“I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely,” he said.
“They are a rotten crew,” Jackson assured him, “and I am taking a night train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over.”
On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old man who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.
“I am going to sail from Seattle,” he said, “and go everywhere and hunt everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind of thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there until I die.”
“I will go with you,” said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at Detroit and continued westward with his new acquaintance.
For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous, big-hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early investment in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to his lusty, primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion hunts, elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of Africa Sam took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the beach smoking black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over and that Sam was a fool to go.
After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life of a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He went on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern lakes, canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat about clubs and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and women of that world.
Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on the Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw her. For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure as she walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had come to mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come face to face with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train to the city feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed after the years.
In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily and almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from his hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting with Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant, got into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode about town laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to passers-by in the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place at the edge of town, where the party spent hours around a long table, drinking, and singing songs.
One of the girls sat on Sam’s lap and put an arm about his neck.