Windy McPherson's Son

by Sherwood Anderson

Into this street Sam walked, thinking little of the wonder of these things and thinking haltingly, getting his sense of the bigness of it in dollars and cents. Standing in the doorway of the commission house for which he was to work, strong, well clad, able and efficient, he looked through the streets, seeing and hearing the hurry and the roar and the shouting of voices, and then with a smile upon his lips went inside. In his brain was an unexpressed thought. As the old Norse marauders looked at the cities sitting in their splendour on the Mediterranean so looked he. “What loot!” a voice within him said, and his brain began devising methods by which he should get his share of it.

Years later, when Sam was a man of big affairs, he drove one day in a carriage through the streets and turning to his companion, a grey-haired, dignified Boston man who sat beside him, said, “I worked here once and used to sit on a barrel of apples at the edge of the sidewalk thinking how clever I was to make more money in one month than the man who raised the apples made in a year.”

The Boston man, stirred by the sight of so much foodstuff and moved to epigram by his mood, looked up and down the street.

“The foodstuff of an empire rattling o’er the stones,” he said.

“I should have made more money here,” answered Sam dryly.

The commission firm for which Sam worked was a partnership, not a corporation, and was owned by two brothers. Of the two Sam thought that the elder, a tall, bald, narrow-shouldered man, with a long narrow face and a suave manner, was the real master, and represented most of the ability in the partnership. He was oily, silent, tireless. All day he went in and out of the office and warehouses and up and down the crowded street, sucking nervously at an unlighted cigar. He was a great worker in a suburban church, but a shrewd and, Sam suspected, an unscrupulous business man. Occasionally the minister or some of the women of the suburban church came into the office to talk with him, and Sam was amused at the thought that Narrow Face, when he talked of the affairs of the church, bore a striking resemblance to the brown-bearded minister of the church in Caxton.

The other brother was a far different sort, and, in business, Sam thought, a much inferior man. He was a heavy, broad-shouldered, square-faced man of about thirty, who sat in the office dictating letters and who stayed out two or three hours to lunch. He sent out letters signed by him on the firm’s stationery with the title of General Manager, and Narrow Face let him do it. Broad Shoulders had been educated in New England and even after several years away from his college seemed more interested in it than in the welfare of the business. For a month or more in the spring he took most of the time of one of the two stenographers employed by the firm writing letters to graduates of Chicago high schools to induce them to go East to finish their education; and when a graduate of the college came to Chicago seeking employment, he closed his desk and spent entire days going from place to place, introducing, urging, recommending. Sam noticed, however, that when the firm employed a new man in their own office or on the road it was Narrow-Face who chose the man.

Broad-shoulders had been a famous football player in his day and wore an iron brace on his leg. The offices, like most of the offices on the street, were dark and narrow, and smelled of decaying vegetables and rancid butter. Noisy Greek and Italian hucksters wrangled on the sidewalk in front, and among these went Narrow-Face hurrying about making deals.

In South Water Street Sam did well, multiplying his thirty-six hundred dollars by ten during the three years that he stayed there, or went out from there to towns and cities directing a part of the great flowing river of foodstuff through his firm’s front door.

With almost his first day on the street he began seeing on all sides of him opportunity for gain, and set himself industriously at work to get his hand upon money with which to take advantage of the chances that he thought lay so invitingly about. Within a year he had made much progress. From a woman on Wabash Avenue he got six thousand dollars, and he planned and executed a coup that gave him the use of twenty thousand dollars that had come as a legacy to his friend, the medical student, who lived at the Pergrin house.