“Who are you anyway?” asked Webster. “If you can get twenty thousand and without collateral you’re worth knowing. I might be getting up a gang to rob a mail train.”
Sam did not answer. He put the contract in his pocket and went home to his alcove at the Pergrins. He wanted to get by himself and think. He did not believe that he would by any chance lose Frank Eckardt’s money, but he knew that Eckardt himself would draw back from the kind of deals that he expected to make with the money, that they would frighten and alarm him, and he wondered if he was being honest.
In his own room after dinner Sam studied carefully the agreement drawn by Webster. It seemed to him to cover what he wanted covered, and having got it well fixed in his mind he tore it up. “There is no use his knowing I have been to a lawyer,” he thought guiltily.
Getting into bed, he began building plans for the future. With more than thirty thousand dollars at his command he thought that he should be able to make headway rapidly. “In my hands it will double itself every year,” he told himself and getting out of bed he drew a chair to the window and sat down, feeling strangely alive and awake like a young man in love. He saw himself going on and on, directing, managing, ruling men. It seemed to him that there was nothing he could not do. “I will run factories and banks and maybe mines and railroads,” he thought and his mind leaped forward so that he saw himself, grey, stern, and capable, sitting at a broad desk high in a great stone building, a materialisation of John Telfer’s word picture—“You will be a big man of dollars—it is plain.”
And then into Sam’s mind came another picture. He remembered a Saturday afternoon when a young man had come running into the office on South Water Street, a young man who owed Narrow-Face a sum of money and could not pay it. He remembered the unpleasant tightening of the mouth and the sudden shrewd hard look in his employer’s long narrow face. He had not heard much of the talk, but he was aware of a strained pleading quality in the voice of the young man who had said over and over slowly and painfully, “But, man, my honour is at stake,” and of a coldness in the answering voice replying persistently, “With me it is not a matter of honour but of dollars, and I am going to get them.”
From the alcove window Sam looked out upon a vacant lot covered with patches of melting snow. Beyond the lot facing him stood a flat building, and the snow, melting on the roof, made a little stream that ran down some hidden pipe and rattled out upon the ground. The noise of the falling water and the sound of distant footsteps going homeward through the sleeping city brought back thoughts of other nights when as a boy in Caxton he had sat thus, thinking disconnected thoughts.
Without knowing it Sam was fighting one of the real battles of his life, a battle in which the odds were very much against the quality in him that got him out of bed to look at the snow-clad vacant lot.
There was in the youth much of the brute trader, blindly intent upon gain; much of the quality that has given America so many of its so-called great men. It was the quality that had sent him in secret to Lawyer Webster to protect himself without protecting the simple credulous young medical student, and that had made him say as he came home with the contract in his pocket, “I will do what I can,” when in truth he meant, “I will get what I can.”
There may be business men in America who do not get what they can, who simply love power. One sees men here and there in banks, at the heads of great industrial trusts, in factories and in great mercantile houses of whom one would like to think thus. They are the men who one dreams have had an awakening, who have found themselves; they are the men hopeful thinkers try to recall again and again to the mind.
To these men America is looking. It is asking them to keep the faith, to stand themselves up against the force of the brute trader, the dollar man, the man who with his one cunning wolf quality of acquisitiveness has too long ruled the business of the nation.