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_ 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." _
Read next: BOOK III: CHAPTER II
Read previous: BOOK II: CHAPTER IX
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