What was the golden road? These men had found it--hundreds, thousands of them,--farming tools, railroads, groceries, gas, dry-goods. It made no matter what: fortunes were building on every side; the flowers of success were blooming before our eyes. To take my place with these mighty ones--I thought a good deal about that these days! And I remember Grace saying sentimentally to Slocum that Sunday:-- "You fellers keep thinkin' of nothin' but money and how you're goin' to make it. Perhaps rich folks ain't the only happy ones in the world." "Yes," Hillary chimed in, "there's such a thing as being too greedy to eat." "What else are we here for except to make money?" Slocum demanded more bitterly than usual. He raised his long arm in explanation and swept it to and fro over the straggling prairie city, with its rough, patched look. I didn't see what there was in the city to object to: it was just a place like any other--to work, eat, and sleep in. Later, however, when I saw the little towns back East, the pleasant hills, the old homes in the valleys, and the red-brick house on the elm-shaded street in Portland, then I knew what Slocum meant. Whatever was there in Chicago in 1877 to live for but Success? CHAPTER V A MAN'S BUSINESS _Signs of trouble at the Enterprise--A possible partnership--He travels fastest who travels alone--John Carmichael--Feeding the peoples of the earth--I drive for Dround_ "Do you see that big, fat fellow talking with Mr. Joyce?" the cashier whispered to me one morning as I passed her cage. "He's Dround's manager--his name is Carmichael. When he shows up, there is trouble coming to some one." Dround & Co. was the name of the packing firm that the Enterprise dealt with. I tied up my bundles and made up my cash account, thinking a good deal about the appearance of the burly manager of the packing-house. Pretty soon Mr. Carmichael came out into the front store very red in the face, followed by the elder Joyce, who had been drinking, and they had some words. The cashier winked at me. The Enterprise had been doing a good business. It was run on a new principle for those days--strictly cash and all cut prices, a cent off here and there, a great sale of some one thing each day, which the house handled speculatively. The brothers Joyce kept branching out, but there wasn't any money to speak of behind the firm. The Drounds and a wholesale grocer had backed it from the start. Nevertheless, we should have got on all right if the elder Joyce had given up drinking and the younger one had not taken to driving fast horses. Latterly no matter how big a business we did, the profits went the wrong way. That evening, as Hillary Cox and I walked over to the Piersons', she said to me abruptly, "There's going to be a new sign at the Enterprise before long!" The smart little cashier must have divined the situation as I had. "Cox's Market?" I suggested jokingly.