Windy McPherson's Son Part 28

The old man, leaning over and putting his hand beside his mouth, began whispering to Sam.

"I'll bet there is a capitalist deal back of that power scheme," he said.

He nodded his head up and down and smiled knowingly.

"If there is Ed will be in on it," he added. "You can't lose Ed. He's a slick one."

He took the pamphlet from Sam's hand and put it in his pocket.

"I'm a socialist," he explained, "but don't say anything. Ed's against 'em."

The men filed back into the room, each with a freshly-lighted cigar in his mouth, and the florid-faced man followed them and went out at the office door.

"Well, so long, boys," he shouted heartily.

Ed went silently up the stairs to join the mother and boy, whose voices could still be heard raised in outbursts of wrath from above as the men took their former chairs along the wall.

"Well, Bill's sure all right," said the red-haired young man, evidently expressing the opinion of the men in regard to the florid-faced man.

A small bent old man with sunken cheeks got up and walking across the room leaned against the cigar case.

"Did you ever hear this one?" he asked, looking about.

Obviously no answer could be given and the bent old man launched into a vile pointless anecdote of a woman, a miner, and a mule, the crowd giving close attention and laughing uproariously when he had finished.

The socialist rubbed his hands together and joined in the applause.

"That was a good one, eh?" he commented, turning to Sam.

Sam, picking up his bag, climbed the stairway as the red-haired young man launched into another tale, slightly less vile. In his room to which Ed, meeting him at the top of the stairs, led him, still chewing at the unlighted cigar, he turned out the light and sat on the edge of the bed.

He was as homesick as a boy.

"Truth," he muttered, looking through the window to the dimly-lighted street. "Do these men seek truth?"

The next day he went to work, wearing a suit of clothes bought from Ed. He worked with Ed's father, carrying timbers and driving nails as directed by him. In the gang with him were four men, boarders at Ed's hotel, and four other men who lived in the town with their families. At the noon hour he asked the old carpenter how the men from the hotel, who did not live in the town, could vote on the question of the power bonds.

The old man grinned and rubbed his hands together.

"I don't know," he said. "I suppose Ed tends to that. He's a slick one, Ed is."

At work, the men who had been so silent in the office of the hotel were alert and wonderfully busy, hurrying here and there at a word from the old man and sawing and nailing furiously. They seemed bent upon outdoing each other and when one fell behind they laughed and shouted at him, asking him if he had decided to quit for the day. But though they seemed determined to outdo him the old man kept ahead of them all, his hammer beating a rattling tattoo upon the boards all day. At the noon hour he had given each of the men one of the pamphlets from his pocket and on the way back to his hotel in the evening he told Sam that the others had tried to show him up.

"They wanted to see if I had juice in me," he explained, strutting beside Sam with an amusing little swagger of his shoulders.

Sam was sick with fatigue. His hands were blistered, his legs felt weak, and a terrible thirst burned in his throat. All day he had gone grimly ahead, thankful for every physical discomfort, every throb of his strained, tired muscles. In his weariness and in his efforts to keep pace with the others he had forgotten Colonel Tom and Mary Underwood.

All during that month and into the next Sam stayed with the old man's gang. He ceased thinking, and only worked desperately. An odd feeling of loyalty and devotion to the old man came over him and he felt that he too must prove that he had the juice in him. At the hotel he went to bed immediately after the silent dinner, slept, awoke aching, and went to work again.

One Sunday one of the men of his gang came to Sam's room and invited him to go with a party of the workers into the country. They went in boats, carrying with them kegs of beer, to a deep ravine clothed on both sides by heavy woods. In the boat with Sam sat the red-haired young man, who was called Jake and who talked loudly of the time they would have in the woods, and boasted that he was the instigator of the trip.

"I thought of it," he said over and over again.

Sam wondered why he had been invited. It was a soft October day and in the ravine he sat looking at the trees splashed with colour and breathing deeply of the air, his whole body relaxed, grateful for the day of rest. Jake came and sat beside him.

"What are you?" he asked bluntly. "We know you are no working man."

Sam told him a half-truth.

"You are right enough about that; I have money enough not to have to work. I used to be a business man. I sold guns. But I have a disease and the doctors have told me that if I do not work out of doors part of me will die."

The man from his own gang who had invited him on the trip came up to them, bringing Sam a foaming gla.s.s of beer. He shook his head.

"The doctor says it will not do," he explained to the two men.

The red-haired man called Jake began talking.

"We are going to have a fight with Ed," he said. "That's what we came up here to talk about. We want to know where you stand. We are going to see if we can't make him pay as well for the work here as men are paid for the same work in Chicago."

Sam lay back upon the gra.s.s.

"All right," he said. "Go ahead. If I can help I will. I'm not so fond of Ed."

The men began talking among themselves. Jake, standing among them, read aloud a list of names among which was the name Sam had written on the register at Ed's hotel.

"It's a list of the names of men we think will stick together and vote together on the bond issue," he explained, turning to Sam. "Ed's in that and we want to use our votes to scare him into giving us what we want.

Will you stay with us? You look like a fighter."

Sam nodded and getting up joined the men about the beer kegs. They began talking of Ed and of the money he had made in the town.

"He's done a lot of town work here and there's been graft in all of it," explained Jake emphatically. "It's time he was being made to do the right thing."

While they talked Sam sat watching the men's faces. They did not seem vile to him now as they had seemed that first evening in the hotel office. He began thinking of them silently and alertly at work all day long, surrounded by such influences as Ed and Bill, and the thought sweetened his opinion of them.

"Look here," he said, "tell me of this matter. I was a business man before I came here and I may be able to help you fellows get what you want."

Getting up, Jake took Sam's arm and they walked down the ravine, Jake explaining the situation in the town.

"The game," he said, "is to make the taxpayers pay for a millrace to be built for the development of the water power in the river and then, by a trick, to turn it over to a private company. Bill and Ed are both in the deal and they are working for a Chicago man named Crofts. He's been up here at the hotel with Bill talking to Ed. I've figured out what they are up to." Sam sat down upon a log and laughed heartily.

"Crofts, eh?" he exclaimed. "Say, we will fight this thing. If Crofts has been up here you can depend upon it there is some size to the deal.

We will just smash the whole crooked gang for the good of the town."

"How would you do that?" asked Jake.

Sam sat down on a log and looked at the river flowing past the mouth of the ravine.

"Just fight," he said. "Let me show you something."

He took a pencil and slip of paper from his pocket, and, with the voices of the men about the beer kegs in his ears and the red-haired man peering over his shoulder, began writing his first political pamphlet.

He wrote and erased and changed words and phrases. The pamphlet was a statement of facts as to the value of water power, and was addressed to the taxpayers of the community. He warmed to the subject, saying that a fortune lay sleeping in the river, and that the town, by the exercise of a little discretion now, could build with that fortune a beautiful city belonging to the people.