“It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the man for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every pat phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He will howl like a beast at paying Tom’s bill, and then the next time he will try to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so that he has to send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like shelling corn off the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him.”
Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. “I am on my way to the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company,” he explained to Prince. “I can’t stop at all. I have here the layout of a circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common stock of theirs that hasn’t paid a dividend for ten years.”
Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. “Never mind the Biscuit Machine people and their stock,” he commanded; “they will always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to meet McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help him with.”
Morris reached across the table and took Sam’s hand; his own was small and soft like that of a woman. “I am worked to death,” he complained; “I have my eye on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am going down there to live.”
For an hour the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked of a place in Wisconsin where the fish should be biting. “A man has told me of the place twenty times,” he declared; “I am sure I could find it on a railroad folder. I have never been fishing nor have you, and Sam here comes from a place to which they carry water in wagons over the plains.”
The little man who had been drinking copiously of the wine looked from Prince to Sam. From time to time he took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “I don’t understand your being in such society,” he announced; “you have the solid, substantial look of a bucket-shop man. Prince here will get nowhere. He is honest, sells wind and his charming society, and spends the money that he gets, instead of marrying and putting it in his wife’s name.”
Prince arose. “It is useless to waste time in persiflage,” he began and then turning to Sam, “There is a place in Wisconsin,” he said uncertainly.
Morris picked up the portfolio and with a grotesque effort at steadiness started for the door followed by Prince and Sam walking with wavering steps. In the street Prince took the portfolio out of the little man’s hand. “Let your mother carry it, Tommy,” he said, shaking his finger under Morris’s nose. He began singing a lullaby. “When the bough bends the cradle will fall.”
The three men walked out of Monroe and into State Street, Sam’s head feeling strangely light. The buildings along the street reeled against the sky. A sudden fierce longing for wild adventure seized him. On a corner Morris stopped, took the handkerchief from his pocket and again wiped his glasses. “I want to be sure that I see clearly,” he said; “it seems to me that in the bottom of that last glass of wine I saw three of us in a cab with a basket of life oil on the seat between us going to the station to catch the train for that place Jack’s friend told fish lies about.”
The next eighteen hours opened up a new world to Sam. With the fumes of liquor rising in his brain, he rode for two hours on a train, tramped in the darkness along dusty roads and, building a bonfire in a woods, danced in the light of it upon the grass, holding the hands of Prince and the little man with the wrinkled face. Solemnly he stood upon a stump at the edge of a wheatfield and recited Poe’s “Helen,” taking on the voice, the gestures and even the habit of spreading his legs apart, of John Telfer. And then overdoing the last, he sat down suddenly on the stump, and Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand said, “Fill the lamp, man—the light of reason has gone out.”