________________________________________________
_ Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to him.
For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun come up
hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the streets in
the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from the north came
into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on the deserted
little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry
with his work that they might get back into the warm stale air of the
smoking car.
In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become a
man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some subtle
way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that to make money
and to have money would in some way make up for the old half-forgotten
humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and would set it on a
more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had provided, grew and
influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly he kept at his efforts to
get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of dollars. Jane McPherson had
herself a passion for frugality. In spite of Windy's incompetence and her
own growing ill health, she would not permit the family to go into debt,
and although, in the long hard winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush
until his mind revolted at the thought of a corn field, yet was the rent
of the little house paid on the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to
increase the totals in the yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the
death of his wife had lived in a loft above his shop and who was a
blacksmith of the old days, a workman first and a money maker later, did
not despise the thought of gain.
"It is money makes the mare go," he said with a kind of reverence as
banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of
Wildman's grocery.
Of John Telfer's attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain. The
man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.
"That's right," he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express
opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly that
the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their
achievements, "Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big world!
Get your name up for a modern, high-class American!"
And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to berate
the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that the day
would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning, he shouted,
"Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old clerkliness lies
asleep!"
Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who
had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a man,
was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they talked
to him of the city and of the money to be made there.
"It is the place for a live young man," they said.
Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their
affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into his
nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the great ways
filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching the sky, the men
running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks going on year after
year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of, and yet not
understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises that supported
them.
In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of
life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a
sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing, had
he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he not
introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the Saturday
night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the totals in
the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He felt within
him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and would do.
"I will be richer than any man in town here," he declared in his pride. "I
will be richer than Ed Walker."
Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks in
the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn venders,
for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses close by the
beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the farmers, and the
labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth to mingle with their
fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores, the sidewalks, and
drinking places, and men stood about in groups talking while young girls
with their lovers walked up and down. In the hall over Geiger's drug store
a dance went on and the voice of the caller-off rose above the clatter of
voices and the stamping of horses in the street. Now and then a fight
broke out among the roisterers in Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was
killed with a knife.
In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.
"Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon," he said, pushing a paper into
the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. "Recipes for cooking new dishes," he
urged to the farmer's wife. "There is a page of new fashions in dress," he
told the young girl.
Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and
the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Saturday
paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day's business.
And it was on a Saturday night that he decided to drop paper selling.
"I will take you into business with me," announced Freedom Smith, stopping
him as he hurried by. "You are getting too old to sell papers and you know
too much."
Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday
night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year he
had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he nodded
his head as he hurried away.
"It is the end of romance," shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom Smith
before Geiger's drug store and who had heard the offer. "A boy, who has
seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe and
Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am overcome
by the thought."
The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to
Sam of the matter at length.
"For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place," he
declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time to
time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. "For any boy I put
money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who despise
money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she puts into the
selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been the making of
her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without the millinery
business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon clothes and with it
she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to her."
Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the
ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking
thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the
boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret
regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by
throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making
the words roll and tumble from his lips.
"No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes
many virtues that are forever on men's lips," he declared fiercely as
though trying to down an opponent. "It is one of the virtues that proves
man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power to
make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys fear.
Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings into
men's lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go
adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.
"Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
wealth," he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. "No doubt the
things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct
to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty,
the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of
the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the
defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man's
city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at
the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and
I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not
acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables him to get on, may
build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is diseased and decaying."
Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his
eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.
"The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that makes
our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for shrewd
money getting or it will destroy itself," he declared. "And the really
great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve in
garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages on Fifth
Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for yourself. Visit
the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to one that you will
find him not only incapable in money getting but also incapable in the
very art for which he starves."
After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer
for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted a
chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and hides
he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged persistency
with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank had caught
Freedom's imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the fact.
Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty
dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn
business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with
the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business,
backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the
cashier telling of Sam's record as a depositor, and the seven hundred
dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with Freedom,
Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his savings as he
had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was impressed. He
thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a week Sam had seen
the silent suggestive power of cash.
The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to more
than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have two-thirds
of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other hand was to
furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam was to take care
of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things bought were to be fixed
each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at less than the prices named
two-thirds of the savings went to him. The arrangement was suggested by
Sam, who thought he would make more from the saving than from the wage.
Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice,
roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great
inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man,
woman and child he knew and liked. "Old Maybe-Not" he called Windy
McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed
rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low
phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip in
the top. To Sam's knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed
during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying.
Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar until
the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him. And then
haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his way while the
farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward child.
Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton's best
streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked
him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing
and roaring about it. "Good morning, Mary," he would shout at the neat
German woman across the street. "Wait and you'll see me clean up about
here. I'm going at it right now. I'm going to brush the flies off the
fence first."
Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the
county.
Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and agricultural
implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard, gathering rust and
decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the lot were a half dozen
buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction engine, a mowing machine,
several farm wagons and other farm tools gone beyond naming. Every few
days he came home bringing a new prize. They overflowed the yard and crept
onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell any of this stuff. He had at
one time sixteen sets of harness all broken and unrepaired in the barn and
in a shed back of the house. A great flock of chickens and two or three
pigs wandered about among this junk and all the children of the
neighbourhood joined Freedom's four and ran howling and shouting over and
under the mass.
Freedom's wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house. She
had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally stood
at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at evening as he
stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both she and Freedom
treated him with great respect.
As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling. He was
a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very systematically
and within a year more than doubling the bulk of Freedom's purchases.
There is a little of Windy McPherson's grotesque pretentiousness in every
man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of it. He
let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value of their
goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they had recovered
from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam's day, farmers did not
watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets were not systematised
and regulated as they were later, and the skill of the buyer was of the
first importance. Having the skill, Sam used it constantly to put money
into his pockets, but in some way kept the confidence and respect of the
men with whom he traded.
The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading
ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the
streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.
"Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy," he would shout to the
loafers in the store.
Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his own
affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom's affairs,
but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and apples, butter
and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working always to swell his
commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business and many times
profited little, but the two liked and respected each other and it was
through Freedom's efforts that Sam finally got out of Caxton and into
larger affairs.
One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam stood
taking the harness off his horse.
"Here is a chance for you, my boy," he said, putting his hand
affectionately on Sam's shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his
voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the
things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had replied
making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might hope for in
Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.
When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for
him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at
last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in
the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the
door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb
to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told him that
in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and filled with
uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom's stable wishing
that he also might be gone.
Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken
from the horse upon a peg in the wall.
"I will be glad to go," he said heavily.
Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who had
come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man of eighteen.
He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago company because of
his affection for the boy and because he believed him capable of something
more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence holding the lantern
aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the yard, filled with
regrets.
By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who,
putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her
eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street,
Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From a
street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could see
them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom's hand and the
slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness. _
Read next: BOOK I: CHAPTER VI
Read previous: BOOK I: CHAPTER IV
Table of content of Windy McPherson's Son
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
