aning 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 wh