Windy McPherson's Son

by Sherwood Anderson

“I know what I will do,” he said, “I will go to work. I will do some real work and make some more money. That’s the place for me.”

And to work he went, real work, the most sustained and clearly thought-out work he had done. For two years he was out of the house at dawn for a long bracing walk in the fresh morning air, to be followed by eight, ten and even fifteen hours in the office and shops; hours in which he drove the Rainey Arms Company’s organisation mercilessly and, taking openly every vestige of the management out of the hands of Colonel Tom, began the plans for the consolidation of the American firearms companies that later put his name on the front pages of the newspapers and got him the title of a Captain of Finance.

There is a widespread misunderstanding abroad regarding the motives of many of the American millionaires who sprang into prominence and affluence in the days of change and sudden bewildering growth that followed the close of the Spanish War. They were, many of them, not of the brute trader type, but were, instead, men who thought and acted quickly and with a daring and audacity impossible to the average mind. They wanted power and were, many of them, entirely unscrupulous, but for the most part they were men with a fire burning within them, men who became what they were because the world offered them no better outlet for their vast energies.

Sam McPherson had been untiring and without scruples in the first hard, quick struggle to get his head above the great unknown body of men there in the city. He had turned aside from money getting when he heard what he took to be a call to a better way of life. Now with the fires of youth still in him and with the training and discipline that had come from two years of reading, of comparative leisure and of thought, he was prepared to give the Chicago business world a display of that tremendous energy that was to write his name in the industrial history of the city as one of the first of the western giants of finance.

Going to Sue, Sam told her frankly of his plans.

“I want a free hand in the handling of your stock in the company,” he said. “I cannot lead this new life of yours. It may help and sustain you but it gets no hold on me. I want to be myself now and lead my own life in my own way. I want to run the company, really run it. I cannot stand idly by and let life go past. I am hurting myself and you standing here looking on. Also I am in a kind of danger of another kind that I want to avoid by throwing myself into hard, constructive work.”

Without question Sue signed the papers he brought her. A flash of her old frankness toward him came back.

“I do not blame you, Sam,” she said, smiling bravely. “Things have not gone right, as we both know, but if we cannot work together at least let us not hurt each other.”

When Sam returned to give himself again to affairs, the country was just at the beginning of the great wave of consolidation which was finally to sweep all of the financial power of the country into a dozen pairs of competent and entirely efficient hands. With the sure instinct of the born trader Sam had seen this movement coming and had studied it. Now he began to act. Going to that same swarthy-faced lawyer who had drawn the contract for him to secure control of the medical student’s twenty thousand dollars and who had jokingly invited him to become one of a band of train robbers, he told him of his plans to begin working toward a consolidation of all the firearms companies of the country.

Webster wasted no time in joking now. He laid out the plans, adjusted and readjusted them to suit Sam’s shrewd suggestions, and when a fee was mentioned shook his head.