all this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t
+      like interferences. I never do anything without writing him. I wrote and
+      told him what you were doing here. I had to, you know. I&rsquo;m responsible to
+      headquarters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the afternoon the Hebrew owner of the shirtwaist factory came in to
+      strike headquarters and, walking through the room took off his hat and sat
+      down by Sam&rsquo;s desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want here?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;The newspaper boys told me of what you
+      had planned to do. What&rsquo;s your game?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to whip you,&rdquo; Sam answered quietly, &ldquo;to whip you good. You might
+      as well get into line. You are going to lose this strike.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m only one,&rdquo; said the Hebrew. &ldquo;There is an association of us
+      manufacturers of shirtwaists. We are all in this. We all have a strike on
+      our hands. What will you gain if you do beat me here? I&rsquo;m only a little
+      fellow after all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and picking up his pen began writing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are unlucky,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I just happened to take hold here. When I
+      have you beaten I will go on and beat the others. There is more money back
+      of me than back of you all, and I am going to beat every one of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning a crowd stood before the stairway leading to the factory
+      when the strikebreaking girls came to work. The letters and the newspaper
+      interview had been effective and more than half the strikebreakers did not
+      appear. The others hurried along the street and turned in at the stairway
+      without looking at the crowd. The girl, told off by Sam, stood on the
+      sidewalk passing out pamphlets to the strikebreakers. The pamphlets were
+      headed, &ldquo;The Story of Ten Girls,&rdquo; and told briefly and pointedly the
+      stories of ten striking girls and what the loss of the strike meant to
+      them and to their families.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a while there drove up two carriages and a large automobile, and out
+      of the automobile climbed a well-dressed woman who took a bundle of the
+      pamphlets from the girl picket and began passing them about among the
+      people. Two policemen who stood in front of the crowd took off their
+      helmets and accompanied her. The crowd cheered. Frank came hurrying across
+      the street to where Sam stood in front of the barber shop and slapped him
+      on the back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re a wonder,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam hurried back to the room and prepared the second letter for the
+      mailing list. Two more stenographers had come to work. He had to send out
+      for more machines. A reporter for the town&rsquo;s evening paper ran up the
+      stairway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;The town wants to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From his pocket he took a telegram from a Pittsburgh daily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about mail-order strike plan? Give name and story new strike leader
+      there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At ten o&rsquo;clock Frank returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a wire from Harrigan,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s coming here. He wants a
+      mass meeting of the girls for to-night. I&rsquo;ve got to get them together.
+      We&rsquo;ll meet here in this room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the room the work went on. The list of names for the mailing had
+      doubled. The picket at the shirtwaist factory reported that three more of
+      the strikebreakers had left the plant. The Jewish girl was excited. She
+      went hurrying about the room, her eyes glowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s great,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The plan is working. The whole town is aroused
+      and for us. We&rsquo;ll win in another twenty-four hours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then at seven o&rsquo;clock that night Harrigan came into the room where Sam
+      sat with the assembled girls, bolting the door behind him. He was a short,
+      strongly built man with blue eyes and red hair. He walked about the room
+      in silence, followed by Frank. Suddenly he stopped and, picking up one of
+      the typewriting machines rented by Sam for the letter writing, raised it
+      above his head and sent it smashing to the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A hell of a strike leader,&rdquo; he roared. &ldquo;Look at this. Scab machines!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scab stenographers!&rdquo; he said through his teeth. &ldquo;Scab printing! Scab
+      everything!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Picking up a bundle of the letterheads, he tore them across, and walking
+      to the front of the room, shook his fist before Sam&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scab leader!&rdquo; he shouted, turning and facing the girls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The soft-eyed Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s winning for us,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harrigan walked toward her threateningly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better lose than win a scab victory,&rdquo; he bellowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you anyway? What grafter sent you here?&rdquo; he demanded, turning to
+      Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He launched into a speech. &ldquo;I have been watching this fellow, I know him.
+      He has a scheme to break down the union and is being paid by the
+      capitalists.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam waited to hear no more. Getting up he pulled on his canvas jacket and
+      started for the door. He saw that already he had involved himself in a
+      dozen violations of the unionist code and the idea of trying to convince
+      Harrigan of his disinterestedness did not occur to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not mind me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked between the rows of frightened, white-faced girls and unbolted
+      the door, the Jewish girl following. At the head of the stairway leading
+      to the street he stopped and pointed back into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go back,&rdquo; he said, handing her a roll of bills. &ldquo;Carry on the work if you
+      can. Get other machines and new printing. I will help you in secret.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning he ran down the stairs, hurried through the curious crowd standing
+      at the foot, and walked rapidly along in front of the lighted stores. A
+      cold rain, half snow, was falling. Beside him walked a young man with a
+      brown pointed beard, one of the newspaper reporters who had interviewed
+      him the day before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did Harrigan trim you?&rdquo; asked the young man, and then added, laughing,
+      &ldquo;He told us he intended to throw you down stairs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam walked on in silence, filled with wrath. He turned into a side street
+      and stopped when his companion put a hand upon his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is our dump,&rdquo; said the young man, pointing to a long low frame
+      building facing the side street. &ldquo;Come in and let us have your story. It
+      should be a good one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Inside the newspaper office another young man sat with his head lying on a
+      flat-top desk. He was clad in a strikingly flashy plaid coat, had a little
+      wizened, good-natured face and seemed to have been drinking. The young man
+      with the beard explained Sam&rsquo;s identity, taking the sleeping man by the
+      shoulder and shaking him vigorously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wake up, Skipper! There&rsquo;s a good story here!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;The union has
+      thrown out the mail-order strike leader!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Skipper got to his feet and began shaking his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, of course, Old Top, they would throw you out. You&rsquo;ve got some
+      brains. No man with brains can lead a strike. It&rsquo;s against the laws of
+      Nature. Something was bound to hit you. Did Roughneck come out from
+      Pittsburgh?&rdquo; he asked, turning to the young man of the brown beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then reaching above his head and taking a cap that matched his plaid coat
+      from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. &ldquo;Come on, Old Top. I&rsquo;ve got to
+      get a drink.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men went through a side door and down a dark alley, going in at
+      the back door of a saloon. Mud lay deep in the alley and The Skipper
+      sloshed through it, splattering Sam&rsquo;s clothes and face. In the saloon at a
+      table facing Sam, with a bottle of French wine between them, he began
+      explaining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve a note coming due at the bank in the morning and no money to pay
+      it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;When I have a note coming due I always have no money and I
+      always get drunk. Then next morning I pay the note. I don&rsquo;t know how I do
+      it, but I always come out all right. It&rsquo;s a system&mdash;Now about this
+      strike.&rdquo; He plunged into a discussion of the strike while men came in and
+      out, laughing and drinking. At ten o&rsquo;clock the proprietor locked the front
+      door, drew the curtain, and coming to the back of the room sat down at the
+      table with Sam and The Skipper, bringing another bottle of the French wine
+      from which the two men continued drinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That man from Pittsburgh busted up your place, eh?&rdquo; he said, turning to
+      Sam. &ldquo;A man came in here to-night and told me. He sent for the typewriter
+      people and made them take away the machines.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When they were ready to leave, Sam took money from his pocket and offered
+      to pay for the bottle of French wine ordered by The Skipper, who arose and
+      stood unsteadily on his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean to insult me?&rdquo; he demanded indignantly, throwing a
+      twenty-dollar bill on the table. The proprietor gave him back only
+      fourteen dollars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might as well wipe off the slate while you&rsquo;re flush,&rdquo; he observed,
+      winking at Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Skipper sat down again, taking a pencil and pad of paper from his
+      pocket, and throwing them on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want an editorial on the strike for the Old Rag,&rdquo; he said to Sam. &ldquo;Do
+      one for me. Do something strong. Get a punch into it. I want to talk to my
+      friend here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Putting the pad of paper on the table Sam began writing his newspaper
+      editorial. His head seemed wonderfully clear, his command of words
+      unusually good. He called the attention of the public to the situation,
+      the struggles of the striking girls and the intelligent fight they had
+      been making to win a just cause, following this with paragraphs pointing
+      out how the effectiveness of the work done had been annulled by the
+      position taken by the labour and socialist leaders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These fellows at bottom care nothing for results,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;They are
+      not thinking of the unemployed women with families to support, they are
+      thinking only of themselves and their puny leadership which they fear is
+      threatened. Now we shall have the usual exhibition of all the old things,
+      struggle, and hatred and defeat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had finished The Skipper and Sam went back through the alley to
+      the newspaper office. The Skipper sloshed again through the mud and
+      carried in his hand a bottle of red gin. At his desk he took the editorial
+      from Sam&rsquo;s hands and read it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perfect! Perfect to the thousandth part of an inch, Old Top,&rdquo; he said,
+      pounding Sam on the shoulder. &ldquo;Just what the Old Rag wanted to say about
+      the strike.&rdquo; Then climbing upon the desk and putting the plaid coat under
+      his head he went peacefully to sleep, and Sam, sitting beside the desk in
+      a shaky office chair, slept also. At daybreak a black man with a broom in
+      his hand woke them, and going into a long low room filled with presses The
+      Skipper put his head under a water tap and came back waving a soiled towel
+      and with water dripping from his hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now for the day and the labours thereof,&rdquo; he said, grinning at Sam and
+      taking a long drink out of the gin bottle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After breakfast he and Sam took up their stand in front of the barber shop
+      opposite the stairway leading to the shirtwaist factory. Sam&rsquo;s girl with
+      the pamphlets was gone as was also the soft-eyed Jewish girl, and in their
+      places Frank and the Pittsburgh leader named Harrigan walked up and down.
+      Again carriages and automobiles stood by the curb, and again a
+      well-dressed woman got out of a machine and went toward three striking
+      girls approaching along the sidewalk. The woman was met by Harrigan,
+      shaking his fist and shouting, and getting back into the machine she drove
+      off. From the stairway the flashily-dressed Hebrew looked at the crowd and
+      laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the new strike leader&mdash;the mail-order strike leader?&rdquo; he
+      called to Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the words, a working man with a dinner pail on his arm ran out of the
+      crowd and knocked the Jew back into the stairway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Punch him! Punch the dirty scab leader!&rdquo; yelled Frank, dancing up and
+      down on the sidewalk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two policemen running forward began leading the workingman up the street,
+      his dinner pail still clutched in one hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know something,&rdquo; The Skipper shouted, pounding Sam on the shoulder. &ldquo;I
+      know who will sign that note with me. The woman Harrigan drove back into
+      her machine is the richest woman in town. I will show her your editorial.
+      She will think I wrote it and it will get her. You&rsquo;ll see.&rdquo; He ran off up
+      the street, shouting back over his shoulder, &ldquo;Come over to the dump, I
+      want to see you again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam returned to the newspaper office and sat down waiting for The Skipper
+      who, after a time, came in, took off his coat and began writing furiously.
+      From time to time he took long drinks out of the bottle of red gin, and
+      after silently offering it to Sam, continued reeling off sheet after sheet
+      of loosely-written matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got her to sign the note,&rdquo; he called over his shoulder to Sam. &ldquo;She was
+      furious at Harrigan and when I told her we were going to attack him and
+      defend you she fell for it quick. I won out by following my system. I
+      always get drunk and it always wins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At ten o&rsquo;clock the newspaper office was in a ferment. The little man with
+      the brown pointed beard, and another, kept running to The Skipper asking
+      advice, laying typewritten sheets before him, talking as he wrote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me a lead. I want one more front page lead,&rdquo; The Skipper kept
+      bawling at them, working like mad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At ten thirty the door opened and Harrigan, accompanied by Frank, came in.
+      Seeing Sam they stopped, looking at him uncertainly, and at the man at
+      work at the desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, speak up. This is no ladies&rsquo; reception room. What do you fellows
+      want?&rdquo; snapped The Skipper, glaring at them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank, coming forward, laid a typewritten sheet on the desk, which the
+      newspaper man read hurriedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you use it?&rdquo; asked Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Skipper laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wouldn&rsquo;t change a word of it,&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;Sure I&rsquo;ll use it. It&rsquo;s what I
+      wanted to make my point. You fellows watch me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank and Harrigan went out and The Skipper, rushing to the door, began
+      yelling into the room beyond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hey, you Shorty and Tom, I&rsquo;ve got that last lead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Coming back to his desk he began writing again, grinning as he worked. To
+      Sam he handed the typewritten sheet prepared by Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dastardly attempt to win the cause of the working girls by dirty scab
+      leaders and butter-fingered capitalist class,&rdquo; it began, and after this
+      followed a wild jumble of words, words without meaning, sentences without
+      point in which Sam was called a mealy-mouthed mail-order musser and The
+      Skipper was mentioned incidentally as a pusillanimous ink slinger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll run the stuff and comment on it,&rdquo; declared The Skipper, handing Sam
+      what he had written. It was an editorial inviting the public to read the
+      article prepared for publication by the strike leaders and sympathising
+      with the striking girls that their cause had to be lost because of the
+      incompetence and lack of intelligence of their leaders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hurrah for Roughhouse, the brave man who leads working girls to defeat in
+      order that he may retain leadership and drive intelligent effort out of
+      the cause of labour,&rdquo; wrote The Skipper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at the sheets and out of the window where a snow storm raged.
+      It seemed to him that a crime was being done and he was sick and disgusted
+      at his own inability to stop it. The Skipper lighted a short black pipe
+      and took his cap from a nail on the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m the smoothest little newspaper thing in town and some financier as
+      well,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go have a drink.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After the drink Sam walked through the town toward the country. At the
+      edge of town where the houses became scattered and the road started to
+      drop away into a deep valley some one helloed behind him. Turning, he saw
+      the soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are you going?&rdquo; he asked, stopping to lean against a board fence,
+      the snow falling upon his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going with you,&rdquo; said the girl. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re the best and the strongest
+      man I&rsquo;ve ever seen and I&rsquo;m not going to let you get away. If you&rsquo;ve got a
+      wife it don&rsquo;t matter. She isn&rsquo;t what she should be or you wouldn&rsquo;t be
+      walking about the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you&rsquo;re crazy, but
+      I know better. I am going with you and I&rsquo;m going to help you find what you
+      want.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam wondered. She took a roll of bills from a pocket in her dress and gave
+      it to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood looking at each other. She put out a hand and laid it on his
+      arm. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with eager light looked into his. Her
+      round breasts rose and fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anywhere you say. I&rsquo;ll be your servant if you ask it of me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A wave of hot desire ran through Sam followed by a quick reaction. He
+      thought of his months of weary seeking and his universal failure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going back to town if I have to drive you there with stones,&rdquo; he
+      told her, and turning ran down the valley leaving her standing by the
+      board fence, her head buried in her arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in
+      Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying or
+      loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed to be
+      a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women who met at
+      the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away together. Sam
+      found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings. In the year since he
+      had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had grown more and more
+      reflective. Little things&mdash;a smile on the lips of an ill-clad old man
+      mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the flutter of a child&rsquo;s
+      hand from the doorway of a farmhouse&mdash;had furnished him food for
+      hours of thought. Now he watched with interest the little incidents; the
+      nods, the hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances around of the men and
+      women who met for a moment at the corner. On the sidewalk near his doorway
+      several middle-aged men, evidently from a large hotel around the corner,
+      were eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry, furtive eyes the women in the crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. &ldquo;Waiting for some
+      one?&rdquo; she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with the harried,
+      uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the middle-aged men
+      upon the sidewalk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing here with your husband at work?&rdquo; he ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked startled and then laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?&rdquo;
+       she demanded, adding, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know who you are, but whoever you are I
+      want to tell you that I&rsquo;ve quit my husband.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; asked Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I guess you&rsquo;re bluffing,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe you know Alf at all.
+      And I&rsquo;m glad you don&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;ve quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just the
+      same, if he saw me out here hustling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a
+      lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and
+      beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered, &ldquo;Hello,
+      Sport!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in the
+      eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of the
+      lives of great numbers of people in the cities&mdash;of the men and women
+      on the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe
+      marriage had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together in
+      the theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of all
+      modern city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching hunger
+      stood in the way of men&rsquo;s getting hold of life and living it earnestly and
+      purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all men and women
+      wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in Caxton he was more than
+      once startled by the flashes of brutality and coarseness in the speech and
+      actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now as he walked in the streets of
+      the city he thought that he had got past being startled. &ldquo;It is a quality
+      of our lives,&rdquo; he decided. &ldquo;American men and women have not learned to be
+      clean and noble and natural, like their forests and their wide, clean
+      plains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other
+      cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his
+      lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are no finer nor cleaner than these,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and we sprang from the
+      big clean new land through which I have been walking all these months.
+      Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly expressed hunger
+      in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will it never shrive itself
+      and understand itself, and turn fiercely and energetically toward the
+      building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It won&rsquo;t unless you help,&rdquo; came the answer from some hidden part of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and he
+      wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of vice,
+      and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in futile
+      attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward human
+      betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or stopping the
+      playing of baseball on Sunday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously in
+      league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as
+      something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague
+      charm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For me,&rdquo; he reflected, &ldquo;there have been no François Villons or Sapphos in
+      the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only
+      heart-breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces
+      and torn, greasy finery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how he,
+      as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly&rsquo;s
+      suggestion and had been helped by him&mdash;helped and frightened and made
+      to see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of a
+      second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed
+      across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of &ldquo;Nana&rsquo;s Brother,&rdquo; saying
+      with a smirk, &ldquo;That&rsquo;s some sporty stuff.&rdquo; And he wondered what he should
+      have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the
+      bookseller&rsquo;s comment was intended to arouse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in which
+      he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to sleep
+      sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman&rsquo;s saloon in
+      Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting that
+      it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth,&rdquo; he thought, coming to a
+      street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a dingy
+      poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. &ldquo;It gets into all
+      modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears lewd
+      stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men from the
+      cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the stove in
+      village stores.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things
+      were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and
+      daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of
+      Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could
+      but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the
+      glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in that
+      city and in every city he had known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far gone
+      in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam&rsquo;s mind leaped back to those
+      first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man he had
+      left behind him in Caxton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than
+      that painter&rsquo;s son of Caxton,&rdquo; he reminded himself, &ldquo;and yet he embraced
+      vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading talk
+      and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part with
+      able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was too rare a
+      thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the
+      lips-that-touch-liquor-shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was
+      reserved for the lips that did not invite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business men
+      of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of himself,
+      quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and to shout the
+      innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in Chicago barrooms.
+      Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one to keep himself to
+      himself. But on these carouses he let himself go, and got a reputation for
+      daring audacity by slapping men on the back and singing songs with them. A
+      glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for a time he had really believed
+      there was such a thing as high flying vice that glistens in the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city&rsquo;s streets,
+      he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted
+      questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained
+      unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they
+      walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at the
+      windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams, and
+      cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the place;
+      men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their faces;
+      sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were locked out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from farms
+      and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men believers in the
+      golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and women of the town
+      laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked in that way. He
+      also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible mistress that
+      lurked at the bottom of men&rsquo;s tales of the submerged world. He wanted his
+      golden girl. He was like the naïve German lad in the South Water Street
+      warehouses who had once said to him&mdash;he was a frugal soul&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      would like to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and modest and who
+      will be my mistress and not charge anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He
+      had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and
+      now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not be
+      made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks of
+      vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no
+      housecleaning days in the tenderloin?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this
+      matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the
+      scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary decent
+      social life could not go on without it. Often during the past year Sam had
+      thought of the man&rsquo;s talk and his brain had reeled before the thought. In
+      towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little girls come
+      laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered which of them
+      would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in his hour of
+      depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his dinner table
+      might be made to walk with him and to share with him his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam continued
+      his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and soothed his
+      mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought with gratitude
+      that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of faces rolling up to
+      him under the lights filled him with peace. &ldquo;There is so much of life,&rdquo; he
+      thought, &ldquo;it must come to some end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the
+      faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose, the
+      faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on which
+      the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers ached to get
+      a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas in enduring
+      pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able to say, &ldquo;Here
+      are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves and for your
+      children.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little cigar
+      counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly at a woman
+      clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her machine to
+      wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that
+      had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one
+      woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little
+      Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness&mdash;her
+      quick, deft fingers and her muscular little arms. &ldquo;Another such as she,&rdquo;
+       he muttered, &ldquo;has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman;
+      a hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the
+      warm furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy&mdash;a shot,
+      and red blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little
+      claws in the air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing
+      her white limbs, her cheeks, her hair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like
+      himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit of
+      the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could
+      achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the
+      power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces in
+      the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers the
+      story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer&rsquo;s talk, and in Chicago and
+      New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of the
+      artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the long
+      street he thought that he did understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an
+      affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her
+      face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message of
+      the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong,
+      bullet-like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold. He
+      remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love passage
+      with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How eagerly both
+      man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place. How her strong
+      hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor by the office
+      building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so free from the
+      marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of a cattle raiser
+      had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the beauty of that face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman,
+      standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called
+      softly, and turning he went to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not a customer,&rdquo; he said, looking at her thin face and bony hands,
+      &ldquo;but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am getting
+      hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to me so that
+      I won&rsquo;t get to thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re a queer bird,&rdquo; said the woman, taking his arm. &ldquo;What have you done
+      that you don&rsquo;t want to think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a place over there,&rdquo; she said, pointing to the lighted front of a
+      cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam kept on walking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you do not mind,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I will pick the place. I want to buy a
+      good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good cook
+      in the kitchen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he
+      waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited he
+      went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When she
+      returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam
+      thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work
+      on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still
+      waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought maybe it was a stall,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with clean
+      washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private dining-rooms.
+      Sam had been there several times during the month, and the food had been
+      well cooked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself, and
+      she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not studying
+      her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his loneliness, and
+      because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out from the darkness
+      by the church door, had made an appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not
+      defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy&rsquo;s.
+      Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had
+      the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother&rsquo;s hands. Now that she sat
+      before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman
+      of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to take me anywhere after this&mdash;after we leave here?&rdquo;
+       she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to take you to the door of your room, that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;it&rsquo;s a long time since I&rsquo;ve had an evening like
+      this. It makes me feel clean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home town
+      in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came into his
+      mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she in turn told
+      of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about hearing which
+      made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be repeated to her
+      and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire, letting her talk. Her
+      father had been a captain of a small steamboat plying up and down Long
+      Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd woman and a good
+      housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village and had a garden
+      back of their house. The captain had not married until he was forty-five
+      and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother dying a year later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy
+      and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in the
+      garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with
+      thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had
+      married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the
+      house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her
+      life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills and
+      the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature,
+      undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of her
+      husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by
+      various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a
+      time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that
+      her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the
+      town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There wasn&rsquo;t any use wasting words when I found he didn&rsquo;t care for me or
+      for the baby and wouldn&rsquo;t support us, so I left him,&rdquo; she said in a level,
+      businesslike way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and had
+      taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her
+      savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to
+      work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with her
+      hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with a
+      small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine
+      man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a
+      gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing to
+      be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was
+      seven dollars a week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I began going on the street. I knew no one and there
+      was nothing else to do. I couldn&rsquo;t do that in the town where the boy
+      lived, so I came away. I&rsquo;ve gone from city to city, working mostly for
+      patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in the
+      streets. I&rsquo;m not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many of
+      them care about me. I don&rsquo;t like to have them touch me with their hands. I
+      can&rsquo;t drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to be left
+      alone. Perhaps I shouldn&rsquo;t have married. Not that I minded my husband. We
+      got along very well until I had to stop giving him money. When I found
+      where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to have at least a
+      thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened to me. When I found
+      there wasn&rsquo;t anything to do but just go on the streets, I went. I tried
+      doing other work, but hadn&rsquo;t the strength, and when it came to the test I
+      cared more about the boy than I did about myself&mdash;any woman would. I
+      thought he was of more importance than what I wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It hasn&rsquo;t been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with me
+      I walk along the street praying that I won&rsquo;t shudder and draw away when he
+      touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away and I won&rsquo;t
+      get any money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then they talk and lie about themselves. I&rsquo;ve had them try to work
+      off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make love
+      to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That&rsquo;s the hard
+      part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies over and
+      over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to these
+      others lying to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and
+      sat looking into the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mother,&rdquo; she began again, &ldquo;didn&rsquo;t always wear a clean dress. She
+      couldn&rsquo;t. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor or
+      out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was
+      dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be
+      that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I&rsquo;m losing it all. All
+      evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear isn&rsquo;t
+      clean. Most of the time I don&rsquo;t care. Being clean doesn&rsquo;t go with what I
+      am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men will stop
+      when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done well I don&rsquo;t go
+      on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean up my room and bathe
+      myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the basement at night. I
+      don&rsquo;t seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am on the streets.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German
+      waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He stopped
+      by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From another
+      room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing voices.
+      The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam felt that
+      he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to him he
+      should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly. She had a
+      quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t mind about you,&rdquo; she said, looking at him frankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s been a good evening,&rdquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;we&rsquo;ll go through with it as it stands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks for that,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and there is something else I want to tell
+      you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don&rsquo;t want to
+      go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on
+      gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing
+      as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved
+      her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish. Sam had a
+      feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in
+      the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted
+      street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton. Like Mike, he
+      lifted up his voice in the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth
+      hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,
+      and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt
+      and destroy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out of
+      his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia,
+      looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly
+      lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his bill
+      at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely abandoned
+      the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about the country
+      and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in villages, and
+      had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his income.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the
+      wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood. The
+      spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain spring
+      mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in his
+      experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through
+      the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when the call
+      of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind, filling him
+      with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain, yet
+      at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was, after all, a man
+      of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water Street and LaSalle
+      Street had all left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket
+      into a corner of the room in the West Virginia hotel, he returned to the
+      haunts of his kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and into
+      the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named Jackson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he
+      had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again
+      the quiet elegance of the surroundings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, Moneymaker,&rdquo; said Jackson, heartily. &ldquo;Heard you had gone to a
+      nunnery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson&rsquo;s eyes open
+      with astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man&rsquo;s spending month after
+      month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then
+      suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this,&rdquo; he
+      observed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How little you know me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I would live my life in the open but
+      that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New York
+      run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will you go
+      back to Morrison and Prince and money making?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before him.
+      How satisfied and happy he looked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are a rotten crew,&rdquo; Jackson assured him, &ldquo;and I am taking a night
+      train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old man
+      who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to sail from Seattle,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and go everywhere and hunt
+      everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind of
+      thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there
+      until I die.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will go with you,&rdquo; said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at Detroit
+      and continued westward with his new acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous,
+      big-hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early
+      investment in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to his
+      lusty, primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion
+      hunts, elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of
+      Africa Sam took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the
+      beach smoking black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over and
+      that Sam was a fool to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life of
+      a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He went
+      on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern lakes,
+      canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat about clubs
+      and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and women of that
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on the
+      Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw her.
+      For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure as she
+      walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had come to
+      mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come face to face
+      with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train to the city
+      feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed after the
+      years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily and
+      almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from his
+      hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting with
+      Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant, got
+      into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode about town
+      laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to passers-by in
+      the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place at the edge of town,
+      where the party spent hours around a long table, drinking, and singing
+      songs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the girls sat on Sam&rsquo;s lap and put an arm about his neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me some money, rich man,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at her closely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that she
+      had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes,&rdquo; she said frankly,
+      &ldquo;but if Tim saw me here he would kill me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a
+      taxicab drove back to his hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in a
+      kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which he did
+      not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited, planned a
+      return to business which he did not execute, and month after month
+      continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon and begin
+      drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry and talkative,
+      calling men by their first names, slapping chance acquaintances on the
+      back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young men intent upon gain.
+      In the early summer he got in with a party of young men from New York and
+      with them spent months in sheer idle waste of time. Together they drove
+      high-powered automobiles on long trips, drank, quarrelled, and went on
+      board a yacht to carouse, alone or with women. At times Sam would leave
+      his companions and spend days riding through the country on fast trains,
+      sitting for hours in silence looking out of the window at the passing
+      country and wondering at his endurance of the life he led. For some months
+      he carried with him a young man whom he called a secretary and paid a
+      large salary for his ability to tell stories and sing clever songs, only
+      to discharge him suddenly for telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of
+      another tale told by the stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed&rsquo;s
+      hotel in the Illinois town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings,
+      Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless
+      way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right way
+      of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He lost his
+      native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for hours by
+      little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and talking
+      nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew
+      habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and
+      more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about
+      hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to
+      sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor&rsquo;s head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train
+      intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had
+      heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he
+      thought he would do something for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them my
+      money,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by setting
+      them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see an
+      attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days stayed
+      about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had picked
+      up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and
+      gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men
+      and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of
+      enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that
+      shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he
+      came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the
+      river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the
+      river,&rdquo; he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. &ldquo;Take
+      us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it
+      costs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he went
+      among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to
+      continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him on
+      the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sing louder,&rdquo; he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his
+      companions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to
+      perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the deck
+      before the shouting crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now dance!&rdquo; he growled, &ldquo;or I will throw you into the river.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked at
+      him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along the deck
+      or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take effect, a
+      queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction came to him
+      and he raised his hand for silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to see a woman who is a mother,&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;I want to see a
+      woman who has borne children.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the group
+      gathered about the dancer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have borne children&mdash;three of them,&rdquo; she said, laughing up into
+      his face. &ldquo;I can bear more of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair on
+      the deck. The crowd laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Belle is after his roll,&rdquo; whispered a short, fat man to his companion, a
+      tall woman with blue eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing songs,
+      went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman beside Sam
+      pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My children are there. They are getting supper now,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting
+      along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang a
+      song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam&rsquo;s companion kept time
+      with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain stood
+      looking up the river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Turn back,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am tired of this crew.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside Sam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will go to my house,&rdquo; she said quietly, &ldquo;just you and me. I will show
+      you the kids.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the
+      distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had
+      grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small
+      groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell Sam
+      her story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I drove him crazy,&rdquo; she said, laughing quietly. &ldquo;He wanted me to stay at
+      home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me down
+      town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn&rsquo;t come he would go
+      away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn&rsquo;t a man. He would
+      do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and left the kids on
+      my hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in an
+      open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place,
+      eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but
+      grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will go to my house. I want to have you alone,&rdquo; said the woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They drove through street after street of workingmen&rsquo;s houses, where
+      children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their
+      bare legs flashing in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after them,
+      holding to the back of the carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up
+      and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of
+      the running boys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Run, you little devils,&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under the
+      lights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me a silver dollar,&rdquo; she said, turning to Sam, and when he had given
+      it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp. The two
+      boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps, striking
+      Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black crawling thing,
+      alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she crept forward and
+      dropped it down the neck of the driver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam&rsquo;s head
+      was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran back over
+      the years he had passed since breaking his word to Sue, and a scorn of all
+      effort burned in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;He comes to a
+      fine end in life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the
+      air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night
+      there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the
+      carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood climbed
+      through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half hope awoke
+      in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing, intoxicated
+      woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot through him. He
+      began thinking of what she had said before the laughing crowd on the
+      steamer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have borne three children and can bear more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain,
+      and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him. He
+      thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of life
+      unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command and
+      direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Else why am I here?&rdquo; he muttered, looking away from the vacant, laughing
+      face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver on the
+      seat in front. &ldquo;Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why went I about
+      seeking Truth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles
+      and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her
+      black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling
+      beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have
+      been,&rdquo; he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he
+      thought, was being tossed about by life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped. Through
+      the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before a bar
+      drinking foaming glasses of beer, the hanging lamps above their heads
+      throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell came
+      out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and
+      shouted. &ldquo;O Will, come out here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A man clad in a long white apron and with his shirt sleeves rolled to his
+      elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had
+      started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you run it?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The kids can take care of themselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got out
+      of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk skirting
+      a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a tangled mass of
+      bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and in the distance the
+      grey body of the river showed faint and far away. The undergrowth was so
+      thick that, looking down, one saw only the tops of the growth, with here
+      and there a grey outcrop of rocks that glistened in the moonlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the houses
+      facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily on Sam&rsquo;s
+      arm, her feet groping for the steps. They passed through a door and into a
+      long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the room went up
+      to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the end one looked
+      into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor and about a table,
+      under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three children. Sam looked at them
+      closely. His head reeled and he clutched at the knob of the door. A boy of
+      perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his face and on the backs of his hands
+      and with reddish-brown hair and brown eyes, was reading aloud. Beside him
+      a younger boy with black hair and black eyes, and with his knees doubled
+      up on the chair in front of him so that his chin rested on them, sat
+      listening. A tiny girl, pale and with yellow hair and dark circles under
+      her eyes, slept in another chair, her head hanging uncomfortably to one
+      side. She was, one would have said, seven, the black-haired boy ten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman; the
+      sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired boy
+      straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, Mother,&rdquo; he said heartily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the
+      dining-room and pulled aside the curtains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come here, Joe,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside,
+      supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he passed she
+      struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him reeling
+      into the dining-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you, Tom,&rdquo; she called to the black-haired boy. &ldquo;I told you kids to
+      wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten
+      and nothing done and you two reading books again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam
+      walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she
+      winced and twisted in his grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You come with me,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned heavily
+      on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the top of the stairway he stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We go in here,&rdquo; she said, pointing to a door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took her into the room. &ldquo;You get to sleep,&rdquo; he said, and going out
+      closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off
+      the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by the
+      table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back at
+      him self-consciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which of you two puts Mary to bed?&rdquo; he asked, and then, without waiting
+      for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. &ldquo;Let Tom do it,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;I will help you here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going
+      busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him
+      dry wiping towels. Sam&rsquo;s coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within Sam&rsquo;s
+      breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though the lash
+      of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old memories
+      began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood, his mother
+      at work among other people&rsquo;s soiled clothes, his father Windy coming home
+      drunk, and the chill in his mother&rsquo;s heart and in his own. There was
+      something men and women owed to childhood, not because it was childhood
+      but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any question of
+      fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house
+      there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam&rsquo;s spirit. The boy Joe went
+      quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves. Somewhere
+      on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The backs of the
+      hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and competent the
+      hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled, unshaken by life.
+      Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He had always wanted
+      quickness and firmness within his own body, the health of the body that is
+      a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an American and down deep
+      within himself was the moral fervor that is American and that had become
+      so strangely perverted in himself and others. As so often happened with
+      him, when he was deeply stirred, an army of vagrant thoughts ran through
+      his head. The thoughts had taken the place of the perpetual scheming and
+      planning of his days as a man of affairs, but as yet all his thinking had
+      brought him to nothing and had only left him more shaken and uncertain
+      then ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to
+      escape the shy silent presence of the boy. &ldquo;Has life quite gone from me?
+      Am I but a dead thing walking about?&rdquo; he asked himself. The presence of
+      the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown
+      tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad.
+      Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two boys
+      said good night to the strange man in their mother&rsquo;s house. Joe, the
+      bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook it
+      solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be around here to-morrow I think,&rdquo; Sam said huskily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boys were gone, into the silence of the house, and Sam walked up and
+      down in the little room. He was restless as though about to start on a new
+      journey and half unconsciously began running his hands over his body
+      wishing it strong and hard as when he tramped the road. As on the day when
+      he had walked out of the Chicago Club bound on his hunt for Truth, he let
+      his mind go so that it played freely over his past life, reviewing and
+      analysing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For hours he sat on the porch or walked up and down in the room where the
+      lamp still burned brightly. Again the smoke from his pipe tasted good on
+      his tongue and all the night air had a sweetness that brought back to him
+      the walk beside the bridle path in Jackson Park when Sue had given him
+      herself, and with herself a new impulse in life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was two o&rsquo;clock when he lay down upon a couch in the living-room and
+      blew out the light. He did not undress, but threw his shoes on the floor
+      and lay looking at a wide path of moonlight that came through the open
+      door. In the darkness it seemed that his mind worked more rapidly and that
+      the events and motives of his restless years went streaming past like
+      living things upon the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy with
+      sleep, ran through the upper part of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother! O Mother!&rdquo; called the sleepy voice, and Sam thought he could hear
+      the little body moving restlessly in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence followed. He sat upon the edge of the couch, waiting. It seemed to
+      him that he was coming to something; that his brain that had for hours
+      been working more and more rapidly was about to produce the thing for
+      which he waited. He felt as he had felt that night as he waited in the
+      corridor of the hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the morning the three children came down the stairs and finished
+      dressing in the long room, the little girl coming last, carrying her shoes
+      and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A cool
+      morning wind blew up from the river and through the open screened doors as
+      he and Joe cooked breakfast, and later as the four of them sat at the
+      table Sam tried to talk but did not make much progress. His tongue was
+      heavy and the children seemed looking at him with strange questioning
+      eyes. &ldquo;Why are you here?&rdquo; their eyes asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a week Sam stayed in the city, coming daily to the house. With the
+      children he talked a little, and in the evening, when the mother had gone
+      away, the little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the porch
+      outside and while the boys sat reading under the lamp inside she went to
+      sleep in his arms. Her body was warm and the breath came softly and
+      sweetly from between her lips. Sam looked down the bluffside and saw the
+      country and the river far below, sweet in the moonlight. Tears came into
+      his eyes. Was a new sweet purpose growing within him or were the tears but
+      evidence of self pity? He wondered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One night the black-haired woman again came home far gone in drink, and
+      again Sam led her up the stairs to see her fall muttering and babbling
+      upon the bed. Her companion, a little flashily dressed man with a beard,
+      had run off at the sight of Sam standing in the living-room under the
+      lamp. The two boys, to whom he had been reading, said nothing, looking
+      self-consciously at the book upon the table and occasionally out of the
+      corner of their eyes at their new friend. In a few minutes they too went
+      up the stairs, and as on that first night, they put out their hands
+      awkwardly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the night Sam again sat in the darkness outside or lay awake on
+      the couch. &ldquo;I will make a new try, adopt a new purpose in life now,&rdquo; he
+      said to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the children had gone to school the next morning, Sam took a car and
+      went into the city, going first to a bank to have a large draft cashed.
+      Then he spent many busy hours going from store to store and buying
+      clothes, caps, soft underwear, suit cases, dresses, night clothes, and
+      books. Last of all he bought a large dressed doll. All these things he had
+      sent to his room at the hotel, leaving a man there to pack the trunks and
+      suit cases, and get them to the station. A large, motherly-looking woman,
+      an employé of the hotel, who passed through the hall, offered to help with
+      the packing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After another visit or two Sam got back upon the car and went again to the
+      house. In his pockets he had several thousands of dollars in large bills.
+      He had remembered the power of cash in deals he had made in the past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will see what it will do here,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the house Sam found the black-haired woman lying on a couch in the
+      living-room. As he came in at the door she arose unsteadily and looked at
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a bottle in the cupboard in the kitchen,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Get me a
+      drink. Why do you hang about here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with
+      her by putting the bottle to his lips and throwing back his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was your husband like?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who? Jack?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Oh, he was all right. He was stuck on me. He stood
+      for anything until I brought men home here. Then he got crazy and went
+      away.&rdquo; She looked at Sam and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t care much for him,&rdquo; she added. &ldquo;He couldn&rsquo;t make money enough
+      for a live woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam began talking of the saloon she intended buying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The children will be a bother, eh?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have an offer for the house,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I wish I didn&rsquo;t have the kids.
+      They are a nuisance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been figuring that out,&rdquo; Sam told her. &ldquo;I know a woman in the East
+      who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I should like
+      to do something to help you. I might take them to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away,&rdquo; she laughed, and took
+      another drink from the bottle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown attorney.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get a neighbour in here to witness this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The woman will want
+      things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and
+      puts it on her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him suspiciously. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the graft? Who gets stuck for the
+      fares down east?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a
+      tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sign here,&rdquo; he said, putting the paper before her. &ldquo;Here is your
+      neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at
+      Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle
+      lay down again on the couch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed,&rdquo; she
+      declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but at the
+      moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take an
+      advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in life,
+      for purpose to come into his own life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at the
+      brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an
+      automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children
+      accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found
+      the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit
+      cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an
+      envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked
+      up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride of
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At two o&rsquo;clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of the
+      boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York flyer&mdash;bound
+      for Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money, that
+      he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does not mean
+      much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy Americans than is
+      commonly believed. Something has happened to him that has happened to the
+      others also, to how many of the others? Men of courage, with strong bodies
+      and quick brains, men who have come of a strong race, have taken up what
+      they had thought to be the banner of life and carried it forward. Growing
+      weary they have stopped in a road that climbs a long hill and have leaned
+      the banner against a tree. Tight brains have loosened a little. Strong
+      convictions have become weak. Old gods are dying.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;It is only when you are torn from your mooring and
+    drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come
+    near to you.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with
+      determination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is inscribed on it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have
+      believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves
+      Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been unknown
+      among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life and
+      courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads had
+      to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What in Europe
+      has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the generations we
+      must build now, in a lifetime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In our father&rsquo;s day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky,
+      and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in our fathers and
+      mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land. When the land was
+      conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in our American souls
+      the wolves still howl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three
+      children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws of
+      failure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still there.
+      It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New England
+      roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it looked down at
+      him from the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept. Perhaps
+      his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it began then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was a
+      house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam&rsquo;s breast
+      there was a feeling of something alive, growing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in
+      Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by
+      raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night,
+      coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children&mdash;a
+      little inclined toward tears and homesickness&mdash;she was flustered and
+      nervous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate to
+      the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe and
+      Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come out at the
+      front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little frightened. Her
+      hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam thought her figure
+      almost boyish in its slenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask
+      many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question she
+      did ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?&rdquo; she
+      asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the
+      children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a help.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep,&rdquo; he said,
+      as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with him
+      three strange children were an everyday affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the
+      house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought
+      together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other
+      and little Mary put her arms about Sam&rsquo;s neck and hid her face on his
+      shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue&rsquo;s
+      arms. &ldquo;She will be your mother now,&rdquo; he said defiantly, not looking at
+      Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and
+      very nobly by Sue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted on
+      that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come into
+      her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly romantic
+      act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening, both Sam and
+      the children had been installed in the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions
+      regarding food for the children. &ldquo;They will want bread and milk, and beds
+      must be found for them,&rdquo; she said, and then, although her mind was still
+      filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam&rsquo;s children by some
+      other woman, she took her plunge. &ldquo;This is Mr. McPherson, my husband, and
+      these are our three children,&rdquo; she announced to the puzzled and smiling
+      servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden. In
+      the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A
+      little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more.
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t bring lamps, a candle will do,&rdquo; Sue said, and she went to stand
+      near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point of
+      breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive sense
+      of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children feel at
+      home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys. &ldquo;There is a
+      barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you everything,&rdquo;
+       she said, smiling at them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue&rsquo;s house and a road
+      that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and the
+      Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In the feeble
+      light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick branches
+      overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into the
+      darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before the
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling for
+      possession of his person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring always
+      to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way, trampled
+      people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped forward, the man
+      of achievement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then there was another personality, a quite different being
+      altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a
+      timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or
+      walked before men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive thing
+      within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him out of his
+      place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many times it had
+      tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against
+      it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into
+      darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept whispering to himself. Perhaps now the test of his life had come.
+      There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. A basis for love
+      and understanding might be found with her. Later the impulse could be
+      carried on and into the lives of the children he had found and brought to
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life, kneeling
+      before the intricate wonder of life, came to him, but he was again afraid.
+      When he saw Sue&rsquo;s figure, dressed in white, a dim, pale, flashing thing,
+      coming down steps toward him, he wanted to run away, to hide himself in
+      the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because
+      she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human
+      perplexities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive within
+      him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her. &ldquo;Nothing but
+      boldness will answer now,&rdquo; he kept saying to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to
+      tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he came
+      to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path and
+      stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically. &ldquo;I
+      have taken them and you, of course,&rdquo; she said, after he had stepped to her
+      and had put his arm about her waist. &ldquo;My life alone hasn&rsquo;t turned out to
+      be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them and you, in
+      the house there. The two years you have been gone have seemed like an age.
+      What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought they must be your own
+      children by some other woman, some woman you had found to take my place.
+      It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two must be nearly fourteen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue&rsquo;s command,
+      found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped and
+      excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue&rsquo;s figure going
+      through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room. Presently
+      she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A place was being
+      prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which he was to live
+      what was left of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure of
+      the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped down
+      over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more intense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house darkly
+      seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman, Sue,
+      ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives together.
+      Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three children who must
+      begin life as he had once done, who must listen to his voice, the voice of
+      Sue and all the other voices they would hear speaking words in the world.
+      They would grow up and thrust out into a world of people as he had done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To what end?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an end. Sam believed that stoutly. &ldquo;To shift the load to the
+      shoulders of children is cowardice,&rdquo; he whispered to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An almost overpowering desire to turn and run away from the house, from
+      Sue who had so generously received him and from the three new lives into
+      which he had thrust himself and in which in the future he would have to be
+      concerned, took hold of him. His body shook with the strength of it, but
+      he stood still under the trees. &ldquo;I cannot run away from life. I must face
+      it. I must begin to try to understand these other lives, to love,&rdquo; he told
+      himself. The buried inner thing in him thrust itself up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How still the night had become. In the tree beneath which he stood a bird
+      moved on some slender branch and there was a faint rustling of leaves. The
+      darkness before and behind was a wall through which he must in some way
+      manage to thrust himself into the light. With his hand before him, as
+      though trying to push aside some dark blinding mass, he moved out of the
+      grove and thus moving stumbled up the steps and into the house.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE END
+    </h3>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg&rsquo;s Windy McPherson&rsquo;s Son, by Sherwood Anderson
+
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