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.