After these evenings of carousal, carried on with Jack Prince and with young men met on trains and about country hotels, Sam spent hour after hour walking about town absorbed in his own thoughts and getting his own impressions of what he saw. In the affairs with the young men he played, for the most part, a passive rôle, going with them from place to place and drinking until they became loud and boisterous, or morose and quarrelsome, and then slipping away to his own room, amused or irritated as the circumstances, or the temperament of his companions, had made or marred the joviality of the evening. On his nights alone, he put his hands into his pockets and walked for endless miles through the lighted streets, getting in a dim way a realisation of the hugeness of life. All of the faces going past him, the women in their furs, the young men with cigars in their mouths going to the theatres, the bald old men with watery eyes, the boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and the slim prostitutes lurking in the hallways, should have interested him deeply. In his youth, and with the pride of sleeping power in him, he saw them only as so many individuals that might some day test their ability against his own. And if he peered at them closely and marked down face after face in the crowds it was as a sitter in the great game of business that he looked, exercising his mind by imagining this or that one arrayed against him in deals, and planning the method by which he would win in the imaginary struggle. There was at that time in Chicago a place, to be reached by a bridge above the Illinois Central Railroad track, that Sam sometimes visited on stormy nights to watch the lake lashed by the wind. Great masses of water moving swiftly and silently broke with a roar against wooden piles, backed by hills of stone and earth, and the spray from the broken waves fell upon Sam’s face and on winter nights froze on his coat. He had learned to smoke, and leaning upon the railing of the bridge would stand for hours with a pipe in his mouth looking at the moving water, filled with awe and admiration of the silent power of it.