nsteady 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