Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/20

4 was this frost on the panes of the Fort Dearborn Club—one of the staidest of the down-town clubs for men—that the great log fires blazing on the open hearths added appreciable light as well as warmth to the rooms.

The few members present at this hour of the afternoon showed by their lazy attitudes and the desultoriness of their conversation the dulling of vitality which warmth and shelter bring on a day of cold and storm. On one, however, the storm had had a contrary effect. With swift, uneven steps he paced now one room, now another; from time to time he stopped abruptly by a window, scraped from it with finger nail the frost, stared out for an instant through the little opening he had made, then resumed as abruptly his nervous pacing with a manner so uneasy and distraught that, since his arrival at the club an hour before, none even among those who knew him best had ventured to speak to him.

There are, in every great city, a few individuals who from their fullness of experience in an epoch of the city's life come to epitomize that epoch in the general mind; when one thinks of a city or of a section of the country in more personal terms than its square miles, its towering buildings, and its censused millions, one must think of those individuals. Almost every great industry owns one and seldom more than one; that often enough is not, in a money sense, the predominant figure of his industry; others of his rivals or even of his partners may be actually more powerful than he; but he is the personality; he represents to the outsiders the romance and mystery of the secrets and early, naked adventures of the great achievement. Thus, to think of the great mercantile establishments of State Street is to think immediately of one man; another