_ The story of Sam's life there in Chicago for the next several years ceases
to be the story of a man and becomes the story of a type, a crowd, a gang.
What he and the group of men surrounding him and making money with him did
in Chicago, other men and other groups of men have done in New York, in
Paris, in London. Coming into power with the great expansive wave of
prosperity that attended the first McKinley administration, these men went
mad of money making. They played with great industrial institutions and
railroad systems like excited children, and a man of Chicago won the
notice and something of the admiration of the world by his willingness to
bet a million dollars on the turn of the weather. In the years of
criticism and readjustment that followed this period of sporadic growth,
writers have told with great clearness how the thing was done, and some of
the participants, captains of industry turned penmen, Caesars become ink-
slingers, have bruited the story to an admiring world.
Given the time, the inclination, the power of the press, and the
unscrupulousness, the thing that Sam McPherson and his followers did in
Chicago in not difficult. Advised by Webster and the talented Prince and
Morrison to handle his publicity work, he rapidly unloaded his huge
holdings of common stock upon an eager public, keeping for himself the
bonds which he hypothecated at the banks to increase his working capital
while continuing to control the company. When the common stock was
unloaded, he, with a group of fellow spirits, began an attack upon it
through the stock market and in the press, and bought it again at a low
figure, holding it ready to unload when the public should have forgotten.
The annual advertising expenditure of the firearms trust ran into millions
and Sam's hold upon the press of the country was almost unbelievably
strong. Morrison rapidly developed unusual daring and audacity in using
this instrument and making it serve Sam's ends. He suppressed facts,
created illusions, and used the newspapers as a whip to crack at the heels
of congressmen, senators, and legislators, of the various states, when
such matters as appropriation for firearms came before them.
And Sam, who had undertaken the consolidation of the firearms companies,
having a dream of himself as a great master in that field, a sort of
American Krupp, rapidly awoke from the dream to take the bigger chances
for gain in the world of speculation. Within a year he dropped Edwards as
head of the firearms trust and in his place put Lewis, with Morrison as
secretary and manager of sales. Guided by Sam these two, like the little
drygoods merchant of the old Rainey Company, went from capital to capital
and from city to city making contracts, influencing news, placing
advertising contracts where they would do the most good, fixing men.
And in the meantime Sam, with Webster, a banker named Crofts who had
profited largely in the firearms merger, and sometimes Morrison or Prince,
began a series of stock raids, speculations, and manipulations that
attracted country-wide attention, and became known to the newspaper
reading world as the McPherson Chicago crowd. They were in oil, railroads,
coal, western land, mining, timber, and street railways. One summer Sam,
with Prince, built, ran to a profit, and sold to advantage a huge
amusement park. Through his head day after day marched columns of figures,
ideas, schemes, more and more spectacular opportunities for gain. Some of
the enterprises in which he engaged, while because of their size they
seemed more dignified, were of reality of a type with the game smuggling
of his South Water Street days, and in all of his operations it was his
old instinct for bargains and for the finding of buyers together with
Webster's ability for carrying through questionable deals that made him
and his followers almost constantly successful in the face of opposition
from the more conservative business and financial men of the city.
Again Sam led a new life, owning running horses at the tracks, memberships
in many clubs, a country house in Wisconsin, and shooting preserves in
Texas. He drank steadily, played poker for big stakes, kept in the public
prints, and day after day led his crew upon the high seas of finance. He
did not dare think and in his heart he was sick of it. Sick to the soul,
so that when thought came to him he got out of his bed to seek roistering
companions or, getting pen and paper, sat for hours figuring out new and
more daring schemes for money making. The great forward movement in modern
industry of which he had dreamed of being a part had for him turned out to
be a huge meaningless gamble with loaded dice against a credulous public.
With his followers he went on day after day doing deeds without thought.
Industries were organised and launched, men employed and thrown out of
employment, towns wrecked by the destruction of an industry and other
towns made by the building of other industries. At a whim of his a
thousand men began building a city on an Indiana sand hill, and at a wave
of his hand another thousand men of an Indiana town sold their homes, with
the chicken houses in the back-yards and vines trained by the kitchen
doors, and rushed to buy sections of the hill plotted off for them. He did
not stop to discuss with his followers the meaning of the things he did.
He told them of the profits to be made and then, having done the thing, he
went with them to drink in bar rooms and to spend the evening or afternoon
singing songs, visiting his stable of runners or, more often, sitting
silently about the card table playing for high stakes. Making millions
through the manipulation of the public during the day, he sometimes sat
half the night struggling with his companions for the possession of
thousands.
Lewis, the Jew, the only one of Sam's companions who had not followed him
in his spectacular money making, stayed in the office of the firearms
company and ran it like the scientific able man of business he was. While
Sam remained chairman of the board of the company and had an office, a
desk, and the name of leadership there, he let Lewis run the place, and
spent his own time upon the stock exchange or in some corner with Webster
and Crofts planning some new money making raid.
"You have the better of it, Lewis," he said one day in a reflective mood;
"you thought I had cut the ground from under you when I got Tom Edwards,
but I only set you more firmly in a larger place."
He made a movement with his hand toward the large general offices with the
rows of busy clerks and the substantial look of work being done.
"I might have had the work you are doing. I planned and schemed with that
end in view," he added, lighting a cigar and going out at the door.
"And the money hunger got you," laughed Lewis, looking after him, "the
hunger that gets Jews and Gentiles and all who feed it."
One might have come upon the McPherson Chicago crowd about the old Chicago
stock exchange on any day during those years, Crofts, tall, abrupt, and
dogmatic; Morrison, slender, dandified, and gracious; Webster, well-
dressed, suave, gentlemanly, and Sam, silent, restless, and often morose
and ugly. Sometimes it seemed to Sam that they were all unreal, himself
and the men with him. He watched his companions cunningly. They were
constantly posing before the passing crowd of brokers and small
speculators. Webster, coming up to him on the floor of the exchange, would
tell him of a snowstorm raging outside with the air of a man parting with
a long-cherished secret. His companions went from one to the other vowing
eternal friendships, and then, keeping spies upon each other, they hurried
to Sam with tales of secret betrayals. Into any deal proposed by him they
went eagerly, although sometimes fearfully, and almost always they won.
And with Sam they made millions through the manipulation of the firearms
company, and the Chicago and Northern Lake Railroad which he controlled.
In later years Sam looked back upon it all as a kind of nightmare. It
seemed to him that never during that period had he lived or thought
sanely. The great financial leaders that he saw were not, he thought,
great men. Some of them, like Webster, were masters of craft, or, like
Morrison, of words, but for the most part they were but shrewd, greedy
vultures feeding upon the public or upon each other.
In the meantime Sam was rapidly degenerating. His paunch became distended,
and his hands trembled in the morning. Being a man of strong appetites,
and having a determination to avoid women, he almost constantly overdrank
and overate, and in the leisure hours that came to him he hurried eagerly
from place to place, avoiding thought, avoiding sane quiet talk, avoiding
himself.
All of his companions did not suffer equally. Webster seemed made for the
life, thriving and expanding under it, putting his winnings steadily
aside, going on Sunday to a suburban church, avoiding the publicity
connecting his name with race horses and big sporting events that Crofts
sought and to which Sam submitted. One day Sam and Crofts caught him in an
effort to sell them out to a group of New York bankers in a mining deal
and turned the trick on him instead, whereupon he went off to New York to
become a respectable big business man and the friend of senators and
philanthropists.
Crofts was a man with chronic domestic troubles, one of those men who
begin each day by cursing their wives before their associates and yet
continue living with them year after year. There was a kind of rough
squareness in the man, and after the completion of a successful deal he
would be as happy as a boy, pounding men on the back, shaking with
laughter, throwing money about, making crude jokes. After Sam left Chicago
he finally divorced his wife and married an actress from the vaudeville
stage and after losing two-thirds of his fortune in an effort to capture
control of a southern railroad, went to England and, coached by the
actress wife, developed into an English country gentleman.
And Sam was a man sick. Day after day he went on drinking more and more
heavily, playing for bigger and bigger stakes, allowing himself less and
less thought of himself. One day he received a long letter from John
Telfer telling of the sudden death of Mary Underwood and berating him for
his neglect of her.
"She was ill for a year and without an income," wrote Telfer. Sam noticed
that the man's hand had begun to tremble. "She lied to me and told me you
had sent her money, but now that she is dead I find that though she wrote
you she got no answer. Her old aunt told me."
Sam put the letter into his pocket and going into one of his clubs began
drinking with a crowd of men he found idling there. He had paid little
attention to his correspondence for months. No doubt the letter from Mary
had been received by his secretary and thrown aside with the letters of
thousands of other women, begging letters, amorous letters, letters
directed at him because of his wealth and the prominence given his
exploits by the newspapers.
After wiring an explanation and mailing a check the size of which filled
John Telfer with admiration, Sam with a half dozen fellow roisterers spent
the late afternoon and evening going from saloon to saloon through the
south side. When he got to his apartments late that night, his head was
reeling and his mind filled with distorted memories of drinking men and
women and of himself standing on a table in some obscure drinking place
and calling upon the shouting, laughing hangers-on of his crowd of rich
money spenders to think and to work and to seek Truth.
He went to sleep in his chair, his mind filled with the dancing faces of
dead women, Mary Underwood and Janet and Sue, tear-stained faces calling
to him. When he awoke and shaved he went out into the street and to
another down-town club.
"I wonder if Sue is dead, too," he muttered, remembering his dream.
At the club he was called to the telephone by Lewis, who asked him to come
at once to his office at the Edwards Consolidated. When he got there he
found a wire from Sue. In a moment of loneliness and despondency over the
loss of his old business standing and reputation, Colonel Tom had shot
himself in a New York hotel.
Sam sat at his desk, fingering the yellow paper lying before him and
fighting to get his head clear.
"The old coward. The damned old coward," he muttered; "any one could have
done that."
When Lewis came into Sam's office he found his chief sitting at his desk
fingering the telegram and muttering to himself. When Sam handed him the
wire he came around and stood beside Sam, his hand upon his shoulder.
"Well, do not blame yourself for that," he said, with quick understanding.
"I don't," Sam muttered; "I do not blame myself for anything. I am a
result, not a cause. I am trying to think. I am not through yet. I am
going to begin again when I get things thought out."
Lewis went out of the room leaving him to his thoughts. For an hour he sat
there reviewing his life. When he came to the day that he had humiliated
Colonel Tom, there came back to his mind the sentence he had written on
the sheet of paper while the vote was being counted. "The best men spend
their lives seeking truth."
Suddenly he came to a decision and, calling Lewis, began laying out a plan
of action. His head cleared and the ring came back into his voice. To
Lewis he gave an option on his entire holdings of Edwards Consolidated
stocks and bonds and to him also he entrusted the clearing up of deal
after deal in which he was interested. Then, calling a broker, he began
throwing a mass of stock on the market. When Lewis told him that Crofts
was 'phoning wildly about town to find him, and was with the help of
another banker supporting the market and taking Sam's stocks as fast as
offered, he laughed and giving Lewis instructions regarding the disposal
of his monies walked out of the office, again a free man and again seeking
the answer to his problem.
He made no attempt to answer Sue's wire. He was restless to get at
something he had in his mind. He went to his apartments and packed a bag
and from there disappeared saying goodbye to no one. In his mind was no
definite idea of where he was going or what he was going to do. He knew
only that he would follow the message his hand had written. He would try
to spend his life seeking truth. _