“If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all right,” he exploded. “He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like it.”
For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing, hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy from the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the money-maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems of life and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great game in which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited patiently until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would possess. With the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they pounced and Sam felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with country buyers used it ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look that came into the eyes of unsuccessful business men at critical moments and watched for it and took advantage of it as a successful prize fighter watches for a similar vague, uncertain look in the eyes of an opponent.
He had found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that comes with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the successful business men about him is the stroke also of the master painter, scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of Whistler, Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been in him when as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook, and now and then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road. In the city where men of wealth and power in affairs rubbed elbows with him in the street cars and walked past him in hotel lobbies he watched and waited saying to himself, “I also will be such a one.”
Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of vast work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but for the most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about him, keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.
During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but that still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed him during the month after his mother’s death, and letters regarding him had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down to dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and talk of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.
“I was thinking of old John Moore to-day—does he still drive that team of black ponies?” the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman of thirty, would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a conversation of baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new office building to be erected in the Loop.
“No, he don’t,” Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in a machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake been the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that he looked upon Sam as an intruder. “John told me last summer when I was home that he intended to sell the blacks and buy mules,” he would add, looking at the youth challengingly.
The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar and bustle of Chicago’s vast west side, it still turned with hungry heart toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for Jake, its mainstay, could be found in that paradise.
Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey moustache, and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so that they stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn, worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night, going to bed at nine o’clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling, from room to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers, or sitting in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the habits formed in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home with his pay in his pocket, settled with the two sisters for the week’s living, sat down to dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then disappeared upon the troubled waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening he re-appeared, with empty pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and a noisy attempt at self-possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl into bed in preparation for another week of toil and respectability. The man had a certain Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new ladies met on his weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall. He once took Sam upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half around the room.