And then Colonel Tom fired his guns. Walking up and down in the room before the men, sitting at a long table or in chairs tilted against the walls, he began talking with all of his old flamboyant pomposity of the past glories of the Rainey Company. Sam watched him quietly thinking of the exhibition as something detached and apart from the business of the meeting. He remembered a question that had come into his head when he was a schoolboy and had got his first peep into a school history. There had been a picture of Indians at the war dance and he had wondered why they danced before rather than after battle. Now his mind answered the question.
“If they had not danced before they might never have got the chance,” he thought, and smiled to himself.
“I call upon you men here to stick to the old colours,” roared the colonel, turning and making a direct attack upon Sam. “Do not let this ungrateful upstart, this son of a drunken village housepainter, that I picked up from among the cabbages of South Water Street, win you away from your loyalty to the old leader. Do not let him steal by trickery what we have won only by years of effort.”
The colonel, leaning 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 employé 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.”