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.”