In the Rainey Company, the various heads of departments were stockholders
in the company, and selected from among themselves two men to sit upon the
board, and in his second year Sam was chosen as one of these employee
directors. During the same year five heads of departments resigning in a
moment of indignation over one of Sam's innovations--to be replaced later
by two--their stock by a prearranged agreement came back into the
company's hands. This stock and another block, secured for him by the
colonel, got into Sam's hands through the use of Eckardt's money, that of
the Wabash Avenue woman, and his own snug pile.
Sam was a growing force in the company. He sat on the board of directors,
the recognised practical head of the business among its stockholders and
employees; he had stopped the company's march toward a second place in its
industry and had faced it about. All about him, in offices and shops,
there was the swing and go of new life and he felt that he was in a
position to move on toward real control and had begun laying lines with
that end in view. Standing in the offices in LaSalle Street or amid the
clang and roar of the shops he tilted up his chin with the same odd little
gesture that had attracted the men of Caxton to him when he was a barefoot
newsboy and the son of the town drunkard.
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