The Square Pegs by Irving Wallace Page B

store. In 1833, when Train was four, the great yellow-fever epidemic hit New Orleans. Families hammered together their own pine coffins, and deposited them on passing “dead wagons.” Train lost his mother and three sisters in the dreadful plague. At last a letter came from his maternal grandmother in Waltham, Massachusetts, begging his father to a send on some one of the family, before they are all dead. Send George.”
    Train’s father, before meeting his own death by the fever, sent the boy aboard the ship Henry with an identity card pinned to his coat. After twenty-three days at sea without a change of clothes, the four-year-old boy reached Waltham. From the day he entered the Pickering farm, he was in revolt. The members of his family were strict Methodists. Their only topical reading was a weekly periodical called Zion’s Herald . When his great-grandfather, who wore a fez and tippled, and his grandmother, who smoked a pipe, insisted that he learn to pray, Train complied but he would not kneel. “I could not see the necessity of God, and no one could ever explain to me the reason why there should be, or is, a God,” he said later. “Morality and ethics I could see the necessity of, and the high and authoritative reason for; but religion never appealed to my intelligence or to my emotions.”
    He helped to sell the family’s farm produce. He attended school. But when there was talk of preparing him for the clergy, or at least for the profession of blacksmith, he walked out. He was fourteen when he left the farm for a job in a Cambridgeport grocery. It was hard work. He labored from four o’clock daybreak until ten in the evening for fifty dollars a year. This went on for two years, and might have gone on longer but for the fact that one day he had a visitor who changed his entire life.
    His father’s cousin, a wealthy, conservative gentleman, Colonel Enoch Train, came calling in a splendid carriage. He made polite inquiries, then returned to the granite building at 37 Lewis Wharf, Boston, which housed the shipping enterprises of Train and Company.
    The following day, Train quit the grocery and appeared in Colonel Enoch’s office. “Where do I come in?” he bluntly asked. The Colonel was shocked. “Come in? Why, people don’t come into a big shipping house like this in that way. You are too young.” Train stood his ground, “I am growing older every day. That is the reason I am here. I want to make my way in the world.” It was a day when audacity was still respected. Train was put to work with the bookkeeper.
    The Colonel’s shipping house was never quite the same after that. In two years the tall, darkly attractive Train had become manager of the firm, and within four years he was receiving $10,000 annually as a partner. Completely uninhibited, Train modernized the business. The Colonel’s aged clippers were receiving stiff competition from the Black Ball Line and from Cunard’s new steamships. When the gold rush began in California, Train made his employer divert forty packets from the English run to the race around the Cape. Dismayed that their largest vessel was only 800 tons, Train prodded the dazed old man into contracting for larger, faster ships. As a result, Donald McKay was commissioned to build a radically new kind of boat, one with a sharp bow that sliced through or clipped the water. His most spectacular product for Train and Company was the 2,000-ton Flying Cloud, whose canvas soared ninety feet into the air and carried her around Cape Horn to California in a record-smashing eighty-nine days. She was followed by the 2,200-ton Monarch Of The Seas . The former was sold to the Swallow-Tail Line for $90,000, twice her cost, and the latter to a company in Germany for $110,000.
    But though he helped the Colonel, Train did not ignore himself. He decided to try a little exporting and importing on his own. He inveigled a company captain into smuggling three tins of opium into China in return for