And then, his head clearing, Sam found himself with
the two others walking again upon the dusty road in
the dawn and singing songs.
On the train, with the help of a Negro porter, the
three men tried to efface the dust and the stains
of the wild night. The pasteboard portfolio containing
the circular for the Biscuit Machine Company was still
under Jack Prince’s arm and the little man,
wiping and re-wiping his glasses, peered at Sam.
“Did you come with us or are you a child we
have adopted here in these parts?” he asked.
It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street
in Chicago where Sam came to make his business start
in the city, and it was proof of the dry unresponsiveness
in him that he did not sense more fully its meaning
and its message. All day the food stuff of a
vast city flowed through the narrow streets.
Blue-shirted, broad-shouldered teamsters from the tops
of high piled wagons bawled at scurrying pedestrians.
On the sidewalks in boxes, bags, and barrels, lay
oranges from Florida and California, figs from Arabia,
bananas from Jamaica, nuts from the hills of Spain
and the plains of Africa, cabbages from Ohio, beans
from Michigan, corn and potatoes from Iowa. In
December, fur-coated men hurried through the forests
of northern Michigan gathering Christmas trees that
found their way to warm firesides through the street.
And summer and winter a million hens laid the eggs
that were gathered there, and the cattle on a thousand
hills sent their yellow butter fat packed in tubs and
piled upon trucks to add to the confusion.
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.
