Windy McPherson's Son eBook

In the Rainey Company, the various heads of departments were stockholders in the company, and selected from among themselves two men to sit upon the board, and in his second year Sam was chosen as one of these employee directors.  During the same year five heads of departments resigning in a moment of indignation over one of Sam’s innovations—­to be replaced later by two—­their stock by a prearranged agreement came back into the company’s hands.  This stock and another block, secured for him by the colonel, got into Sam’s hands through the use of Eckardt’s money, that of the Wabash Avenue woman, and his own snug pile.

Sam was a growing force in the company.  He sat on the board of directors, the recognised practical head of the business among its stockholders and employees; he had stopped the company’s march toward a second place in its industry and had faced it about.  All about him, in offices and shops, there was the swing and go of new life and he felt that he was in a position to move on toward real control and had begun laying lines with that end in view.  Standing in the offices in LaSalle Street or amid the clang and roar of the shops he tilted up his chin with the same odd little gesture that had attracted the men of Caxton to him when he was a barefoot newsboy and the son of the town drunkard.  Through his head went big ambitious projects.  “I have in my hand a great tool,” he thought; “with it I will pry my way into the place I mean to occupy among the big men of this city and this nation.”

CHAPTER III

Sam McPherson, who stood in the shops among the thousands of employees of the Rainey Arms Company, who looked with unseeing eyes at the faces of the men intent upon the operation of machines and saw in them but so many aids to the ambitious projects stirring in his brain, who, while yet a boy, had because of the quality of daring in him, combined with a gift of acquisitiveness, become a master, who was untrained, uneducated, knowing nothing of the history of industry or of social effort, walked out of the offices of his company and along through the crowded streets to the new apartment he had taken on Michigan Avenue.  It was Saturday evening at the end of a busy week and as he walked he thought of things he had accomplished during the week and made plans for the one to come.  Through Madison Street he went and into State, seeing the crowds of men and women, boys and girls, clambering aboard the cable cars, massed upon the pavements, forming in groups, the groups breaking and reforming, and the whole making a picture intense, confusing, awe-inspiring.  As in the shops among the men workers, so here, also, walked the youth with unseeing eyes.  He liked it all; the mass of people; the clerks in their cheap clothing; the old men with young girls on their arms going to dine in restaurants; the young man with a wistful look in his eyes waiting for his sweetheart in the shadow of the towering office building.  The eager, straining rush of the whole, seemed no more to him than a kind of gigantic setting for action; action controlled by a few quiet, capable men—­of whom he intended to be one—­intent upon growth.