CHAPTER I

Produced by Anne Soulard, Eric Eldred, John R. Bilderback,

and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

WINDY MCPHERSON’S SON

By Sherwood Anderson

To The Living Men And Women Of My Own Middle Western Home Town This Book

Is Dedicated

WINDY MCPHERSON’S SON

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam

McPherson, a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black

eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he

walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping

town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked

cautiously, lifting his bare feet and putting them down with extreme

deliberateness on the hot, dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried

a bundle of newspapers. A long black cigar was in his hand.

In front of the station he stopped; and Jerry Donlin, the baggage-man,

seeing the cigar in his hand, laughed, and slowly drew the side of his

face up into a laboured wink.

“What is the game to-night, Sam?” he asked.

Sam stepped to the baggage-room door, handed him the cigar, and

began giving directions, pointing into the baggage-room, intent and

business-like in the face of the Irishman’s laughter. Then, turning, he

walked across the station platform to the main street of the town, his

eyes bent on the ends of his fingers on which he was making computations

with his thumb. Jerry looked after him, grinning so that his red gums

made a splash of colour on his bearded face. A gleam of paternal pride

lit his eyes and he shook his head and muttered admiringly. Then,

lighting the cigar, he went down the platform to where a wrapped

bundle of newspapers lay against the building, under the window of the

telegraph office, and taking it in his arm disappeared, still grinning,

into the baggage-room.

Sam McPherson walked down Main Street, past the shoe store, the bakery,

and the candy store kept by Penny Hughes, toward a group lounging at

the front of Geiger’s drug store. Before the door of the shoe store he

paused a moment, and taking a small note-book from his pocket ran his

finger down the pages, then shaking his head continued on his way, again

absorbed in doing sums on his fingers.

Suddenly, from among the men by the drug store, a roaring song broke the

evening quiet of the street, and a voice, huge and guttural, brought a

smile to the boy’s lips:

“He washed the windows and he swept the floor,

And he polished up the handle of the big front door.

He polished that handle so carefullee,

That now he’s the ruler of the queen’s navee.”

The singer, a short man with grotesquely wide shoulders, wore a long

flowing moustache, and a black coat, covered with dust, that reached to

his knees. He held a smoking briar pipe in his hand, and with it beat

time for a row of men sitting on a long stone under the store window and

pounding on the sidewalk with their heels to make a chorus for the song.

Sam’s smile broadened into a grin as he looked at the singer, Freedom

Smith, a buyer of butter and eggs, and past him at John Telfer, the

orator, the dandy, the only man in town, except Mike McCarthy, who kept

his trousers creased. Among all the men of Caxton, Sam most admired

John Telfer and in his admiration had struck upon the town’s high light.

Telfer loved good clothes and wore them with an air, and never allowed

Caxton to see him shabbily or indifferently dressed, laughingly

declaring that it was his mission in life to give tone to the town.

John Telfer had a small income left him by his father, once a banker

in the town, and in his youth he had gone to New York to study art, and

later to Paris; but lacking ability or industry to get on had come back

to Caxton where he had married Eleanor Millis, a prosperous milliner.

They were the most successful married pair in Caxton, and after years

of life together they were still in love; were never indifferent to

each other, and never quarrelled; Telfer treated his wife with as much

consideration and respect as though she were a sweetheart, or a guest in

his house, and she, unlike most of the wives in Caxton, never ventured

to question his goings and comings, but left him free to live his own

life in his own way while she attended to the millinery business.

At the age of forty-five John Telfer was a tall, slender, fine looking

man, with black hair and a little black pointed beard, and with

something lazy and care-free in his every movement and impulse. Dressed

in white flannels, with white shoes, a jaunty cap upon his head,

eyeglasses hanging from a gold chain, and a cane lightly swinging from

his hand, he made a figure that might have passed unnoticed on the

promenade before some fashionable summer hotel, but that seemed a breach

of the laws of nature when seen on the streets of a corn-shipping town

in Iowa. And Telfer was aware of the extraordinary figure he cut; it was

a part of his programme of life. Now as Sam approached he laid a hand on

Freedom Smith’s shoulder to check the song, and, with his eyes twinkling

with good-humour, began thrusting with his cane at the boy’s feet.

“He will never be ruler of the queen’s navee,” he declared, laughing and

following the dancing boy about in a wide circle. “He is a little mole

that works underground intent upon worms. The trick he has of tilting up

his nose is only his way of smelling out stray pennies. I have it from

Banker Walker that he brings a basket of them into the bank every day.

One of these days he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket.”

Circling about on the stone sidewalk and dancing to escape the flying

cane, Sam dodged under the arm of Valmore, a huge old blacksmith with

shaggy clumps of hair on the back of his hands, and sought refuge

between him and Freedom Smith. The blacksmith’s hand stole out and lay

upon the boy’s shoulder. Telfer, his legs spread apart and the cane

hooked upon his arm, began rolling a cigarette; Geiger, a yellow skinned

man with fat cheeks and with hands clasped over his round paunch, smoked

a black cigar, and as he sent each puff into the air, grunted forth his

satisfaction with life. He was wishing that Telfer, Freedom Smith,

and Valmore, instead of moving on to their nightly nest at the back of

Wildman’s grocery, would come into his place for the evening. He

thought he would like to have the three of them there night after night

discussing the doings of the world.

Quiet once more settled down upon the sleepy street. Over Sam’s

shoulder, Valmore and Freedom Smith talked of the coming corn crop and

the growth and prosperity of the country.

“Times are getting better about here, but the wild things are almost

gone,” said Freedom, who in the winter bought hides and pelts.

The men sitting on the stone beneath the window watched with idle

interest Telfer’s labours with paper and tobacco. “Young Henry Kerns

has got married,” observed one of them, striving to make talk. “He

has married a girl from over Parkertown way. She gives lessons in

painting--china painting--kind of an artist, you know.”

An ejaculation of disgust broke from Telfer: his fingers trembled and

the tobacco that was to have been the foundation of his evening smoke

rained on the sidewalk.

“An artist!” he exclaimed, his voice tense with excitement. “Who said

artist? Who called her that?” He glared fiercely about. “Let us have an

end to this blatant misuse of fine old words. To say of one that he is

an artist is to touch the peak of praise.”

Throwing his cigarette paper after the scattered tobacco he thrust

one hand into his trouser pocket. With the other he held the cane,

emphasising his points by ringing taps upon the pavement. Geiger, taking

the cigar between his fingers, listened with open mouth to the outburst

that followed. Valmore and Freedom Smith dropped their conversation and

with broad smiles upon their faces gave attention, and Sam McPherson,

his eyes round with wonder and admiration, felt again the thrill that

always ran through him under the drum beats of Telfer’s eloquence.

“An artist is one who hungers and thirsts after perfection, not one

who dabs flowers upon plates to choke the gullets of diners,” declared

Telfer, setting himself for one of the long speeches with which he loved

to astonish the men of Caxton, and glaring down at those seated upon the

stone. “It is the artist who, among all men, has the divine audacity.

Does he not hurl himself into a battle in which is engaged against him

all of the accumulative genius of the world?”

Pausing, he looked about for an opponent upon whom he might pour the

flood of his eloquence, but on all sides smiles greeted him. Undaunted,

he rushed again to the charge.

“A business man--what is he?” he demanded. “He succeeds by outwitting

the little minds with which he comes in contact. A scientist is of

more account--he pits his brains against the dull unresponsiveness of

inanimate matter and a hundredweight of black iron he makes do the work

of a hundred housewives. But an artist tests his brains against the

greatest brains of all times; he stands upon the peak of life and hurls

himself against the world. A girl from Parkertown who paints flowers

upon dishes to be called an artist--ugh! Let me spew forth the thought!

Let me cleanse my mouth! A man should have a prayer upon his lips who

utters the word artist!”

“Well, we can’t all be artists and the woman can paint flowers upon

dishes for all I care,” spoke up Valmore, laughing good naturedly. “We

can’t all paint pictures and write books.”

“We do not want to be artists--we do not dare to be,” shouted Telfer,

whirling and shaking his cane at Valmore. “You have a misunderstanding

of the word.”

He straightened his shoulders and threw out his chest and the boy

standing beside the blacksmith threw up his chin, unconsciously

imitating the swagger of the man.

“I do not paint pictures; I do not write books; yet am I an artist,”

declared Telfer, proudly. “I am an artist practising the most difficult

of all arts--the art of living. Here in this western village I stand

and fling my challenge to the world. ‘On the lip of not the greatest of

you,’ I cry, ‘has life been more sweet.’”

He turned from Valmore to the men upon the stone.

“Make a study of my life,” he commanded. “It will be a revelation to

you. With a smile I greet the morning; I swagger in the noontime; and

in the evening, like Socrates of old, I gather a little group of you

benighted villagers about me and toss wisdom into your teeth, striving

to teach you judgment in the use of great words.”

“You talk an almighty lot about yourself, John,” grumbled Freedom Smith,

taking his pipe from his mouth.

“The subject is complex, it is varied, it is full of charm,” Telfer

answered, laughing.

Taking a fresh supply of tobacco and paper from his pocket, he rolled

and lighted a cigarette. His fingers no longer trembled. Flourishing his

cane he threw back his head and blew smoke into the air. He thought

that in spite of the roar of laughter that had greeted Freedom Smith’s

comment, he had vindicated the honour of art and the thought made him

happy.

To the newsboy, who had been leaning against the storefront lost in

admiration, it seemed that he had caught in Telfer’s talk an echo of the

kind of talk that must go on among men in the big outside world. Had

not this Telfer travelled far? Had he not lived in New York and Paris?

Without understanding the sense of what had been said, Sam felt that it

must be something big and conclusive. When from the distance there came

the shriek of a locomotive, he stood unmoved, trying to comprehend the

meaning of Telfer’s outburst over the lounger’s simple statement.

“There’s the seven forty-five,” cried Telfer, sharply. “Is the war

between you and Fatty at an end? Are we going to lose our evening’s

diversion? Has Fatty bluffed you out or are you growing rich and lazy

like Papa Geiger here?”

Springing from his place beside the blacksmith and grasping the bundle

of newspapers, Sam ran down the street, Telfer, Valmore, Freedom Smith

and the loungers following more slowly.

When the evening train from Des Moines stopped at Caxton, a blue-coated

train news merchant leaped hurriedly to the platform and began looking

anxiously about.

“Hurry, Fatty,” rang out Freedom Smith’s huge voice, “Sam’s already half

through one car.”

The young man called “Fatty” ran up and down the station platform.

“Where is that bundle of Omaha papers, you Irish loafer?” he shouted,

shaking his fist at Jerry Donlin who stood upon a truck at the front of

the train, up-ending trunks into the baggage car.

Jerry paused with a trunk dangling in mid-air. “In the baggage-room, of

course. Hurry, man. Do you want the kid to work the whole train?”

An air of something impending hung over the idlers upon the platform,

the train crew, and even the travelling men who began climbing off the

train. The engineer thrust his head out of the cab; the conductor, a

dignified looking man with a grey moustache, threw back his head and

shook with mirth; a young man with a suit-case in his hand and a long

pipe in his mouth ran to the door of the baggage-room, calling, “Hurry!

Hurry, Fatty! The kid is working the entire train. You won’t be able to

sell a paper.”

The fat young man ran from the baggage-room to the platform and shouted

again to Jerry Donlin, who was now slowly pushing the empty truck along

the platform. From the train came a clear voice calling, “Latest Omaha

papers! Have your change ready! Fatty, the train newsboy, has fallen

down a well! Have your change ready, gentlemen!”

Jerry Donlin, followed by Fatty, again disappeared from sight. The

conductor, waving his hand, jumped upon the steps of the train. The

engineer pulled in his head and the train began to move.

The fat young man emerged from the baggage-room, swearing revenge upon

the head of Jerry Donlin. “There was no need to put it under a mail

sack!” he shouted, shaking his fist. “I’ll be even with you for this.”

Followed by the shouts of the travelling men and the laughter of the

idlers upon the platform he climbed upon the moving train and began

running from car to car. Off the last car dropped Sam McPherson, a smile

upon his lips, the bundle of newspapers gone, his pocket jingling with

coins. The evening’s entertainment for the town of Caxton was at an end.

John Telfer, standing by the side of Valmore, waved his cane in the air

and began talking.

“Beat him again, by Gad!” he exclaimed. “Bully for Sam! Who says the

spirit of the old buccaneers is dead? That boy didn’t understand what I

said about art, but he is an artist just the same!”

CHAPTER II

Windy McPherson, the father of the Caxton newsboy, Sam McPherson, had

been war touched. The civilian clothes that he wore caused an itching

of the skin. He could not forget that he had once been a sergeant in a

regiment of infantry and had commanded a company through a battle fought

in ditches along a Virginia country road. He chafed under the fact of

his present obscure position in life. Had he been able to replace his

regimentals with the robes of a judge, the felt hat of a statesman, or

even with the night stick of a village marshal life might have retained

something of its sweetness, but to have ended by becoming an obscure

housepainter in a village that lived by raising corn and by feeding that

corn to red steers--ugh!--the thought made him shudder. He looked with

envy at the blue coat and the brass buttons of the railroad agent; he

tried vainly to get into the Caxton Cornet Band; he got drunk to forget

his humiliation and in the end he fell to loud boasting and to the

nursing of a belief within himself that in truth not Lincoln nor Grant

but he himself had thrown the winning die in the great struggle. In his

cups he said as much and the Caxton corn grower, punching his neighbour

in the ribs, shook with delight over the statement.

When Sam was a twelve year old, barefooted boy upon the streets a kind

of backwash of the wave of glory that had swept over Windy McPherson in

the days of ‘61 lapped upon the shores of the Iowa village. That strange

manifestation called the A. P. A. movement brought the old soldier to

a position of prominence in the community. He founded a local branch

of the organisation; he marched at the head of a procession through the

streets; he stood on a corner and pointing a trembling forefinger

to where the flag on the schoolhouse waved beside the cross of Rome,

shouted hoarsely, “See, the cross rears itself above the flag! We shall

end by being murdered in our beds!”

But although some of the hard-headed, money-making men of Caxton joined

the movement started by the boasting old soldier and although for the

moment they vied with him in stealthy creepings through the streets to

secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands the movement

subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its leader more

desolate.

In the little house at the end of the street by the shores of Squirrel

Creek, Sam and his sister Kate regarded their father’s warlike

pretensions with scorn. “The butter is low, father’s army leg will ache

to-night,” they whispered to each other across the kitchen table.

Following her mother’s example, Kate, a tall slender girl of sixteen

and already a bread winner with a clerkship in Winney’s drygoods store,

remained silent under Windy’s boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate

them, did not always succeed. There was now and then a rebellious

muttering that should have warned Windy. It had once burst into an open

quarrel in which the victor of a hundred battles withdrew defeated from

the field. Windy, half-drunk, had taken an old account book from a shelf

in the kitchen, a relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when he had

first come to Caxton, and had begun reading to the little family a list

of names of men who, he claimed, had been the cause of his ruin.

“There is Tom Newman, now,” he exclaimed excitedly. “Owns a hundred

acres of good corn-growing land and won’t pay for the harness on the

backs of his horses or for the ploughs in his barn. The receipt he has

from me is forged. I could put him in prison if I chose. To beat an old

soldier!--to beat one of the boys of ‘61!--it is shameful!”

“I have heard of what you owed and what men owed you; you had none the

worst of it,” Sam protested coldly, while Kate held her breath and Jane

McPherson, at work over the ironing board in the corner, half turned and

looked silently at the man and the boy, the slightly increased pallor of

her long face the only sign that she had heard.

Windy had not pressed the quarrel. Standing for a moment in the middle

of the kitchen, holding the book in his hand, he looked from the pale

silent mother by the ironing board to the son now standing and staring

at him, and, throwing the book upon the table with a bang, fled the

house. “You don’t understand,” he had cried, “you don’t understand the

heart of a soldier.”

In a way the man was right. The two children did not understand the

blustering, pretending, inefficient old man. Having moved shoulder to

shoulder with grim, silent men to the consummation of great deeds Windy

could not get the flavour of those days out of his outlook upon life.

Walking half drunk in the darkness along the sidewalks of Caxton on

the evening of the quarrel the man became inspired. He threw back his

shoulders and walked with martial tread; he drew an imaginary sword from

its scabbard and waved it aloft; stopping, he aimed carefully at a body

of imaginary men who advanced yelling toward him across a wheatfield; he

felt that life in making him a housepainter in a farming village in Iowa

and in giving him an unappreciative son had been cruelly unfair; he wept

at the injustice of it.

The American Civil War was a thing so passionate, so inflaming, so vast,

so absorbing, it so touched to the quick the men and women of those

pregnant days that but a faint echo of it has been able to penetrate

down to our days and to our minds; no real sense of it has as yet crept

into the pages of a printed book; it yet wants its Thomas Carlyle; and

in the end we are put to the need of listening to old fellows boasting

on our village streets to get upon our cheeks the living breath of it.

For four years the men of American cities, villages and farms walked

across the smoking embers of a burning land, advancing and receding as

the flame of that universal, passionate, death-spitting thing swept down

upon them or receded toward the smoking sky-line. Is it so strange that

they could not come home and begin again peacefully painting houses or

mending broken shoes? A something in them cried out. It sent them to

bluster and boast upon the street corners. When people passing continued

to think only of their brick laying and of their shovelling of corn

into cars, when the sons of these war gods walking home at evening and

hearing the vain boastings of the fathers began to doubt even the facts

of the great struggle, a something snapped in their brains and they fell

to chattering and shouting their vain boastings to all as they looked

hungrily about for believing eyes.

When our own Thomas Carlyle comes to write of our Civil War he will make

much of our Windy McPhersons. He will see something big and pathetic in

their hungry search for auditors and in their endless war talk. He

will go filled with eager curiosity into little G. A. R. halls in the

villages and think of the men who coming there night after night, year

after year, told and re-told endlessly, monotonously, their story of

battle.

Let us hope that in his fervour for the old fellows he will not fail to

treat tenderly the families of those veteran talkers; the families that

with their breakfasts and their dinners, by the fire at evening, through

fast day and feast day, at weddings and at funerals got again and again

endlessly, everlastingly this flow of war words. Let him reflect that

peaceful men in corn-growing counties do not by choice sleep among the

dogs of war nor wash their linen in the blood of their country’s foe.

Let him, in his sympathy with the talkers, remember with kindness the

heroism of the listeners.

* * * * *

On a summer day Sam McPherson sat on a box before Wildman’s grocery lost

in thought. In his hand he held the little yellow account book and in

this he buried himself, striving to wipe from his consciousness a scene

being enacted before his eyes upon the street.

The realisation of the fact that his father was a confirmed liar and

braggart had for years cast a shadow over his days and the shadow had

been made blacker by the fact that in a land where the least fortunate

can laugh in the face of want he had more than once stood face to face

with poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation was

money in the bank and with all the ardour of his boy’s heart he strove

to realise that answer. He wanted to be a money-maker and the totals at

the foot of the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones

that marked the progress he had already made. They told him that the

daily struggles with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton’s streets on

bleak winter evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when crowds

filled the stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he worked

among them tirelessly and persistently were not without fruit.

Suddenly, above the murmur of men’s voices on the street, his father’s

voice rose loud and insistent. A block further down the street, leaning

against the door of Hunter’s jewelry store, Windy talked at the top of

his lungs, pumping his arms up and down with the air of a man making a

stump speech.

“He is making a fool of himself,” thought Sam, and returned to his

bankbook, striving in the contemplation of the totals at the foot of the

pages to shake off the dull anger that had begun to burn in his brain.

Glancing up again, he saw that Joe Wildman, son of the grocer and a

boy of his own age, had joined the group of men laughing and jeering at

Windy. The shadow on Sam’s face grew heavier.

Sam had been at Joe Wildman’s house; he knew the air of plenty and of

comfort that hung over it; the table piled high with meat and potatoes;

the group of children laughing and eating to the edge of gluttony; the

quiet, gentle father who amid the clamour and the noise did not raise

his voice, and the well-dressed, bustling, rosy-cheeked mother. As a

contrast to this scene he began to call up in his mind a picture of

life in his own home, getting a kind of perverted pleasure out of his

dissatisfaction with it. He saw the boasting, incompetent father telling

his endless tales of the Civil War and complaining of his wounds; the

tall, stoop-shouldered, silent mother with the deep lines in her long

face, everlastingly at work over her washtub among the soiled clothes;

the silent, hurriedly-eaten meals snatched from the kitchen table; and

the long winter days when ice formed upon his mother’s skirts and

Windy idled about town while the little family subsisted upon bowls of

cornmeal mush everlastingly repeated.

Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half gone

in drink, and knew that he was boasting of his part in the Civil War.

“He is either doing that or telling of his aristocratic family or lying

about his birthplace,” he thought resentfully, and unable any longer to

endure the sight of what seemed to him his own degradation, he got up

and went into the grocery where a group of Caxton citizens stood talking

to Wildman of a meeting to be held that morning at the town hall.

Caxton was to have a Fourth of July celebration. The idea, born in the

heads of the few, had been taken up by the many. Rumours of it had run

through the streets late in May. It had been talked of in Geiger’s drug

store, at the back of Wildman’s grocery, and in the street before the

New Leland House. John Telfer, the town’s one man of leisure, had

for weeks been going from place to place discussing the details with

prominent men. Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall over

Geiger’s drug store and to a man the citizens of Caxton had turned out

for the meeting. The housepainter had come down off his ladder, the

clerks were locking the doors of the stores, men went along the streets

in groups bound for the hall. As they went they shouted to each other.

“The old town has woke up,” they called.

On a corner by Hunter’s jewelry store Windy McPherson leaned against a

building and harangued the passing crowd.

“Let the old flag wave,” he shouted excitedly, “let the men of Caxton

show the true blue and rally to the old standards.”

“That’s right, Windy, expostulate with them,” shouted a wit, and a roar

of laughter drowned Windy’s reply.

Sam McPherson also went to the meeting in the hall. He came out of the

grocery store with Wildman and went along the street looking at the

sidewalk and trying not to see the drunken man talking in front of the

jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up

and down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the

town’s life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned.

He squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window

ledge where he could watch the men come in and find seats.

As Caxton’s one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a

living and a kind of standing in the town’s life. To be a newsboy or a

bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in

the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great

men and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day

likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town owe to

future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the men of Caxton

and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the window ledge of the

hall while the other boys of the town waited on the sidewalk below.

John Telfer was chairman of the mass meeting. He was always chairman of

public meetings in Caxton. The industrious silent men of position in

the town envied his easy, bantering style of public address, while

pretending to treat it with scorn. “He talks too much,” they said,

making a virtue of their own inability with apt and clever words.

Telfer did not wait to be appointed chairman of the meeting, but went

forward, climbed the little raised platform at the end of the hall,

and usurped the chairmanship. He walked up and down on the platform

bantering with the crowd, answering gibes, calling to well-known men,

getting and giving keen satisfaction with his talent. When the hall was

filled with men he called the meeting to order, appointed committees and

launched into a harangue. He told of plans made to advertise the big

day in other towns and to get low railroad rates arranged for excursion

parties. The programme, he said, included a musical carnival with brass

bands from other towns, a sham battle by the military company at the

fairgrounds, horse races, speeches from the steps of the town hall,

and fireworks in the evening. “We’ll show them a live town here,” he

declared, walking up and down the platform and swinging his cane, while

the crowd applauded and shouted its approval.

When a call came for voluntary subscriptions to pay for the fun, the

audience quieted down. One or two men got up and started to go out,

grumbling that it was a waste of money. The fate of the celebration was

on the knees of the gods.

Telfer arose to the occasion. He called out the names of the departing,

and made jests at their expense so that they dropped back into their

chairs unable to face the roaring laughter of the crowd, and shouted

to a man at the back of the hall to close and bolt the door. Men began

getting up in various parts of the hall and calling out sums, Telfer

repeating the name and the amount in a loud voice to young Tom Jedrow,

clerk in the bank, who wrote them down in a book. When the amount

subscribed did not meet with his approval, he protested and the crowd

backing him up forced the increase he demanded. When a man did not rise,

he shouted at him and the man answered back an amount.

Suddenly in the hall a diversion arose. Windy McPherson emerged from the

crowd at the back of the hall and walked down the centre aisle to the

platform. He walked unsteadily straightening his shoulders and thrusting

out his chin. When he got to the front of the hall he took a roll of

bills from his pocket and threw it on the platform at the chairman’s

feet. “From one of the boys of ‘61,” he announced in a loud voice.

The crowd shouted and clapped its hands with delight as Telfer picked

up the bills and ran his finger over them. “Seventeen dollars from our

hero, the mighty McPherson,” he shouted while the bank clerk wrote the

name and the amount in the book and the crowd continued to make merry

over the title given the drunken soldier by the chairman.

The boy on the window ledge slipped to the floor and stood with burning

cheeks behind the mass of men. He knew that at home his mother was

doing a family washing for Lesley, the shoe merchant, who had given five

dollars to the Fourth-of-July fund, and the resentment he had felt on

seeing his father talking to the crowd before the jewelry store blazed

up anew.

After the taking of subscriptions, men in various parts of the hall

began making suggestions for added features for the great day. To some

of the speakers the crowd listened respectfully, at others they

hooted. An old man with a grey beard told a long rambling story of a

Fourth-of-July celebration of his boyhood. When voices interrupted he

protested and shook his fist in the air, pale with indignation.

“Oh, sit down, old daddy,” shouted Freedom Smith and a murmur of

applause greeted this sensible suggestion.

Another man got up and began to talk. He had an idea. “We will have,” he

said, “a bugler mounted on a white horse who will ride through the town

at dawn blowing the reveille. At midnight he will stand on the steps of

the town hall and blow taps to end the day.”

The crowd applauded. The idea had caught their fancy and had instantly

taken a place in their minds as one of the real events of the day.

Again Windy McPherson emerged from the crowd at the back of the hall.

Raising his hand for silence he told the crowd that he was a bugler,

that he had been a regimental bugler for two years during the Civil War.

He said that he would gladly volunteer for the place.

The crowd shouted and John Telfer waved his hand. “The white horse for

you, McPherson,” he said.

Sam McPherson wriggled along the wall and out at the now unbolted door.

He was filled with astonishment at his father’s folly, and was still

more astonished at the folly of these other men in accepting his

statement and handing over the important place for the big day. He knew

that his father must have had some part in the war as he was a member of

the G. A. R., but he had no faith at all in the stories he had heard

him relate of his experiences in the war. Sometimes he caught himself

wondering if there ever had been such a war and thought that it must be

a lie like everything else in the life of Windy McPherson. For years he

had wondered why some sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did

not rise, and in a matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing

as the Civil War had ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in

the minds of pompous old men demanding unearned glory of their fellows.

Now hurrying along the street with burning cheeks, he decided that after

all there must have been such a war. He had had the same feeling about

birthplaces and there could be no doubt that people were born. He

had heard his father claim as his birthplace Kentucky, Texas, North

Carolina, Louisiana and Scotland. The thing had left a kind of defect in

his mind. To the end of his life when he heard a man tell the place of

his birth he looked up suspiciously, and a shadow of doubt crossed his

mind.

From the mass meeting Sam went home to his mother and presented the case

bluntly. “The thing will have to be stopped,” he declared, standing

with blazing eyes before her washtub. “It is too public. He can’t blow

a bugle; I know he can’t. The whole town will have another laugh at our

expense.”

Jane McPherson listened in silence to the boy’s outburst, then, turning,

went back to rubbing clothes, avoiding his eyes.

With his hands thrust into his trousers pocket Sam stared sullenly at

the ground. A sense of justice told him not to press the matter, but as

he walked away from the washtub and out at the kitchen door, he hoped

there would be plain talk of the matter at supper time. “The old fool!”

he protested, addressing the empty street. “He is going to make a show

of himself again.”

When Windy McPherson came home that evening, something in the eyes of

the silent wife, and the sullen face of the boy, startled him. He passed

over lightly his wife’s silence but looked closely at his son. He felt

that he faced a crisis. In the emergency he was magnificent. With a

flourish, he told of the mass meeting, and declared that the citizens

of Caxton had arisen as one man to demand that he take the responsible

place as official bugler. Then, turning, he glared across the table at

his son.

Sam, openly defiant, announced that he did not believe his father

capable of blowing a bugle.

Windy roared with amazement. He rose from the table declaring in a loud

voice that the boy had wronged him; he swore that he had been for two

years bugler on the staff of a colonel, and launched into a long story

of a surprise by the enemy while his regiment lay asleep in their tents,

and of his standing in the face of a storm of bullets and blowing his

comrades to action. Putting one hand on his forehead he rocked back and

forth as though about to fall, declaring that he was striving to

keep back the tears wrenched from him by the injustice of his son’s

insinuation and, shouting so that his voice carried far down the street,

he declared with an oath that the town of Caxton should ring and echo

with his bugling as the sleeping camp had echoed with it that night in

the Virginia wood. Then dropping again into his chair, and resting his

head upon his hand, he assumed a look of patient resignation.

Windy McPherson was victorious. In the little house a great stir

and bustle of preparation arose. Putting on his white overalls and

forgetting for the time his honourable wounds the father went day after

day to his work as a housepainter. He dreamed of a new blue uniform for

the great day and in the end achieved the realisation of his dreams, not

however without material assistance from what was known in the house

as “Mother’s Wash Money.” And the boy, convinced by the story of the

midnight attack in the woods of Virginia, began against his judgment to

build once more an old dream of his father’s reformation. Boylike, the

scepticism was thrown to the winds and he entered with zeal into the

plans for the great day. As he went through the quiet residence streets

delivering the late evening papers, he threw back his head and revelled

in the thought of a tall blue-clad figure on a great white horse passing

like a knight before the gaping people. In a fervent moment he even drew

money from his carefully built-up bank account and sent it to a firm in

Chicago to pay for a shining new bugle that would complete the picture

he had in his mind. And when the evening papers were distributed he

hurried home to sit on the porch before the house discussing with his

sister Kate the honours that had alighted upon their family.

* * * * *

With the coming of dawn on the great day the three McPhersons hurried

hand in hand toward Main Street. In the street, on all sides of them,

they saw people coming out of houses rubbing their eyes and buttoning

their coats as they went along the sidewalk. All of Caxton seemed

abroad.

In Main Street the people were packed on the sidewalk, and massed on the

curb and in the doorways of the stores. Heads appeared at windows, flags

waved from roofs or hung from ropes stretched across the street, and a

great murmur of voices broke the silence of the dawn.

Sam’s heart beat so that he was hard put to it to keep back the tears

from his eyes. He thought with a gasp of the days of anxiety that had

passed when the new bugle had not come from the Chicago company, and in

retrospect he suffered again the horror of the days of waiting. It

had been all important. He could not blame his father for raving and

shouting about the house, he himself had felt like raving, and had put

another dollar of his savings into telegrams before the treasure was

finally in his hands. Now, the thought that it might not have come

sickened him, and a little prayer of thankfulness rose from his lips.

To be sure one might have been secured from a nearby town, but not a new

shining one to go with his father’s new blue uniform.

A cheer broke from the crowd massed along the street. Into the street

rode a tall figure seated upon a white horse. The horse was from

Culvert’s livery and the boys there had woven ribbons into its mane and

tail. Windy McPherson, sitting very straight in the saddle and looking

wonderfully striking in the new blue uniform and the broad-brimmed

campaign hat, had the air of a conqueror come to receive the homage of

the town. He wore a gold band across his chest and against his hip

rested the shining bugle. With stern eyes he looked down upon the

people.

The lump in the throat of the boy hurt more and more. A great wave of

pride ran over him, submerging him. In a moment he forgot all the past

humiliations the father had brought upon his family, and understood

why his mother remained silent when he, in his blindness, had wanted to

protest against her seeming indifference. Glancing furtively up he saw

a tear lying upon her cheek and felt that he too would like to sob aloud

his pride and happiness.

Slowly and with stately stride the horse walked up the street between

the rows of silent waiting people. In front of the town hall the tall

military figure, rising in the saddle, took one haughty look at the

multitude, and then, putting the bugle to his lips, blew.

Out of the bugle came only a thin piercing shriek followed by a squawk.

Again Windy put the bugle to his lips and again the same dismal

squawk was his only reward. On his face was a look of helpless boyish

astonishment.

And in a moment the people knew. It was only another of Windy

McPherson’s pretensions. He couldn’t blow a bugle at all.

A great shout of laughter rolled down the street. Men and women sat on

the curbstones and laughed until they were tired. Then, looking at the

figure upon the motionless horse, they laughed again.

Windy looked about him with troubled eyes. It is doubtful if he had ever

had a bugle to his lips until that moment, but he was filled with wonder

and astonishment that the reveille did not roll forth. He had heard

the thing a thousand times and had it clearly in his mind; with all his

heart he wanted it to roll forth, and could picture the street ringing

with it and the applause of the people; the thing, he felt, was in him,

and it was only a fatal blunder in nature that it did not come out at

the flaring end of the bugle. He was amazed at this dismal end of his

great moment--he was always amazed and helpless before facts.

The crowd began gathering about the motionless, astonished figure,

laughter continuing to send them off into something near convulsions.

Grasping the bridle of the horse, John Telfer began leading it off up

the street. Boys whooped and shouted at the rider, “Blow! Blow!”

The three McPhersons stood in a doorway leading into a shoe store. The

boy and the mother, white and speechless with humiliation, dared not

look at each other. In the flood of shame sweeping over them they stared

straight before them with hard, stony eyes.

The procession led by John Telfer at the bridle of the white horse

marched down the street. Looking up, the eyes of the laughing, shouting

man met those of the boy and a look of pain shot across his face.

Dropping the bridle he hurried away through the crowd. The procession

moved on, and watching their chance the mother and the two children

crept home along side streets, Kate weeping bitterly. Leaving them at

the door Sam went straight on down a sandy road toward a small wood.

“I’ve got my lesson. I’ve got my lesson,” he muttered over and over as

he went.

At the edge of the wood he stopped and leaning on a rail fence watched

until he saw his mother come out to the pump in the back yard. She had

begun to draw water for the day’s washing. For her also the holiday was

at an end. A flood of tears ran down the boy’s cheeks, and he shook his

fist in the direction of the town. “You may laugh at that fool Windy,

but you shall never laugh at Sam McPherson,” he cried, his voice shaking

with excitement.

CHAPTER III

One evening, when he had grown so that he outtopped Windy, Sam McPherson

returned from his paper route to find his mother arrayed in her black,

church-going dress. An evangelist was at work in Caxton and she had

decided to hear him. Sam shuddered. In the house it was an understood

thing that when Jane McPherson went to church her son went with her.

There was nothing said. Jane McPherson did all things without words,

always there was nothing said. Now she stood waiting in her black

dress when her son came in at the door and he hurriedly put on his best

clothes and went with her to the brick church.

Valmore, John Telfer, and Freedom Smith, who had taken upon themselves

a kind of common guardianship of the boy and with whom he spent evening

after evening at the back of Wildman’s grocery, did not go to church.

They talked of religion and seemed singularly curious and interested in

what other men thought on the subject but they did not allow themselves

to be coaxed into a house of worship. To the boy, who had become a

fourth member of the evening gatherings at the back of the grocery

store, they would not talk of God, answering the direct questions he

sometimes asked by changing the subject. Once Telfer, the reader of

poetry, answered the boy. “Sell papers and fill your pockets with money

but let your soul sleep,” he said sharply.

In the absence of the others Wildman talked more freely. He was a

spiritualist and tried to make Sam see the beauties of that faith.

On long summer afternoons the grocer and the boy spent hours driving

through the streets in a rattling old delivery wagon, the man striving

earnestly to make clear to the boy the shadowy ideas of God that were in

his mind.

Although Windy McPherson had been the leader of a Bible class in his

youth, and had been a moving spirit at revival meetings during his early

days in Caxton, he no longer went to church and his wife did not ask

him to go. On Sunday mornings he lay abed. If there was work to be done

about the house or yard he complained of his wounds. He complained of

his wounds when the rent fell due, and when there was a shortage of food

in the house. Later in his life and after the death of Jane McPherson

the old soldier married the widow of a farmer by whom he had four

children and with whom he went to church twice on Sunday. Kate wrote

Sam one of her infrequent letters about it. “He has met his match,” she

said, and was tremendously pleased.

In church on Sunday mornings Sam went regularly to sleep, putting his

head on his mother’s arm and sleeping throughout the service. Jane

McPherson loved to have the boy there beside her. It was the one thing

in life they did together and she did not mind his sleeping the time

away. Knowing how late he had been upon the streets at the paper selling

on Saturday evenings, she looked at him with eyes filled with tenderness

and sympathy. Once the minister, a man with brown beard and hard,

tightly-closed mouth, spoke to her. “Can’t you keep him awake?” he

asked impatiently. “He needs the sleep,” she said and hurried past the

minister and out of the church, looking ahead of her and frowning.

The evening of the evangelist meeting was a summer evening fallen on a

winter month. All day the warm winds had come up from the southwest. Mud

lay soft and deep in the streets and among the little pools of water

on the sidewalks were dry spots from which steam arose. Nature had

forgotten herself. A day that should have sent old fellows to their

nests behind stoves in stores sent them forth to loaf in the sun. The

night fell warm and cloudy. A thunder storm threatened in the month of

February.

Sam walked along the sidewalk with his mother bound for the brick

church, wearing a new grey overcoat. The night did not demand the

overcoat but Sam wore it out of an excess of pride in its possession.

The overcoat had an air. It had been made by Gunther the tailor after a

design sketched on the back of a piece of wrapping paper by John Telfer

and had been paid for out of the newsboy’s savings. The little

German tailor, after a talk with Valmore and Telfer, had made it at a

marvellously low price. Sam swaggered as he walked.

He did not sleep in church that evening; indeed he found the quiet

church filled with a medley of strange noises. Folding carefully the new

coat and laying it beside him on the seat he looked with interest at

the people, feeling within him something of the nervous excitement with

which the air was charged. The evangelist, a short, athletic-looking man

in a grey business suit, seemed to the boy out of place in the church.

He had the assured business-like air of the travelling men who come to

the New Leland House, and Sam thought he looked like a man who had goods

to be sold. He did not stand quietly back of the pulpit giving out the

text as did the brown-bearded minister, nor did he sit with closed eyes

and clasped hands waiting for the choir to finish singing. While the

choir sang he ran up and down the platform waving his arms and shouting

excitedly to the people on the church benches, “Sing! Sing! Sing! For

the glory of God, sing!”

When the song was finished, he began talking, quietly at first, of life

in the town. As he talked he grew more and more excited. “The town is a

cesspool of vice!” he shouted. “It reeks with evil! The devil counts it

a suburb of hell!”

His voice rose, and sweat ran off his face. A sort of frenzy seized him.

He pulled off his coat and throwing it over a chair ran up and down the

platform and into the aisles among the people, shouting, threatening,

pleading. People began to stir uneasily in their seats. Jane McPherson

stared stonily at the back of the woman in front of her. Sam was

horribly frightened.

The newsboy of Caxton was not without a hunger for religion. Like all

boys he thought much and often of death. In the night he sometimes

awakened cold with fear, thinking that death must be just without the

door of his room waiting for him. When in the winter he had a cold and

coughed, he trembled at the thought of tuberculosis. Once, when he was

taken with a fever, he fell asleep and dreamed that he had died and was

walking on the trunk of a fallen tree over a ravine filled with lost

souls that shrieked with terror. When he awoke he prayed. Had some one

come into his room and heard his prayer he would have been ashamed.

On winter evenings as he walked through the dark streets with the papers

under his arm he thought of his soul. As he thought a tenderness came

over him; a lump came into his throat and he pitied himself; he felt

that there was something missing in his life, something he wanted very

badly.

Under John Telfer’s influence, the boy, who had quit school to devote

himself to money making, read Walt Whitman and had a season of admiring

his own body with its straight white legs, and the head that was poised

so jauntily on the body. Sometimes he would awaken on summer nights and

be so filled with strange longing that he would creep out of bed and,

pushing open the window, sit upon the floor, his bare legs sticking out

beyond his white nightgown, and, thus sitting, yearn eagerly toward some

fine impulse, some call, some sense of bigness and of leadership that

was absent from the necessities of the life he led. He looked at the

stars and listened to the night noises, so filled with longing that the

tears sprang to his eyes.

Once, after the affair of the bugle, Jane McPherson had been ill--and

the first touch of the finger of death reaching out to her--had sat with

her son in the warm darkness in the little grass plot at the front of

the house. It was a clear, warm, starlit evening without a moon, and as

the two sat closely together a sense of the coming of death crept over

the mother.

At the evening meal Windy McPherson had talked voluminously, ranting

and shouting about the house. He said that a housepainter who had a real

sense of colour had no business trying to work in a hole like Caxton.

He had been in trouble with a housewife about a colour he had mixed for

painting a porch floor and at his own table he raved about the woman

and what he declared her lack of even a primitive sense of colour. “I

am sick of it all,” he shouted, going out of the house and up the street

with uncertain steps. His wife had been unmoved by his outburst, but in

the presence of the quiet boy whose chair touched her own she trembled

with a strange new fear and began to talk of the life after death,

making effort after effort to get at what she wanted to say, and only

succeeding in finding expression for her thoughts in little sentences

broken by long painful pauses. She told the boy she had no doubt at all

that there was some kind of future life and that she believed she should

see and live with him again after they had finished with this world.

One day the minister who had been annoyed because he had slept in his

church, stopped Sam on the street to talk to him of his soul. He said

that the boy should be thinking of making himself one of the brothers in

Christ by joining the church. Sam listened silently to the talk of the

man, whom he instinctively disliked, but in his silence felt there was

something insincere. With all his heart he wanted to repeat a sentence

he had heard from the lips of grey-haired, big-fisted Valmore--“How can

they believe and not lead a life of simple, fervent devotion to their

belief?” He thought himself superior to the thin-lipped man who talked

with him and had he been able to express what was in his heart he might

have said, “Look here, man! I am made of different stuff from all the

people there at the church. I am new clay to be moulded into a new man.

Not even my mother is like me. I do not accept your ideas of life just

because you say they are good any more than I accept Windy McPherson

just because he happens to be my father.”

During one winter Sam spent evening after evening reading the Bible in

his room. It was after Kate’s marriage--she had got into an affair with

a young farmer that had kept her name upon the tongues of whisperers for

months but was now a housewife on a farm at the edge of a village some

miles from Caxton, and the mother was again at her endless task among

the soiled clothes in the kitchen and Windy McPherson off drinking and

boasting about town. Sam read the book in secret. He had a lamp on a

little stand beside his bed and a novel, lent him by John Telfer, beside

it. When his mother came up the stairway he slipped the Bible under

the cover of the bed and became absorbed in the novel. He thought it

something not quite in keeping with his aims as a business man and a

money getter to be concerned about his soul. He wanted to conceal his

concern but with all his heart wanted to get hold of the message of

the strange book, about which men wrangled hour after hour on winter

evenings in the store.

He did not get it; and after a time he stopped reading the book. Left to

himself he might have sensed its meaning, but on all sides of him were

the voices of the men--the men at Wildman’s who owned to no faith and

yet were filled with dogmatisms as they talked behind the stove in the

grocery; the brown-bearded, thin-lipped minister in the brick church;

the shouting, pleading evangelists who came to visit the town in

the winter; the gentle old grocer who talked vaguely of the spirit

world,--all these voices were at the mind of the boy pleading,

insisting, demanding, not that Christ’s simple message that men love

one another to the end, that they work together for the common good, be

accepted, but that their own complex interpretation of his word be taken

to the end that souls be saved.

In the end the boy of Caxton got to the place where he had a dread

of the word soul. It seemed to him that the mention of the word in

conversation was something shameful and to think of the word or the

shadowy something for which the word stood an act of cowardice. In his

mind the soul became a thing to be hidden away, covered up, not thought

of. One might be allowed to speak of the matter at the moment of death,

but for the healthy man or boy to have the thought of his soul in

his mind or word of it on his lips--one might better become blatantly

profane and go to the devil with a swagger. With delight he imagined

himself as dying and with his last breath tossing a round oath into the

air of his death chamber.

In the meantime Sam continued to have inexplicable longings and hopes.

He kept surprising himself by the changing aspect of his own viewpoint

of life. He found himself indulging in the most petty meannesses, and

following these with flashes of a kind of loftiness of mind. Looking at

a girl passing in the street, he had unbelievably mean thoughts; and the

next day, passing the same girl, a line caught from the babbling of John

Telfer came to his lips and he went his way muttering, “June’s twice

June since she breathed it with me.”

And then into the complex nature of this boy came the sex motive.

Already he dreamed of having women in his arms. He looked shyly at the

ankles of women crossing the street, and listened eagerly when the crowd

about the stove in Wildman’s fell to telling smutty stories. He sank

to unbelievable depths of triviality in sordidness, looking shyly into

dictionaries for words that appealed to the animal lust in his queerly

perverted mind and, when he came across it, lost entirely the beauty of

the old Bible tale of Ruth in the suggestion of intimacy between man and

woman that it brought to him. And yet Sam McPherson was no evil-minded

boy. He had, as a matter of fact, a quality of intellectual honesty that

appealed strongly to the clean-minded, simple-hearted old blacksmith

Valmore; he had awakened something like love in the hearts of the women

school teachers in the Caxton schools, at least one of whom continued

to interest herself in him, taking him with her on walks along country

roads, and talking to him constantly of the development of his mind; and

he was the friend and boon companion of Telfer, the dandy, the reader of

poems, the keen lover of life. The boy was struggling to find himself.

One night when the sex call kept him awake he got up and dressed, and

went and stood in the rain by the creek in Miller’s pasture. The wind

swept the rain across the face of the water and a sentence flashed

through his mind: “The little feet of the rain run on the water.” There

was a quality of almost lyrical beauty in the Iowa boy.

And this boy, who couldn’t get hold of his impulse toward God, whose sex

impulses made him at times mean, at times full of beauty, and who had

decided that the impulse toward bargaining and money getting was the

impulse in him most worth cherishing, now sat beside his mother in

church and watched with wide-open eyes the man who took off his coat,

who sweated profusely, and who called the town in which he lived a

cesspool of vice and its citizens wards of the devil.

The evangelist from talking of the town began talking instead of heaven

and hell and his earnestness caught the attention of the listening boy

who began seeing pictures.

Into his mind there came a picture of a burning pit of fire in which

great flames leaped about the heads of the people who writhed in the

pit. “Art Sherman would be there,” thought Sam, materialising the

picture he saw; “nothing can save him; he keeps a saloon.”

Filled with pity for the man he saw in the picture of the burning pit,

his mind centered on the person of Art Sherman. He liked Art Sherman.

More than once he had felt the touch of human kindness in the man. The

roaring, blustering saloonkeeper had helped the boy sell and collect

for newspapers. “Pay the kid or get out of the place,” the red-faced man

roared at drunken men leaning on the bar.

And then, looking into the burning pit, Sam thought of Mike McCarthy,

for whom he had at that moment a kind of passion akin to a young girl’s

blind devotion to her lover. With a shudder he realised that Mike also

would go into the pit, for he had heard Mike laughing at churches and

declaring there was no God.

The evangelist ran upon the platform and called to the people demanding

that they stand upon their feet. “Stand up for Jesus,” he shouted;

“stand up and be counted among the host of the Lord God.”

In the church people began getting to their feet. Jane McPherson stood

with the others. Sam did not stand. He crept behind his mother’s dress,

hoping to pass through the storm unnoticed. The call to the faithful to

stand was a thing to be complied with or resisted as the people might

wish; it was something entirely outside of himself. It did not occur to

him to count himself among either the lost or the saved.

Again the choir began singing and a businesslike movement began among

the people. Men and women went up and down the aisles clasping the hands

of people in the pews, talking and praying aloud. “Welcome among us,”

they said to certain ones who stood upon their feet. “It gladdens our

hearts to see you among us. We are happy at seeing you in the fold among

the saved. It is good to confess Jesus.”

Suddenly a voice from the bench back of him struck terror to Sam’s

heart. Jim Williams, who worked in Sawyer’s barber shop, was upon his

knees and in a loud voice was praying for the soul of Sam McPherson.

“Lord, help this erring boy who goes up and down in the company of

sinners and publicans,” he shouted.

In a moment the terror of death and the fiery pit that had possessed him

passed, and Sam was filled instead with blind, dumb rage. He remembered

that this same Jim Williams had treated lightly the honour of his sister

at the time of her disappearance, and he wanted to get upon his feet and

pour out his wrath on the head of the man, who, he felt, had betrayed

him. “They would not have seen me,” he thought; “this is a fine trick

Jim Williams has played me. I shall be even with him for this.”

He got to his feet and stood beside his mother. He had no qualms about

passing himself off as one of the lambs safely within the fold. His mind

was bent upon quieting Jim Williams’ prayers and avoiding the attention

of the people.

The minister began calling on the standing people to testify of their

salvation. From various parts of the church the people spoke out, some

loudly and boldly and with a ring of confidence in their voices, some

tremblingly and hesitatingly. One woman wept loudly shouting between the

paroxysms of sobbing that seized her, “The weight of my sins is heavy on

my soul.” Girls and young men when called on by the minister responded

with shamed, hesitating voices asking that a verse of some hymn be sung,

or quoting a line of scripture.

At the back of the church the evangelist with one of the deacons and two

or three women had gathered about a small, black-haired woman, the wife

of a baker to whom Sam delivered papers. They were urging her to rise

and get within the fold, and Sam turned and watched her curiously, his

sympathy going out to her. With all his heart he hoped that she would

continue doggedly shaking her head.

Suddenly the irrepressible Jim Williams broke forth again. A quiver

ran over Sam’s body and the blood rose to his cheeks. “Here is another

sinner saved,” shouted Jim, pointing to the standing boy. “Count this

boy, Sam McPherson, in the fold among the lambs.”

On the platform the brown-bearded minister stood upon a chair and looked

over the heads of the people. An ingratiating smile played about his

lips. “Let us hear from the young man, Sam McPherson,” he said, raising

his hand for silence, and, then, encouragingly, “Sam, what have you to

say for the Lord?”

Become the centre for the attention of the people in the church Sam

was terror-stricken. The rage against Jim Williams was forgotten in the

spasm of fear that seized him. He looked over his shoulder to the door

at the back of the church and thought longingly of the quiet street

outside. He hesitated, stammered, grew more red and uncertain,

and finally burst out: “The Lord,” he said, and then looked about

hopelessly, “the Lord maketh me to lie out in green pastures.”

In the seats behind him a titter arose. A young woman sitting among the

singers in the choir put her handkerchief to her face and throwing back

her head rocked back and forth. A man near the door guffawed loudly and

went hurriedly out. All over the church people began laughing.

Sam turned his eyes upon his mother. She was staring straight ahead of

her, and her face was red. “I’m going out of this place and I’m never

coming back again,” he whispered, and, stepping into the aisle, walked

boldly toward the door. He had made up his mind that if the evangelist

tried to stop him he would fight. At his back he felt the rows of people

looking at him and smiling. The laughter continued.

In the street he hurried along consumed with indignation. “I’ll never

go into any church again,” he swore, shaking his fist in the air.

The public avowals he had heard in the church seemed to him cheap and

unworthy. He wondered why his mother stayed in there. With a sweep of

his arm he dismissed all the people in the church. “It is a place to

make public asses of the people,” he thought.

Sam McPherson wandered through Main Street, dreading to meet Valmore and

John Telfer. Finding the chairs back of the stove in Wildman’s grocery

deserted, he hurried past the grocer and hid in a corner. Tears of wrath

stood in his eyes. He had been made a fool of. He imagined the scene

that would go on when he came upon the street with the papers the next

morning. Freedom Smith would be there sitting in the old worn buggy and

roaring so that all the street would listen and laugh. “Going to lie out

in any green pastures to-night, Sam?” he would shout. “Ain’t you afraid

you’ll take cold?” By Geiger’s drug store would stand Valmore and

Telfer, eager to join in the fun at his expense. Telfer would pound on

the side of the building with his cane and roar with laughter. Valmore

would make a trumpet of his hands and shout after the fleeing boy. “Do

you sleep out alone in them green pastures?” Freedom Smith would roar

again.

Sam got up and went out of the grocery. As he hurried along, blind with

wrath, he felt he would like a stand-up fight with some one. And, then,

hurrying and avoiding the people, he merged with the crowd on the street

and became a witness to the strange thing that happened that night in

Caxton.

* * * * *

In Main Street hushed people stood about in groups talking. The air

was heavy with excitement. Solitary figures went from group to group

whispering hoarsely. Mike McCarthy, the man who had denied God and

who had won a place for himself in the affection of the newsboy, had

assaulted a man with a pocket knife and had left him bleeding and

wounded beside a country road. Something big and sensational had

happened in the life of the town.

Mike McCarthy and Sam were friends. For years the man had idled upon the

streets of the town, loitering about, boasting and talking. He had sat

for hours in a chair under a tree before the New Leland House, reading

books, doing tricks with cards, engaging in long discussions with John

Telfer or any who would stand up to him.

Mike McCarthy got into trouble in a fight over a woman. A young farmer

living at the edge of Caxton had come home from the fields to find his

wife in the bold Irishman’s arms and the two men had gone out of the

house together to fight in the road. The woman, weeping in the house,

followed to ask forgiveness of her husband. Running in the gathering

darkness along the road she had found him cut and bleeding terribly,

lying in a ditch under a hedge. On down the road she ran and appeared at

the door of a neighbour, screaming and calling for help.

The story of the fight in the road got to Caxton just as Sam came out of

the corner, back of the stove in Wildman’s and appeared on the street.

Men ran from store to store and from group to group along the street

saying that the young farmer had died and that murder had been done. On

a street corner Windy McPherson harangued the crowd declaring that the

men of Caxton should arise in the defence of their homes and string the

murderer to a lamp post. Hop Higgins, driving a horse from Culvert’s

livery, appeared on Main Street. “He will be at the McCarthy farm,” he

shouted. When several men, coming out of Geiger’s drug store, stopped

the marshal’s horse, saying, “You will have trouble out there; you had

better take help,” the little red-faced marshal with the crippled leg

laughed. “What trouble?” he asked--“To get Mike McCarthy? I shall ask

him to come and he will come. The rest of that lot won’t cut any figure.

Mike can wrap the entire McCarthy family around his finger.”

There were six of the McCarthy men, all, except Mike, silent, sullen

men who only talked when they were in liquor. Mike furnished the town’s

social touch with the family. It was a strange family to live there

in that fat, corn-growing country, a family with something savage and

primitive about it, one that belonged among western mining camps or

among the half savage dwellers in deep alleys in cities, and the fact

that it lived on a corn farm in Iowa was, in the words of John Telfer,

“something monstrous in Nature.”

The McCarthy farm, lying some four miles east of Caxton, had once

contained a thousand acres of good corn-growing land. Lem McCarthy, the

father of the family, had inherited it from a brother, a gold miner,

a forty-niner, a sport owning fast horses, who planned to breed race

horses on the Iowa land. Lem had come out of the back streets of an

eastern city, bringing his brood of tall, silent, savage boys to live

upon the land and, like the forty-niner, to be a sport. Thinking the

wealth that had come to him vast beyond spending, he had plunged into

horse racing and gambling. When, within two years, five hundred acres

of the farm had to be sold to pay gambling debts, and the wide acres lay

covered with weeds, Lem became alarmed, and settled down to hard work,

the boys working all day in the field and at long intervals coming

into town at night to get into trouble. Having no mother or sister, and

knowing that no Caxton woman could be hired to go upon the place, they

did their own housework; and on rainy days sat about the old farmhouse

playing cards and fighting. On other days they would stand around the

bar in Art Sherman’s saloon in Piety Hollow drinking until they had lost

their savage silence and had become loud and quarrelsome, going from

there upon the streets to seek trouble. Once, going into Hayner’s

restaurant, they took stacks of plates from shelves back of the counter

and, standing in the doorway, threw them at people passing in the

street, the crash of the breaking crockery accompanying their roaring

laughter. When they had driven the people to cover they got upon their

horses and with wild shouts raced up and down Main Street between the

rows of tied horses until Hop Higgins, the town marshal, appeared, when

they rode off into the country awakening the farmers along the darkened

road as they fled, shouting and singing, toward home.

When the McCarthy boys got into trouble in Caxton, old Lem McCarthy

drove into town and got them out of it, paying for the damage done and

going about declaring the boys meant no harm. When told to keep them out

of town he shook his head and said he would try.

Mike McCarthy did not ride swearing and singing with the five brothers

along the dark road. He did not work all day in the hot corn fields. He

was the family gentleman, and, wearing good clothes, strolled instead

upon the street or loitered in the shade before the New Leland House.

Mike had been educated. For some years he had attended a college in

Indiana from which he was expelled for an affair with a woman. After his

return from college he stayed in Caxton, living at the hotel and making

a pretence of studying law in the office of old Judge Reynolds. He paid

slight attention to the study of law, but with infinite patience had so

trained his hands that he became wonderfully dexterous with coins and

cards, plucking them out of the air and making them appear in the shoes,

the hats, and even in the mouths, of bystanders. During the day he

walked the streets looking at the girl clerks in the stores, or stood

upon the station platform waving his hand to women passengers on passing

trains. He told John Telfer that the flattery of women was a lost art

that he intended to restore. Mike McCarthy carried in his pockets books

which he read sitting in a chair before the hotel or on the stones

before store windows. When on Saturdays the streets were filled with

people, he stood on the corners giving gratuitous performances of his

magical art with cards and coins, and eyeing country girls in the crowd.

Once, a woman, the town stationer’s wife, shouted at him, calling him

a lazy lout, whereupon he threw a coin in the air, and when it did not

come down rushed toward her shouting, “She has it in her stocking.” When

the stationer’s wife ran into her shop and banged the door the crowd

laughed and shouted with delight.

Telfer had a liking for the tall, grey-eyed, loitering McCarthy

and sometimes sat with him discussing a novel or a poem; Sam in the

background listened eagerly. Valmore did not care for the man, shaking

his head and declaring that such a fellow could come to no good end.

The rest of the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this,

sunned himself in the town’s displeasure. For the sake of the public

furor it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist,

an anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone

cared greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations

of his passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in

Wildman’s grocery store he would stand whipping them into a frenzy by

declaring for free love, and vowing that he would have the best of any

woman who gave him the chance.

For this man the frugal, hard working newsboy had conceived a regard

amounting to a passion. As he listened to McCarthy he got continuous

delightful little thrills. “There is nothing he would not dare,” thought

the boy. “He is the freest, the boldest, the bravest man in town.”

When the young Irishman, seeing the admiration in his eyes, flung him

a silver dollar saying, “That is for your fine brown eyes, my boy; it

I had them I would have half the women in town after me,” Sam kept the

dollar in his pocket and counted it a kind of treasure like the rose

given a lover by his sweetheart.

* * * * *

It was past eleven o’clock when Hop Higgins returned to town with

McCarthy, driving quietly along the street and through an alley at the

back of the town hall. The crowd upon the street had broken up. Sam had

gone from one to another of the muttering groups, his heart quaking with

fear. Now he stood at the back of the mass of men gathered at the jail

door. An oil lamp, burning at the top of the post above the door, threw

dancing, flickering lights on the faces of the men before him. The

thunder storm that had threatened had not come, but the unnatural warm

wind continued and the sky overhead was inky black.

Through the alley, to the jail door, drove the town marshal, the young

McCarthy sitting in the buggy beside him. A man rushed forward to hold

the horse. McCarthy’s face was chalky white. He laughed and shouted,

raising his hand toward the sky.

“I am Michael, son of God. I have cut a man with a knife so that his

red blood ran upon the ground. I am the son of God and this filthy jail

shall be my sanctuary. In there I shall talk aloud with my Father,” he

roared hoarsely, shaking his fist at the crowd. “Sons of this cesspool

of respectability, stay and hear! Send for your females and let them

stand in the presence of a man!”

Taking the white, wild-eyed man by the arm Marshal Higgins led him into

the jail, the clank of locks, the low murmur of the voice of Higgins and

the wild laughter of McCarthy floating out to the group of silent men

standing in the mud of the alley.

Sam McPherson ran past the group of men to the side of the jail and

finding John Telfer and Valmore leaning silently against the wall of

Tom Folger’s wagon shop slipped between them. Telfer put out his arm and

laid it upon the boy’s shoulder. Hop Higgins, coming out of the jail,

addressed the crowd. “Don’t answer if he talks,” he said; “he is as

crazy as a loon.”

Sam moved closer to Telfer. The voice of the imprisoned man, loud,

and filled with a startling boldness, rolled out of the jail. He began

praying.

“Hear me, Father Almighty, who has permitted this town of Caxton to

exist and has let me, Thy son, grow to manhood. I am Michael, Thy son.

They have put me in this jail where rats run across the floor and

they stand in the mud outside as I talk with Thee. Are you there, old

Truepenny?”

A breath of cold air blew up the alley followed by a flaw of rain. The

group under the flickering lamp by the jail entrance drew back against

the walls of the building. Sam could see them dimly, pressing closely

against the wall. The man in the jail laughed loudly.

“I have had a philosophy of life, O Father,” he shouted. “I have seen

men and women here living year after year without children. I have seen

them hoarding pennies and denying Thee new life on which to work Thy

will. To these women I have gone secretly talking of carnal love. With

them I have been gentle and kind; them I have flattered.”

A roaring laugh broke from the lips of the imprisoned man. “Are you

there, oh dwellers in the cesspool of respectability?” he shouted. “Do

you stand in the mud with cold feet listening? I have been with your

wives. Eleven Caxton wives without babes have I been with and it has

been fruitless. The twelfth woman I have just left, leaving her man in

the road a bleeding sacrifice to thee. I shall call out the names of the

eleven. I shall have revenge also upon the husbands of the women, some

of whom wait with the others in the mud outside.”

He began calling off the names of Caxton wives. A shudder ran through

the body of the boy, sensitised by the new chill in the air and by the

excitement of the night. Among the men standing along the wall of the

jail a murmur arose. Again they grouped themselves under the flickering

light by the jail door, disregarding the rain. Valmore, stumbling out of

the darkness beside Sam, stood before Telfer. “The boy should be going

home,” he said; “this isn’t fit for him to hear.”

Telfer laughed and drew Sam closer to him. “He has heard enough lies in

this town,” he said. “Truth won’t hurt him. I would not go myself, nor

would you, and the boy shall not go. This McCarthy has a brain. Although

he is half insane now he is trying to work something out. The boy and I

will stay to hear.”

The voice from the jail continued calling out the names of Caxton wives.

Voices in the group before the jail door began shouting: “This should be

stopped. Let us tear down the jail.”

McCarthy laughed aloud. “They squirm, oh Father, they squirm; I have

them in the pit and I torture them,” he cried.

An ugly feeling of satisfaction came over Sam. He had a sense of the

fact that the names shouted from the jail would be repeated over and

over through the town. One of the women whose names had been called out

had stood with the evangelist at the back of the church trying to induce

the wife of the baker to rise and be counted in the fold with the lambs.

The rain, falling on the shoulders of the men by the jail door, changed

to hail, the air grew colder and the hailstones rattled on the roofs of

buildings. Some of the men joined Telfer and Valmore, talking in low,

excited voices. “And Mary McKane, too, the hypocrite,” Sam heard one of

them say.

The voice inside the jail changed. Still praying, Mike McCarthy seemed

also to be talking to the group in the darkness outside.

“I am sick of my life. I have sought leadership and have not found

it. Oh Father! Send down to men a new Christ, one to get hold of us, a

modern Christ with a pipe in his mouth who will swear and knock us about

so that we vermin who pretend to be made in Thy image will understand.

Let him go into churches and into courthouses, into cities, and into

towns like this, shouting, ‘Be ashamed! Be ashamed of your cowardly

concern over your snivelling souls!’ Let him tell us that never will our

lives, so miserably lived, be repeated after our bodies lie rotting in

the grave.”

A sob broke from his lips and a lump came into Sam’s throat.

“Oh Father! help us men of Caxton to understand that we have only this,

our lives, this life so warm and hopeful and laughing in the sun, this

life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls

with their long legs and freckles on their noses, that are meant to

carry life within themselves, new life, kicking and stirring, and waking

them at night.”

The voice of the prayer broke. Wild sobs took the place of speech.

“Father!” shouted the broken voice, “I have taken a life, a man that

moved and talked and whistled in the sunshine on winter mornings; I have

killed.”

* * * * *

The voice inside the jail became inaudible. Silence, broken by low sobs

from the jail, fell on the little dark alley and the listening men began

going silently away. The lump in Sam’s throat grew larger. Tears stood

in his eyes. He went with Telfer and Valmore out of the alley and into

the street, the two men walking in silence. The rain had ceased and a

cold wind blew.

The boy felt that he had been shriven. His mind, his heart, even his

tired body seemed strangely cleansed. He felt a new affection for Telfer

and Valmore. When Telfer began talking he listened eagerly, thinking

that at last he understood him and knew why men like Valmore, Wildman,

Freedom Smith, and Telfer loved each other and went on being friends

year after year in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings. He

thought that he had got hold of the idea of brotherhood that John Telfer

talked of so often and so eloquently. “Mike McCarthy is only a brother

who has gone the dark road,” he thought and felt a glow of pride in the

thought and in the apt expression of it in his mind.

John Telfer, forgetting the boy, talked soberly to Valmore, the two men

stumbling along in the darkness intent upon their own thoughts.

“It is an odd thought,” said Telfer and his voice seemed far away and

unnatural like the voice from the jail; “it is an odd thought that but

for a quirk in the brain this Mike McCarthy might himself have been a

kind of Christ with a pipe in his mouth.”

Valmore stumbled and half fell in the darkness at a street crossing.

Telfer went on talking.

“The world will some day grope its way into some kind of an

understanding of its extraordinary men. Now they suffer terribly. In

success or in such failures as has come to this imaginative, strangely

perverted Irishman their lot is pitiful. It is only the common, the

plain, unthinking man who slides peacefully through this troubled

world.”

At the house Jane McPherson sat waiting for her boy. She was thinking of

the scene in the church and a hard light was in her eyes. Sam went

past the sleeping room of his parents, where Windy McPherson snored

peacefully, and up the stairway to his own room. He undressed and,

putting out the light, knelt upon the floor. From the wild ravings of

the man in the jail he had got hold of something. In the midst of the

blasphemy of Mike McCarthy he had sensed a deep and abiding love of

life. Where the church had failed the bold sensualist succeeded. Sam

felt that he could have prayed in the presence of the entire town.

“Oh, Father!” he cried, sending up his voice in the silence of the

little room, “make me stick to the thought that the right living of

this, my life, is my duty to you.”

By the door below, while Valmore waited on the sidewalk, Telfer talked

to Jane McPherson.

“I wanted Sam to hear,” he explained. “He needs a religion. All young

men need a religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man like Mike

McCarthy keeps instinctively trying to justify himself before God.”

CHAPTER IV

John Telfer’s friendship was a formative influence upon Sam McPherson.

His father’s worthlessness and the growing realisation of the hardship

of his mother’s position had given life a bitter taste in his mouth,

and Telfer sweetened it. He entered with zeal into Sam’s thoughts

and dreams, and tried valiantly to arouse in the quiet, industrious,

money-making boy some of his own love of life and beauty. At night, as

the two walked down country roads, the man would stop and, waving his

arms about, quote Poe or Browning or, in another mood, would compel

Sam’s attention to the rare smell of a hayfield or to a moonlit stretch

of meadow.

Before people gathered on the streets he teased the boy, calling him a

little money grubber and saying, “He is like a little mole that

works underground. As the mole goes for a worm so this boy goes for a

five-cent piece. I have watched him. A travelling man goes out of town

leaving a stray dime or nickel here and within an hour it is in this

boy’s pocket. I have talked to banker Walker of him. He trembles lest

his vaults become too small to hold the wealth of this young Croesus.

The day will come when he will buy the town and put it into his vest

pocket.”

For all his public teasing of the boy Telfer had the genius to adopt a

different attitude when they were alone together. Then he talked to him

openly and freely as he talked to Valmore and Freedom Smith and to other

cronies of his on the streets of Caxton. Walking along the road he would

point with his cane to the town and say, “You and that mother of yours

have more of the real stuff in you than the rest of the boys and mothers

of the town put together.”

In all Caxton Telfer was the only man who knew books and who took them

seriously. Sam sometimes found his attitude toward them puzzling and

would stand with open mouth listening as Telfer swore or laughed at a

book as he did at Valmore or Freedom Smith. He had a fine portrait

of Browning which he kept hung in the stable and before this he would

stand, his legs spread apart, and his head tilted to one side, talking.

“A rich old sport you are, eh?” he would say, grinning. “Getting

yourself discussed by women and college professors in clubs, eh? You old

fraud!”

Toward Mary Underwood, the school teacher who had become Sam’s friend

and with whom the boy sometimes walked and talked, Telfer had no

charity. Mary Underwood was a sort of cinder in the eyes of Caxton. She

was the only child of Silas Underwood, the town harness maker, who once

had worked in a shop belonging to Windy McPherson. After the business

failure of Windy he had started independently and for a time did

well, sending his daughter to a school in Massachusetts. Mary did

not understand the people of Caxton and the people misunderstood and

distrusted her. Taking no part in the life of the town and keeping to

herself and to her books she awoke a kind of fear in others. Because she

did not join them at church suppers, or go from porch to porch gossiping

with other women through the long summer evenings, they thought her

something abnormal. On Sundays she sat alone in her pew at church and

on Saturday afternoons, come storm, come sunshine, she walked on country

roads and through the woods accompanied by a collie dog. She was a small

woman with a straight, slender figure and had fine blue eyes filled with

changing lights, hidden by the eye-glasses she almost constantly wore.

Her lips were very full and red, and she sat with them parted so that

the edges of her fine teeth showed. Her nose was large, and a fine

reddish-brown colour glowed in her cheeks. Though different, she had,

like Jane McPherson, a habit of silence; and under her silence, she,

like Sam’s mother, possessed an unusually strong and vigorous mind.

As a child she was a sort of half invalid and had not been on friendly

footing with other children. It was then that her habit of silence and

reticence had been established. The years in the school in Massachusetts

restored her health but did not break this habit. She came home and took

the place in the schools to earn money with which to take her back East,

dreaming of a position as instructor in an eastern college. She was that

rare thing, a woman scholar, loving scholarship for its own sake.

Mary Underwood’s position in the town and in the schools was insecure.

Out of her silent, independent way of life had sprung a misunderstanding

that, at least once, had taken definite form and had come near driving

her from the town and schools. That she did not succumb to the storm of

criticism that for some weeks beat about her head was due to her habit

of silence and to a determination to get her own way in the face of

everything.

It was a suggestion of scandal that had put the grey hairs upon her

head. The scandal had blown over before the time of her friendship for

Sam, but he had known of it. In those days he knew of everything that

went on in the town--his quick ears and eyes missed nothing. More than

once he had heard the men waiting to be shaved in Sawyer’s barber shop

speak of her.

The tale ran that she had been involved in an affair with a real estate

agent who had afterward left town. It was said that the man, a tall,

fine-looking fellow, had been in love with Mary and had wanted to desert

his wife and go away with her. One night he had driven to Mary’s house

in a closed buggy and the two had driven into the country. They had sat

for hours in the covered buggy at the side of the road and talked, and

people driving past had seen them there talking together.

And then she had got out of the buggy and walked home alone through snow

drifts. The next day she was at school as usual. When told of it the

school superintendent, a puttering old fellow with vacant eyes, had

shaken his head in alarm and declared that it must be looked into. He

called Mary into his little narrow office in the school building, but

lost courage when she sat before him, and said nothing. The man in the

barber shop, who repeated the tale, said that the real estate man drove

on to a distant station and took a train to the city, and that some days

later he came back to Caxton and moved his family out of town.

Sam dismissed the story from his mind. Having begun a friendship for

Mary he put the man in the barber shop into a class with Windy McPherson

and thought of him as a pretender and liar who talked for the sake of

talk. He remembered with a shock the crude levity with which the loafers

in the shop had greeted the repetition of the tale. Their comments

had come back to his mind as he walked through the streets with his

newspapers and had given him a kind of jolt. He went along under the

trees thinking of the sunlight falling upon the grey hair as they walked

together on summer afternoons, and bit his lip and opened and closed his

fist convulsively.

During Mary’s second year in the Caxton schools her mother died, and at

the end of another year, her father, failing in the harness business,

Mary became a fixture in the schools. The house at the edge of the town,

the property of her mother, had come down to her and she lived there

with an old aunt. After the passing of the wind of scandal concerning

the real estate man the town lost interest in her. She was thirty-six

at the time of her first friendship with Sam and lived alone among her

books.

Sam had been deeply moved by her friendship. It had seemed to him

something significant that grown people with affairs of their own should

be so in earnest about his future as she and Telfer were. Boylike, he

counted it a tribute to himself rather than to the winsome youth in him,

and was made proud by it. Having no real feeling for books, and only

pretending to have out of a desire to please, he sometimes went from one

to the other of his two friends, passing off their opinions as his own.

At this trick Telfer invariably caught him. “That is not your notion,”

he would shout, “you have it from that school teacher. It is the opinion

of a woman. Their opinions, like the books they sometimes write, are

founded on nothing. They are not the real things. Women know nothing.

Men only care for them because they have not had what they want from

them. No woman is really big--except maybe my woman, Eleanor.”

When Sam continued to be much in the company of Mary, Telfer grew more

bitter.

“I would have you observe women’s minds and avoid letting them influence

your own,” he told the boy. “They live in a world of unrealities. They

like even vulgar people in books, but shrink from the simple, earthy

folk about them. That school teacher is so. Is she like me? Does she,

while loving books, love also the very smell of human life?”

In a way Telfer’s attitude toward the kindly little school teacher

became Sam’s attitude. Although they walked and talked together the

course of study she had planned for him he never took up and as he

grew to know her better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced

appealed to him less and less. He thought that she, as Telfer held,

lived in a world of illusion and unreality and said so. When she lent

him books, he put them in his pocket and did not read them. When he did

read, he thought the books reminded him of something that hurt him. They

were in some way false and pretentious. He thought they were like

his father. One day he tried reading aloud to Telfer from a book Mary

Underwood had lent him.

The story was one of a poetic man with long, unclean fingernails who

went among people preaching the doctrine of beauty. It began with a

scene on a hillside in a rainstorm where the poetic man sat under a tent

writing a letter to his sweetheart.

Telfer was beside himself. Jumping from his seat under a tree by the

roadside he waved his arms and shouted:

“Stop! Stop it! Do not go on with it. The story lies. A man could not

write love letters under the circumstances and he was a fool to pitch

his tent on a hillside. A man in a tent on a hillside in a storm would

be cold and wet and getting the rheumatism. To be writing letters he

would need to be an unspeakable ass. He had better be out digging a

trench to keep the water from running through his tent.”

Waving his arms, Telfer went off up the road and Sam followed thinking

him altogether right, and, if later in life he learned that there are

men who could write love letters on a piece of housetop in a flood, he

did not know it then and the least suggestion of windiness or pretence

lay heavy in his stomach.

Telfer had a vast enthusiasm for Bellamy’s “Looking Backward,” and read

it aloud to his wife on Sunday afternoons, sitting under the apple trees

in the garden. They had a fund of little personal jokes and sayings that

they were forever laughing over, and she had infinite delight in his

comments on the life and people of Caxton, but did not share his love of

books. When she sometimes went to sleep in her chair during the Sunday

afternoon readings he poked her with his cane and laughingly told her

to wake up and listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning’s

verses his favourites were “A Light Woman” and “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and

he would recite these aloud with great gusto. He declared Mark Twain the

greatest man in the world and in certain moods he would walk the road

beside Sam reciting over and over one or two lines of verse, often this

from Poe:

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like some Nicean bark of yore.

Then, stopping and turning upon the boy, he would demand whether or not

the writing of such lines wasn’t worth living a life for.

Telfer had a pack of dogs that always went with them on their walks

at night and he had for them long Latin names that Sam could never

remember. One summer be bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and

gave great attention to the colt, which he named Bellamy Boy, trotting

him up and down a little driveway by the side of his house for hours at

a time and declaring he would be a great trotting horse. He could recite

the colt’s pedigree with great gusto and when he had been talking to Sam

of some book he would repay the boy’s attention by saying, “You, my boy,

are as far superior to the run of boys about town as the colt, Bellamy

Boy, is superior to the farm horses that are hitched along Main Street

on Saturday afternoons.” And then, with a wave of his hand and a look

of much seriousness on his face, he would add, “And for the same reason.

You have been, like him, under a master trainer of youth.”

* * * * *

One evening Sam, now grown to man’s stature and full of the awkwardness

and self-consciousness of his new growth, was sitting on a cracker

barrel at the back of Wildman’s grocery. It was a summer evening and a

breeze blew through the open doors swaying the hanging oil lamps that

burned and sputtered overhead. As usual he was listening in silence to

the talk that went on among the men.

Standing with legs wide apart and from time to time jabbing with his

cane at Sam’s legs, John Telfer held forth on the subject of love.

“It is a theme that poets do well to write of,” he declared. “In

writing of it they avoid the necessity of embracing it. In trying for a

well-turned line they forget to look at well-turned ankles. He who

sings most passionately of love has been in love the least; he woos the

goddess of poesy and only gets into trouble when he, like John Keats,

turns to the daughter of a villager and tries to live the lines he has

written.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” roared Freedom Smith, who had been sitting tilted

far back in a chair with his feet against the cold stove, smoking a

short, black pipe, and who now brought his feet down upon the floor with

a bang. Admiring Telfer’s flow of words he pretended to be filled with

scorn. “The night is too hot for eloquence,” he bellowed. “If you must

be eloquent talk of ice cream or mint juleps or recite a verse about the

old swimming pool.”

Telfer, wetting his finger, thrust it into the air.

“The wind is in the north-west; the beasts roar; we will have a storm,”

he said, winking at Valmore.

Banker Walker came into the store, followed by his daughter. She was a

small, dark-skinned girl with black, quick eyes. Seeing Sam sitting with

swinging legs upon the cracker barrel she spoke to her father and went

out of the store. At the sidewalk she stopped and, turning, made a quick

motion with her hand.

Sam jumped off the cracker barrel and strolled toward the street door.

A flush was on his cheeks. His mouth felt hot and dry. He went with

extreme deliberateness, stopping to bow to the banker, and for a moment

lingering to read a newspaper that lay upon the cigar case, to avoid the

comments he feared his going might excite among the men by the stove.

In his heart he trembled lest the girl should have disappeared down the

street, and with his eyes, he looked guiltily at the banker, who had

joined the group at the back of the store and who now stood listening

to the talk, while he read from a list held in his hand and Wildman

went here and there doing up packages and repeating aloud the names of

articles called off by the banker.

At the end of the lighted business section of Main Street, Sam found the

girl waiting for him. She began to tell of the subterfuge by which she

had escaped her father.

“I told him I would go home with my sister,” she said, tossing her head.

Taking hold of the boy’s hand, she led him along the shaded street. For

the first time Sam walked in the company of one of the strange beings

that had begun to bring him uneasy nights, and overcome with the wonder

of it the blood climbed through his body and made his head reel so that

he walked in silence unable to understand his own emotions. He felt the

soft hand of the girl with delight; his heart pounded against the walls

of his chest and a choking sensation gripped at his throat.

Walking along the street, past lighted residences where the low voices

of women in talk greeted his ears, Sam was inordinately proud. He

thought that he should like to turn and walk with this girl through the

lighted Main Street. Had she not chosen him from among all the boys of

the town; had she not, with a flutter of her little, white hand, called

to him with a call that he wondered the men upon the cracker barrels had

not heard? Her boldness and his own took his breath away. He could not

talk. His tongue seemed paralysed.

Down the street went the boy and girl, loitering in the shadows,

hurrying past the dim oil lamps at street crossings, getting from each

other wave after wave of exquisite little thrills. Neither spoke. They

were beyond words. Had they not together done this daring thing?

In the shadow of a tree they stopped and stood facing each other; the

girl looked at the ground and stood facing the boy. Putting out his hand

he laid it upon her shoulder. In the darkness on the other side of the

street a man stumbled homeward along a board sidewalk. The lights of

Main Street glowed in the distance. Sam drew the girl toward him. She

raised her head. Their lips met, and then, throwing her arms about his

neck, she kissed him again and again eagerly.

* * * * *

Sam’s return to Wildman’s was marked by extreme caution. Although he had

been absent but fifteen minutes it seemed to him that hours must have

passed and he would not have been surprised to see the stores locked

and darkness settled down on Main Street. It was inconceivable that the

grocer could still be wrapping packages for banker Walker. Worlds had

been remade. Manhood had come to him. Why! the man should have wrapped

the entire store, package after package, and sent it to the ends of the

earth. He lingered in the shadows at the first of the store lights

where ages before he had gone, a mere boy, to meet her, a mere girl, and

looked with wonder at the lighted way before him.

Sam crossed the street and, from the front of Sawyer’s barber shop,

looked into Wildman’s. He felt like a spy looking into the camp of an

enemy. There before him sat the men into whose midst he had it in

his power to cast a thunderbolt. He might walk to the door and say,

truthfully enough, “Here before you is a boy that by the flutter of a

white hand has been made into a man; here is one who has wrung the heart

of womankind and eaten his fill at the tree of the knowledge of life.”

In the grocery the talk still continued among the men upon the cracker

barrels who seemed unconscious of the boy’s slinking entrance. Indeed,

their talk had sunk. From talking of love and of poets they talked of

corn and of steers. Banker Walker, his packages of groceries lying on

the counter, smoked a cigar.

“You can fairly hear the corn growing to-night,” he said. “It wants but

another shower or two and we shall have a record crop. I plan to feed a

hundred steers at my farm out Rabbit Road this winter.”

The boy climbed again upon a cracker barrel and tried to look

unconcerned and interested in the talk. Still his heart thumped; still

a throbbing went on in his wrists. He turned and looked at the floor

hoping his agitation would pass unnoticed.

The banker, taking up the packages, walked out at the door. Valmore and

Freedom Smith went over to the livery barn for a game of pinochle.

And John Telfer, twirling his cane and calling to a troup of dogs that

loitered in an alley back of the store, took Sam for a walk into the

country.

“I will continue this talk of love,” said Telfer, striking at weeds

along the road with his cane and from time to time calling sharply to

the dogs that, filled with delight at being abroad, ran growling and

tumbling over each other in the dusty road.

“That Freedom Smith is a sample of life in this town. At the word love

he drops his feet upon the floor and pretends to be filled with disgust.

He will talk of corn or steers or of the stinking hides that he buys,

but at the mention of the word love he is like a hen that has seen a

hawk in the sky. He runs about in circles making a fuss. ‘Here! Here!

Here!’ he cries, ‘you are making public something that should be kept

hidden. You are doing in the light of day what should only be done with

a shamed face in a darkened room.’ Why, boy, if I were a woman in

this town I would not stand it--I would go to New York, to France,

to Paris--To be wooed for but a passing moment by a shame-faced yokel

without art--uh--it is unthinkable.”

The man and the boy walked in silence. The dogs, scenting a rabbit,

disappeared across a long pasture, their master letting them go. From

time to time he threw back his head and took long breaths of the night

air.

“I am not like banker Walker,” he declared. “He thinks of the growing

corn in terms of fat steers feeding on the Rabbit Run farm; I think of

it as something majestic. I see the long corn rows with the men and the

horses half hidden, hot and breathless, and I think of a vast river of

life. I catch a breath of the flame that was in the mind of the man who

said, ‘The land is flowing with milk and honey.’ I am made happy by my

thoughts not by the dollars clinking in my pocket.

“And then in the fall when the corn stands shocked I see another

picture. Here and there in companies stand the armies of the corn.

It puts a ring in my voice to look at them. ‘These orderly armies has

mankind brought out of chaos,’ I say to myself. ‘On a smoking black ball

flung by the hand of God out of illimitable space has man stood up these

armies to defend his home against the grim attacking armies of want.’”

Telfer stopped and stood in the road with his legs spread apart. He took

off his hat and throwing back his head laughed up at the stars.

“Freedom Smith should hear me now,” he cried, rocking back and forth

with laughter and switching his cane at the boy’s legs so that Sam had

to hop merrily about in the road to avoid it. “Flung by the hand of God

out of illimitable space--eh! not bad, eh! I should be in Congress. I

am wasted here. I am throwing priceless eloquence to dogs who prefer to

chase rabbits and to a boy who is the worst little money grubber in the

town.”

The midsummer madness that had seized Telfer passed and for a time he

walked in silence. Suddenly, putting his arm on the boy’s shoulder, he

stopped and pointed to where a faint light in the sky marked the lighted

town.

“They are good people,” he said, “but their ways are not my ways or your

ways. You will go out of the town. You have genius. You will be a man of

finance. I have watched you. You are not niggardly and you do not cheat

and lie--result--you will not be a little business man. What have you?

You have the gift of seeing dollars where the rest of the boys of the

town see nothing and you are tireless after those dollars--you will be

a big man of dollars, it is plain.” Into his voice came a touch of

bitterness. “I also was marked out. Why do I carry a cane? why do I not

buy a farm and raise steers? I am the most worthless thing alive. I have

the touch of genius without the energy to make it count.”

Sam’s mind that had been inflamed by the kiss of the girl cooled in the

presence of Telfer. In the summer madness of the talking man there was

something soothing to the fever in his blood. He followed the words

eagerly, seeing pictures, getting thrills, filled with happiness.

At the edge of town a buggy passed the walking pair. In the buggy sat

a young farmer, his arm about the waist of a girl, her head upon his

shoulder. Far in the distance sounded the faint call of the dogs. Sam

and Telfer sat down on a grassy bank under a tree while Telfer rolled

and lighted a cigarette.

“As I promised, I will talk to you of love,” he said, making a wide

sweep with his arm each time as he put his cigarette into his mouth.

The grassy bank on which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot

days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind

them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of

serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer and

his face became serious.

“My foolishness is more than half earnest,” he said. “I think that a

man or boy who has set for himself a task had better let women and girls

alone. If he be a man of genius, he has a purpose independent of all

the world, and should cut and slash and pound his way toward his mark,

forgetting every one, particularly the woman that would come to grips

with him. She also has a mark toward which she goes. She is at war with

him and has a purpose that is not his purpose. She believes that the

pursuit of women is an end for a life. For all they now condemn Mike

McCarthy who went to the asylum because of them and who, while loving

life, came near to taking life, the women of Caxton do not condemn his

madness for themselves; they do not blame him for loitering away his

good years or for making an abortive mess of his good brain. While he

made an art of the pursuit of women they applauded secretly. Did

not twelve of them accept the challenge thrown out by his eyes as he

loitered in the streets?”

The man, who had begun talking quietly and seriously, raised his voice

and waved the lighted cigarette in the air and the boy who had begun

to think again of the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker listened

attentively. The barking of the dogs grew nearer.

“If you as a boy can get from me, a grown man, an understanding of the

purpose of women you will not have lived in this town for nothing. Set

your mark at money making if you will, but drive at that. Let yourself

but go and a sweet wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd or a pair

of little feet running over a dance floor will retard your growth for

years. No man or boy can grow toward the purpose of a life while he

thinks of women. Let him try it and he will be undone. What is to him

a passing humour is to them an end. They are diabolically clever. They

will run and stop and run and stop again, keeping just without his

reach. He sees them here and there about him. His mind is filled with

vague, delicious thoughts that come out of the very air; before he

realises what he has done he has spent his years in vain pursuit and

turning finds himself old and undone.”

Telfer began jabbing at the ground with his stick.

“I had my chance. In New York I had money to live on and time to have

made an artist of myself. I won prize after prize. The master, walking

up and down back of us, lingered longest over my easel. There was a

fellow sat beside me who had nothing. I made sport of him and called him

Sleepy Jock after a dog we used to have about our house here in Caxton.

Now I am here idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only

last week I saw in a paper that he had won a place among the world’s

great artists by a picture he has painted. In the school I watched for

a look in the eyes of the girl students and went about with them night

after night winning, like Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy

Jock had the best of it. He did not look about with open eyes but kept

peering instead at the face of the master. My days were full of small

successes. I could wear clothes. I could make soft-eyed girls turn to

look at me in a dance hall. I remember a night. We students gave a dance

and Sleepy Jock came. He went about asking for dances and the girls

laughed and told him they had none to give, that the dances were taken.

I followed him and had my ears filled with flattery and my card with

names. In riding the wave of small success I got the habit of small

success. When I could not catch the line I wanted to make a drawing

live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my arm, went for a

day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I overheard two women

talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy for a week.”

Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.

“My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me?

Let me tell you. It has brought me to this--that at fifty I, who might

have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of

beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a

flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising

corn.

“If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small

success and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you

that I got it when I saw it lurking in a woman’s eyes and heard the

pleasant little songs that lull to sleep upon a woman’s lips.”

The boy, sitting upon the grassy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of

life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare

silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at

night, of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little

blue-eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith’s home and

of how he had gone at night to stand under her window.

In Caxton adolescent love had about it a virility befitting a land

that raised so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers

through the streets to be loaded upon cars. Men and women went their

ways believing, with characteristic American what-boots-it attitude

toward the needs of childhood, that it was well for growing boys and

girls to be much alone together. To leave them alone together was a

principle with them. When a young man called upon his sweetheart,

her parents sat in the presence of the two with apologetic eyes and

presently disappeared leaving them alone together. When boys’ and girls’

parties were given in Caxton houses, parents went away leaving the

children to shift for themselves.

“Now have a good time and don’t tear the house down,” they said, going

off upstairs.

Left to themselves the children played kissing games and young men

and tall half-formed girls sat on the front porches in the darkness,

thrilled and half frightened, getting through their instincts, crudely

and without guidance, their first peep at the mystery of life. They

kissed passionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds

fevered and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.

Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing

aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a

kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as

a drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on

the next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost

their keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men

about the station and in the stores, they went slinking through the

streets in groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said,

“It is the loutish age.”

If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to

increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to

the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and

to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now

sat musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to

do with the Walker girl. He remembered his sister’s affair with a young

farmer and shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the

shoulder of the man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the

rolling fields stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came

Telfer’s speech. So vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the

armies of standing corn which men had set up in the fields to protect

themselves against the march of pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the

picture in his mind as he followed the sense of Telfer’s talk, thought

that all society had resolved itself into a few sturdy souls who went

on and on regardless, and a hunger to make of himself such another arose

engulfing him. The desire within him seemed so compelling that he turned

and haltingly tried to express what was in his mind.

“I will try,” he stammered, “I will try to be a man. I will try to

not have anything to do with them--with women. I will work and make

money--and--and----”

Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the

ground.

“To Hell with women and girls,” he burst forth as though throwing

something distasteful out of his throat.

In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits,

came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the grassy

bank, covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his

sensitive nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. His _sang

froid_ had returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the

dogs he cried joyfully, “We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy,

and dog. We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked

into bed.”

CHAPTER V

Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to

him. For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun

come up hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the

streets in the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from

the north came into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on

the deserted little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry

Donlin to hurry with his work that they might get back into the warm

stale air of the smoking car.

In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become

a man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some

subtle way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that

to make money and to have money would in some way make up for the old

half-forgotten humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and

would set it on a more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had

provided, grew and influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly

he kept at his efforts to get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of

dollars. Jane McPherson had herself a passion for frugality. In spite

of Windy’s incompetence and her own growing ill health, she would

not permit the family to go into debt, and although, in the long hard

winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush until his mind revolted at the

thought of a corn field, yet was the rent of the little house paid on

the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to increase the totals in the

yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the death of his wife had lived

in a loft above his shop and who was a blacksmith of the old days, a

workman first and a money maker later, did not despise the thought of

gain.

“It is money makes the mare go,” he said with a kind of reverence as

banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of

Wildman’s grocery.

Of John Telfer’s attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain.

The man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.

“That’s right,” he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express

opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly

that the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their

achievements, “Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big

world! Get your name up for a modern, high-class American!”

And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to

berate the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that

the day would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning,

he shouted, “Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old

clerkliness lies asleep!”

Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who

had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a

man, was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they

talked to him of the city and of the money to be made there.

“It is the place for a live young man,” they said.

Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their

affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into

his nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the

great ways filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching

the sky, the men running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks

going on year after year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of,

and yet not understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises

that supported them.

In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of

life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a

sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing,

had he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he

not introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the

Saturday night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the

totals in the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He

felt within him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and

would do.

“I will be richer than any man in town here,” he declared in his pride.

“I will be richer than Ed Walker.”

Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks

in the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn

venders, for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses

close by the beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the

farmers, and the labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth

to mingle with their fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores,

the sidewalks, and drinking places, and men stood about in groups

talking while young girls with their lovers walked up and down. In

the hall over Geiger’s drug store a dance went on and the voice of the

caller-off rose above the clatter of voices and the stamping of horses

in the street. Now and then a fight broke out among the roisterers in

Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was killed with a knife.

In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.

“Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon,” he said, pushing a paper

into the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. “Recipes for cooking new

dishes,” he urged to the farmer’s wife. “There is a page of new fashions

in dress,” he told the young girl.

Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and

the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Saturday

paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day’s business.

And it was on a Saturday night that he decided to drop paper selling.

“I will take you into business with me,” announced Freedom Smith,

stopping him as he hurried by. “You are getting too old to sell papers

and you know too much.”

Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday

night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year

he had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he

nodded his head as he hurried away.

“It is the end of romance,” shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom

Smith before Geiger’s drug store and who had heard the offer. “A boy,

who has seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe

and Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am

overcome by the thought.”

The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to

Sam of the matter at length.

“For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place,” he

declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time

to time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. “For any boy

I put money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who

despise money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she

puts into the selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been

the making of her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without

the millinery business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon

clothes and with it she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to

her.”

Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the

ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking

thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the

boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret

regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face

by throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue,

making the words roll and tumble from his lips.

“No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes

many virtues that are forever on men’s lips,” he declared fiercely as

though trying to down an opponent. “It is one of the virtues that proves

man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power

to make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys

fear. Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings

into men’s lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go

adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.

“Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great

wealth,” he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. “No doubt

the things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the

instinct to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of

poverty, the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim

silences of the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient,

and the defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid

rich man’s city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a

factory at the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty

than you and I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious,

and who has not acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables

him to get on, may build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is

diseased and decaying.”

Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his

eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.

“The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that

makes our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for

shrewd money getting or it will destroy itself,” he declared. “And the

really great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve

in garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages

on Fifth Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for

yourself. Visit the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to

one that you will find him not only incapable in money getting but also

incapable in the very art for which he starves.”

After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer

for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted

a chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and

hides he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged

persistency with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank

had caught Freedom’s imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the

fact.

Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty

dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn

business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with

the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business,

backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the

cashier telling of Sam’s record as a depositor, and the seven hundred

dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with

Freedom, Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his

savings as he had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was

impressed. He thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a

week Sam had seen the silent suggestive power of cash.

The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to

more than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have

two-thirds of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other

hand was to furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam

was to take care of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things

bought were to be fixed each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at

less than the prices named two-thirds of the savings went to him. The

arrangement was suggested by Sam, who thought he would make more from

the saving than from the wage.

Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice,

roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great

inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man,

woman and child he knew and liked. “Old Maybe-Not” he called Windy

McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed

rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low

phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip

in the top. To Sam’s knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed

during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying.

Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar

until the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him.

And then haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his

way while the farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward

child.

Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton’s best

streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked

him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing

and roaring about it. “Good morning, Mary,” he would shout at the neat

German woman across the street. “Wait and you’ll see me clean up about

here. I’m going at it right now. I’m going to brush the flies off the

fence first.”

Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the

county.

Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and

agricultural implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard,

gathering rust and decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the

lot were a half dozen buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction

engine, a mowing machine, several farm wagons and other farm tools gone

beyond naming. Every few days he came home bringing a new prize. They

overflowed the yard and crept onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell

any of this stuff. He had at one time sixteen sets of harness all broken

and unrepaired in the barn and in a shed back of the house. A great

flock of chickens and two or three pigs wandered about among this junk

and all the children of the neighbourhood joined Freedom’s four and ran

howling and shouting over and under the mass.

Freedom’s wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house.

She had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally

stood at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at

evening as he stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both

she and Freedom treated him with great respect.

As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling.

He was a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very

systematically and within a year more than doubling the bulk of

Freedom’s purchases.

There is a little of Windy McPherson’s grotesque pretentiousness in

every man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of

it. He let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value

of their goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they

had recovered from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam’s day,

farmers did not watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets

were not systematised and regulated as they were later, and the skill

of the buyer was of the first importance. Having the skill, Sam used

it constantly to put money into his pockets, but in some way kept the

confidence and respect of the men with whom he traded.

The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading

ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the

streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.

“Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy,” he would shout to the

loafers in the store.

Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his

own affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom’s

affairs, but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and

apples, butter and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working

always to swell his commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business

and many times profited little, but the two liked and respected each

other and it was through Freedom’s efforts that Sam finally got out of

Caxton and into larger affairs.

One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam

stood taking the harness off his horse.

“Here is a chance for you, my boy,” he said, putting his hand

affectionately on Sam’s shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his

voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the

things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had

replied making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might

hope for in Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.

When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for

him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at

last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in

the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the

door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his

thumb to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told

him that in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and

filled with uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom’s

stable wishing that he also might be gone.

Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken

from the horse upon a peg in the wall.

“I will be glad to go,” he said heavily.

Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who

had come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man

of eighteen. He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago

company because of his affection for the boy and because he believed him

capable of something more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence

holding the lantern aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the

yard, filled with regrets.

By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who,

putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her

eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street,

Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From

a street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could

see them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom’s hand and the

slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.

CHAPTER VI

Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving

March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom’s hand. At the

front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on

the gate and looking at the sky.

“We shall have a rain,” he said in a quavering voice, as though giving

a decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an

answer went along a narrow path into the house.

The incident brought a smile to Sam’s lips followed by a kind of

weariness of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had,

day after day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking

at the sky. The man was one of Sam’s old newspaper customers who stood

as a kind of figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he

had been a gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part

in more than one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he

had come to end his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself

by keeping year after year a carefully tabulated record of weather

variations. Once or twice a month during the warm season he stumbled

into Wildman’s and, sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the

accuracy of his records and the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at

his heels. In his present mood the endless sameness and uneventfulness

of the man’s life seemed to Sam amusing and in some way sad.

“To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point

to a day--to look forward to and depend upon that--what deadliness!” he

thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt with pleasure

the letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much of the big

outside world to him.

In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he

felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought

on by his mother’s approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of

confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost

cheerful. The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom

was renewed by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at

the sky.

“I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching

a mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer,” he

thought.

The three years in Freedom Smith’s service had taught Sam not to doubt

his ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his

way. He knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business

man, one of the men who direct and control the affairs in which they

are concerned because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He

recalled with pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped

calling him a bright boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.

At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these

things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old

man he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his

mother’s life had been as barren as that of the man who depended for

companionship upon a dog and a thermometer.

“Indeed,” he said to himself, pursuing the thought, “it has been worse.

She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the

remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the

last days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old

man watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house

chasing playthings.” The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the

wind singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional

drop of rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with

his mother. During the last two or three years he had been trying to

make things up to her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the

beginning of his success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub

and since the beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after

evening with her instead of going to Wildman’s to sit with the four

friends and hear the talk that went on among them. No more did he walk

with Telfer or Mary Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the

bedside of the sick woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an

arm chair upon the grass plot at the front of the house.

The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an

understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to

the ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together,

the mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much

speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it

unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought

of the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had

been made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which

he had been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the

doings of the pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane’s illness

continued to go off after pension day for long periods of drunkenness,

and who only came home to weep and wail through the house, when the

pension money was gone, regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the

loss of both the washwoman and the wife.

“She has been the most wonderful woman in the world,” he told himself

and tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend,

John Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy

trotting beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of

her long gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A

picture of George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness

in the kitchen of Freedom Smith’s house, had caught his eye some days

before, and in the darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his

lips, realising that in some indescribable way it was like his mother

as she had been before her illness. Freedom’s wife had given him the

picture and he had been carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on

lonely stretches of road as he went about his work.

Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of

an attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue

the thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details

of a long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It

was extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could

remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her

youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy’s

mind. She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of

a thin-lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a

farm, and of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved

to buy books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a

school teacher, and of her marriage to Windy--then John McPherson.

Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in

the town’s life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man

who walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and

who taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.

When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him

eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should

have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.

“And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour

and unhappiness for me,” the sick woman had told her son.

After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton

where he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the

store into the sheriff’s hands and his wife into the position of town

laundress.

In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted

across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy

and another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the

state giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs

and had written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the

applause that greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances,

the little dimly-lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces

shining in the light of the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted

Windy running here and there, talking the jargon of stageland, arraying

himself in his motley and strutting upon the little stage.

“And all winter he did not send me a penny,” the sick woman had said,

interrupting his thoughts.

Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth,

the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been

killed in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an

anecdote, touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her

son.

The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for

an hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old

woman looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter

feel she had been a fool to come.

At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The

story ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding

the woman alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman,

then in her prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house.

The railroad agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and

laughed.

“She knocked him out, too,” he said, “knocked him cold upon the ground

and then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town

declaring her the finest woman in the state.”

In the darkness by the broken shed Sam’s mind turned from thoughts of

his mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young

farmer. He thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of

the failings of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of

the house to wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of

war talk always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of

the night when, getting a rig from Culvert’s livery, she had driven off

alone into the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show

her wedding ring.

Before him there rose a picture of a summer afternoon when he had seen

a part of the love making that had preceded this. He had gone into the

store to see his sister when the young farmer came in, looked awkwardly

about and pushed a new gold watch across the counter to Kate. A sudden

wave of respect for his sister had pervaded the boy. “What a sum it must

have cost,” he thought, and looked with new interest at the back of the

lover and at the flushed cheek and shining eyes of his sister. When the

lover, turning, had seen young McPherson standing at the counter, he

laughed self-consciously and walked out at the door. Kate had been

embarrassed and secretly pleased and flattered by the look in her

brother’s eyes, but had pretended to treat the gift lightly, twirling

it carelessly back and forth on the counter and walking up and down

swinging her arms.

“Don’t go telling,” she had said.

“Then don’t go pretending,” the boy had answered.

Sam thought that his sister’s indiscretion, which had brought her a babe

and a husband in the same month had, after all, ended better than the

indiscretion of his mother in her marriage with Windy.

Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for

the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of

his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.

Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and

presently returned, bringing a daughter.

There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in

a house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an

attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code,

if she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The

thought amused and saddened him.

“You would have thought her safe,” he mused. She was fifty, small,

nervous and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled

as she talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue

because of nervousness.

In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the

door holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of

himself.

“My wife--my wife is dying. She may die any day,” he wailed, tears

standing in his eyes.

The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed

had been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with

anger and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and

began sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped

and Sam could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as

the man turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels

rose a voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had

begun to rain.

“He has got into the wrong street,” thought the boy stupidly.

Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs

echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air

of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother’s ironing board stood

against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering

in Sam’s heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store

doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of

his father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate’s wedding, when

Windy had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and

the mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house,

sick with humiliation.

The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores

replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy’s anger. Sam began thinking

again of his mother’s life.

The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now

seemed utterly fruitless. “I would like to repay him,” he thought,

shaken with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him.

The cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages

on the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol

of the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he

turned his face and stared at the wall.

He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith’s house.

Freedom had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just

as to-night he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and

just as Sam was shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the

stable door had come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy

girl of fourteen with the strength of a man and an inclination to burst

out of her clothes at unexpected places, they had come charging into the

stables to carry Sam off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them

on, his voice roaring in the stable so that the horses jumped about in

their stalls. Into the house they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of

four, sitting astride his back and beating on his head with a woollen

cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern and giving an occasional helpful

push with his hand.

A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of

the big dining room in Freedom’s house came back into the mind of

the boy now sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted,

badly-cooked food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great

dishes heaped with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had

always been just enough food for the single meal. The thing was nicely

calculated, when you had finished the table was bare.

How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a

flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and

passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh

supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the

children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the

tomboy girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of

the boy.

“My mother never knew anything like that,” he thought.

The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking

loudly--some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he talked

of the cost of school books.

“They change the books in the school too often,” he declared in a loud

voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an

audience. “It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I

will not stand it.”

Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a

message upon it.

“Be silent,” he wrote. “If you say another word or make another sound to

disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the

street.”

Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a

fork taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under

the lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a

desire to spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had

brought his mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking

at her very death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared

about the kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.

Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not

understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his

pocket.

“A dog is dead, eh?” he shouted. “Well you’re getting too big and smart,

lad. What do I care for a dead dog?”

Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put

his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.

“I must not kill,” he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a

stranger. “I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill.”

In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise,

struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at

him and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a

start that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly

it stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had

become.

“I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub

by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with

so little extra pressure,” he thought.

The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the

forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon

of drunken carousing.

“If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it

looks now all the days of my life,” thought the boy.

In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman

speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the

sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and

went carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down

upon him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind,

shaking loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it

against his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before

the house he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into

the road. Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the

street.

“I will go for Mary Underwood,” he thought, his mind returning to the

friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose

friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer’s tirades against all

women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his

bare head.

“We need a woman in our house,” he kept saying over and over to himself.

“We need a woman in our house.”

CHAPTER VII

Leaning against the wall under the veranda of Mary Underwood’s house,

Sam tried to get in his mind a remembrance of what had brought him

there. He had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along a

country road. Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He

had forgotten the purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The

unexpected and terrible hatred of his father that had come upon him in

the tense silence of the kitchen had so paralysed his brain that he now

felt light-headed and wonderfully happy and carefree.

“I have been doing something,” he thought; “I wonder what it is.”

The house faced a grove of pine trees and was reached by climbing a

little rise and following a winding road out beyond the graveyard and

the last of the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled

on the tin roof overhead, and Sam, his back closely pressed against the

front of the house, fought to regain control of his mind.

For an hour he stood there staring into the darkness and watched with

delight the progress of the storm. He had--an inheritance from his

mother--a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a boy

and his mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the

house singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did

not hear, and in his bed upstairs Sam had lain awake listening to the

noises--the rain on the roof, the occasional crash of thunder, the

snoring of Windy, and the unusual and, he thought, beautiful sound of

the mother singing in the storm.

Now, lifting up his head, he looked about with delight. Trees in the

grove in front of him bent and tossed in the wind. The inky blackness of

the night was relieved by the flickering oil lamp in the road beyond

the graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the

windows of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which

he stood made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees

through which the raindrops fell gleaming and sparkling. An occasional

flash of lightning lit up the trees and the winding road, and the

cannonry of the skies rolled and echoed overhead. A kind of wild song

sang in Sam’s heart.

“I wish it would last all night,” he thought, his mind fixed on the

singing of his mother in the dark house when he was a boy.

The door opened and a woman stepped out upon the veranda and stood

before him facing the storm, the wind tossing the soft kimono in which

she was clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air

was filled with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted

her head and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her

fine contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and

going on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover

riding through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the

song--

“He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,”

sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch

and leaning forward into the storm.

Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who

had been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind

had turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman

standing singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother

singing on the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on,

seeing pictures as he used to see them when a boy walking under

the stars and listening to the talk of John Telfer. He saw a

broad-shouldered man shouting defiance to the storm as he rode down a

mountain path.

“And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak,” went on the voice of

the singer.

Mary Underwood’s singing there in the rain made her seem near and

likeable as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.

“John Telfer was wrong about her,” he thought.

She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down

across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating

the spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon

his clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation

of surprise broke from her lips:

“Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the

rain.”

“I like it here,” replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at

the storm.

Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary

looked into the darkness.

“You have been a long time coming to see me,” she said, “come in.”

Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the

veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon

a table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the

shelves along the walls. On a table burned a student’s lamp and in the

corners of the room lay heavy shadows.

Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes.

Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned

clad in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began

moving about the room picking up odds and ends of woman’s clothing

scattered on the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks

piled in an open grate at the side of the room.

“It was the storm made me want to sing,” she said self-consciously, and

then briskly, “we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in

the road and got yourself covered with mud.”

From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into

his mind.

“I have come here courting,” he thought; “I have come to ask Mary

Underwood to be my wife and live in my house.”

The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused

something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore,

falling away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by

the kimono, wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the

soft grey hair and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks

caused a jumping of his heart.

“We are needing a woman in our house,” he said heavily, repeating the

words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept

streets and along the mud-covered roads. “We are needing a woman in our

house, and I have come to take you there.

“I intend to marry you,” he added, lurching across the room and grasping

her roughly by the shoulders. “Why not? I am needing a woman.”

Mary Underwood was dismayed and frightened by the face looking down at

her, and by the strong hands clenched upon her shoulders. In his youth

she had conceived a kind of maternal passion for the newsboy and had

planned a future for him. Her plans if followed would have made him a

scholar, a man living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had

chosen to live his life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about

the country like Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen

him driving at evening through the street to Freedom’s house, going in

and out of Wildman’s, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim

way she knew that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from

the things of which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John

Telfer, the talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had

come back to her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of

the road, and talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother,

of marriage and of coming to live with him in his house. She stood,

chilled, looking into the eager, strong face and the eyes with the

pained, dazed look in them.

Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to

Sam, and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.

“It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you,” he began, “it was

because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired

of them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little

schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew

tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks

and looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to

get out of there and into the streets myself.”

Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and

stared into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from

his trousers legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to

reconstruct an old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer’s,

that had years before come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and

Telfer had made of the ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central

figure, a stoop-shouldered, feeble old man stumbling along the street,

muttering to himself and poking in a gutter with a stick. The picture

was a caricature of puttering old Frank Huntley, superintendent of the

Caxton schools.

Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood’s house, become, for the

moment, a boy, facing a boy’s problems, Sam did not want to be such a

man. He wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the

kind of man he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of

the world and making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get

expressed when he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind,

he felt that he must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that

the schools were not giving him what he wanted. His brain worked on the

problem of how to tell her about it.

Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: “I am going to quit the

schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same.”

Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the

chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the

door opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called

sharply, “Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here.”

A startled, trembling voice answered from above, “Who is it?”

Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her

hand gently on his shoulder, said, “It is your mother and you are only a

sick, half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it.”

Sam shook his head. “She is still there in the bed, coughing.” He roused

himself and stood up. “I have just killed my father,” he announced. “I

choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the

house. He made horrible noises in the kitchen and mother was tired and

wanted to sleep.”

Mary Underwood began running about the room. From a little alcove under

a stairway she took clothes, throwing them upon the floor about the

room. She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam’s presence,

raised her skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the

stockinged foot and the other on the bare one, she turned to him. “We

will go back to your house. I think you are right. You need a woman

there.”

In the street she walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall

fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over

Sam. He felt he had accomplished something--something he had set out to

accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion

that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith’s, began planning

the evening he would spend with her.

“I will tell her of the letter from the Chicago company and of what I

will do when I go to the city,” he thought.

At the gate before the McPherson house Mary looked into the road below

the grassy bank that ran down from the fence, but in the darkness she

could see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and

shouted as it rushed through the bare branches of the trees. Sam went

through the gate and around the house to the kitchen door intent upon

getting to his mother’s bedside.

In the house the neighbour woman sat asleep in a chair before the

kitchen stove. The daughter had gone.

Sam went through the house to the parlour and sat down in a chair beside

his mother’s bed, picking up her hand and holding it in his own. “She

must be asleep,” he thought.

At the kitchen door Mary Underwood stopped, and, turning, ran away into

the darkness along the street. By the kitchen fire the neighbour

woman still slept. In the parlour Sam, sitting on the chair beside his

mother’s bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little

stand beside the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a

tall, aristocratic-looking woman with rings on her fingers, that hung

upon the wall. The picture belonged to Windy and was claimed by him as a

portrait of his mother, and it had once brought on a quarrel between Sam

and his sister.

Kate had taken the portrait of the lady seriously, and the boy had come

upon her sitting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands

lying in her lap in imitation of the pose maintained so haughtily by the

great lady who looked down at her.

“It is a fraud,” he had declared, irritated by what he believed his

sister’s devotion to one of the father’s pretensions. “It is a fraud

he has picked up somewhere and now claims as his mother to make people

believe he is something big.”

The girl, ashamed at having been caught in the pose, and furious because

of the attack upon the authenticity of the portrait, had gone into a

spasm of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the

floor with her foot. Then she had run across the room and dropped upon

her knees before a little couch, buried her face in a pillow and shook

with anger and grief.

Sam had turned and walked out of the room. The emotions of the sister

had seemed to him to have the flavour of one of Windy’s outbreaks.

“She likes it,” he had thought, dismissing the incident. “She likes

believing in lies. She is like Windy and would rather believe in them

than not.”

* * * * *

Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer’s house and beat on

the door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, holding a lamp

above her head, appeared at the door. With Telfer she went back through

the streets to the front of Sam’s house thinking of the terrible choked

and disfigured man they should find there. She went along clinging to

Telfer’s arm as she had clung to Sam’s, unconscious of her bare head

and scanty attire. In his hand Telfer carried a lantern secured from the

stable.

In the road before the house they found nothing. Telfer went up and down

swinging the lantern and peering into gutters. The woman walked beside

him, her skirts lifted and the mud splashing upon her bare leg.

Suddenly Telfer threw back his head and laughed. Taking her hand he led

Mary with a rush up the bank and through the gate.

“What a muddle-headed old fool I am!” he cried. “I am getting old and

addle-pated! Windy McPherson is not dead! Nothing could kill that old

war horse! He was in at Wildman’s grocery after nine o’clock to-night

covered with mud and swearing he had been in a fight with Art Sherman.

Poor Sam and you--to have come to me and to have found me a stupid ass!

Fool! Fool! What a fool I have become!”

In at the kitchen door ran Mary and Telfer, frightening the woman by

the stove so that she sprang to her feet and began nervously making the

false teeth rattle with her tongue. In the parlour they found Sam, his

head upon the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand

of Jane McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood stooped

over and kissed his wet hair as the neighbour woman came in at the

doorway bearing the kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, holding his finger to

his lips, commanded silence.

CHAPTER VIII

The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He

thought that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become

coarsened--she looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had

an air of having quarrelled with her husband when they came out of

their bedroom in the morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the

parlour, astonished and irritated by the endless number of women that

crowded into the house. They were everywhere, in the kitchen, the

sleeping room back of the parlour; and in the parlour, where the

dead woman lay in her coffin, they were massed. When the thin-lipped

minister, holding a book in his hand, held forth upon the virtues of

the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the floor and thought that thus

they would have wept over the body of the dead Windy, had his fingers

but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister would have talked

in the same way--blatantly and without knowledge--of the virtues of the

dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved husband, in new

black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious undertaker kept

moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his trade.

During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the

floor at Sam’s feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to

distract his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of

the weeping women, none of whom had before been in the house and all

of whom he thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of

privacy. The note was from John Telfer.

“I will not come to your mother’s funeral,” he wrote. “I respected your

mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she

is dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in

Wildman’s, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the

moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore’s shop, I will

go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If

he or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their

friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know

that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take

them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of

the dead.”

The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something

that had slipped from him.

“It is good sense, after all,” he thought, and realised that even in the

days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the

fact that Jane McPherson’s long, hard role was just being played out

to the end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore

was beating upon his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with

a flourish. He arose, interrupting the minister’s discourse. Mary

Underwood had come in just as the minister began talking and had dropped

into an obscure corner near the door leading into the street. Sam

crowded past the women who stared and the minister who frowned and the

baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands and, dropping the note into

her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking and listening with

breathless curiosity, “It is from John Telfer. Read it. Even he, hating

women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door.”

In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their

heads together and their hands before their faces, nodded toward

the school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had

created, went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting

until the talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the

streets should be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book.

“I have become older than all of these people here,” thought the youth.

“They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of

my hand.”

Mary Underwood, lacking Sam’s unconsciousness of the people, looked

about with burning cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and putting their

heads together, a chill of fear ran through her. Into the room had been

thrust the face of an old enemy to her--the scandal of a small town.

Picking up the note she slipped out at the door and stole away along

the street. The old maternal love for Sam had returned strengthened and

ennobled by the terror through which she had passed with him that night

in the rain. Going to her house she whistled the collie dog and set out

along a country road. At the edge of a grove of trees she stopped, sat

down on a log, and read Telfer’s note. From the soft ground into which

her feet sank there came the warm pungent smell of the new growth. Tears

came into her eyes. She thought that in a few days much had come to her.

She had got a boy upon whom she could pour out the mother love in her

heart, and she had made a friend of Telfer, whom she had long regarded

with fear and doubt.

For a month Sam lingered in Caxton. It seemed to him there was something

that wanted doing there. He sat with the men at the back of Wildman’s,

and walked aimlessly through the streets and out of the town along the

country roads, where men worked all day in the fields behind sweating

horses, ploughing the land. The thrill of spring was in the air, and

in the evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree below his bedroom

window. Sam walked and loitered in silence, looking at the ground.

In his mind was the dread of people. The talk of the men in the store

wearied him and when he went alone into the country he found himself

accompanied by the voices of all of those he had come out of town to

escape. On the street corner the thin-lipped, brown-bearded minister

stopped him and talked of the future life as he had stopped and talked

to a bare-legged newsboy.

“Your mother,” he said, “has but gone before. It is for you to get into

the narrow path and follow her. God has sent this sorrow as a warning

to you. He wants you also to get into the way of life and in the end to

join her. Begin coming to our church. Join in the work of the Christ.

Find truth.”

Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The

minister’s talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of

which he got but one thought.

“Find truth,” he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his

mind play with the idea. “The best men are all trying to do that. They

spend their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth.”

He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the

interpretation he had put upon the minister’s words. The terrible

moments in the kitchen followed by his mother’s death had put a new

look of seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of

responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the

street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become

public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public

affairs.

“He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour’s wife,” said

John Telfer.

Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken

him to its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had

encouraged him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father,

and patronised him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was

a boy, scurrying between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a

Saturday night, there was always some one to speak a word to him of his

morals and to shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected

to remain there, with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the

Savings Bank--built to that during his years with Freedom Smith--he

might soon become one of the town’s solid men.

He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and

that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the

train and be off.

One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences,

hearing the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the

smell of the new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town

and sat down on a low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the

railroad station, to wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken

on a new meaning to him since any day might see him on such a train

bound into his new life.

A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed

by two women.

“Here, watch these,” he said to the women, setting the bags upon

the platform; “I will go for the tickets,” and disappeared into the

darkness.

The two women resumed their interrupted talk.

“Ed’s wife has been poorly these ten years,” said one of them. “It will

be better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long

ride. I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to

be train-sick.”

Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John

Telfer’s old talks with him.

“They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away

from here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain.”

He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending

shoes on a side street back of Geiger’s drug store and the two women,

one short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery

shop and were Eleanor Telfer’s only competitors.

“Well, the town knows her now for what she is,” said the tall woman.

“Milly Peters says she won’t rest until she has put that stuck-up Mary

Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house and

it was her told Milly. I never heard such a story. To think of Jane

McPherson working all these years and then having such goings-on in her

house when she lay dying, Milly says that Sam went away early in the

evening and came home late with that Underwood thing, half dressed,

hanging on his arm. Milly’s mother looked out of the window and saw

them. Then she ran out by the kitchen stove and pretended to be asleep.

She wanted to see what was up. And the bold hussy came right into the

house with Sam. Then she went away, and after a while back she came with

that John Telfer. Milly is going to see that Eleanor Telfer finds it

out. I guess it will bring her down, too. And there is no telling

how many other men in this town Mary Underwood is running with. Milly

says----”

The two women turned as out of the darkness came a tall figure roaring

and swearing. Two hands flashed out and sank into their hair.

“Stop it!” growled Sam, beating the two heads together, “stop your dirty

lies!--you ugly she-beasts!”

Hearing the two women screaming the man who had gone for the railroad

tickets came running down the station platform followed by Jerry Donlin.

Springing forward Sam knocked the shoemaker over the iron fence into a

newly spaded flower bed and then turned to the baggage man.

“They were telling lies about Mary Underwood,” he shouted. “She tried to

save me from killing my father and now they are telling lies about her.”

The two women picked up the bags and ran whimpering away along

the station platform. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and

confronted the surprised and frightened shoemaker.

“What the Hell are you doing in my flower bed?” he growled.

* * * * *

Hurrying through the streets Sam’s mind was in a ferment. Like the Roman

emperor he wished that all the world had but one head that he might cut

it off with a slash. The town that had seemed so paternal, so cheery, so

intent upon wishing him well, now seemed horrible. He thought of it as a

great, crawling, slimy thing lying in wait amid the cornfields.

“To be saying that of her, of that white soul!” he exclaimed aloud in

the empty street, all of his boyish loyalty and devotion to the woman

who had put out a hand to him in his hour of trouble aroused and burning

in him.

He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a

swinging blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to

his own house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing

meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets

past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone

and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and

quiet. He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane

McPherson’s funeral.

“It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another,” he

thought.

For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy

he saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with

coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They

were the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers.

He remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the

papers and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational

murder cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive

and the details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain

their curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing

the newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and

over on their tongues.

In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the

thought of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small,

unaired, unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and

clothes--only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no

clean thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in

a darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such

a yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these

women come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat

hurriedly and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of

utter physical exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in

stockinged feet before crawling away to sleep and oblivion.

In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed

ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the

man they have snatched from society they cling also with a tenacity

to be measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the

craving for food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the

despair of reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put

the black dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, “The female of

the species is more deadly than the male.” At their worst they are to be

seen drunk with emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution

or immersed in the secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious

persecution. At their best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth

coming to them, they throw themselves into garish display of it and

flash upon the sight of Newport or Palm Beach. In their native lair in

the close little houses, they sleep in the bed of the man who has put

clothes upon their backs and food into their mouths because that is the

usage of their kind and give him of their bodies grudgingly or willingly

as the laws of their physical needs direct. They do not love, they sell,

instead, their bodies in the market place and cry out that man shall

witness their virtue because they had had the joy of finding one buyer

instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce animalism in them

makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the days of its

softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch again

an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy, no

longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite. Having

passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of emotions

and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the eloquence of

evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell--the call to the one being

brother to the call of the other--crying upon the troubled air of hot

little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of vulgarity, “The

weight of my sins is heavy on my soul.” Along streets they go lifting

heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel to roll

upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the life

of a Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its

offal. Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air,

dream dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of

animal youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door

to kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has

found a carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it

forward to the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the

fine emotion of achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having

hysteria rather than reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of

femininity--and none of it. For the most part they live and die unseen,

unknown, eating rank food, sleeping overmuch, and sitting through

summer afternoons rocking in chairs and looking at people passing in the

street. In the end they die full of faith, hoping for a life to come.

Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making

on Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields

that lay beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness

and he thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that

had been marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and

shivered as he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air

aggravating the dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the

assurance of the days before his mother’s illness and to get again the

strong belief in his own destiny that had kept him at the money making

and saving and had urged him to the efforts to rise above the level of

the man who bred him. He didn’t succeed. The feeling of age that had

settled upon him in the midst of the people mourning over the body of

his mother came back, and, turning, he went along the road toward the

town, saying to himself: “I will go and talk to Mary Underwood.”

While he waited on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided

that after all a marriage with her might lead to happiness. The half

spiritual, half physical love of woman that is the glory and mystery of

youth was gone from him. He thought that if he could only drive from her

presence the fear of the faces that had been coming and going in his own

mind he would, for his own part, be content to live his life as a worker

and money maker, one without dreams.

Mary Underwood came to the door wearing the same heavy long coat she had

worn on that other night and taking her by the hand Sam led her to the

edge of the veranda. He looked with content at the pine trees before

the house, thinking that some benign influence must have guided the hand

that planted them there to stand clothed and decent amid the barrenness

of the land at the end of winter.

“What is it, boy?” asked the woman, and her voice was filled with

anxiety. The maternal passion again glowing in her had for days coloured

all her thoughts, and with all the ardour of an intense nature she had

thrown herself into her love of Sam. Thinking of him, she felt in fancy

the pangs of birth, and in her bed at night relived with him his boyhood

in the town and built again her plans for his future. In the day time

she laughed at herself and said tenderly, “You are an old fool.”

Brutally and frankly Sam told her of the thing he had heard on the

station platform, looking past her at the pine trees and gripping the

veranda rail. From the dead land there came again the smell of the new

growth as it had come to him on the road before the revelation at the

railroad station.

“Something kept telling me not to go away,” he said. “It must have been

in the air--this thing. Already these evil crawling things were at work.

Oh, if only all the world, like you and Telfer and some of the others

here, had an appreciation of the sense of privacy.”

Mary Underwood laughed quietly.

“I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making

you a man at work upon the things of the mind,” she said. “The sense of

privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer’s method was

better than my own. He has given you the knack of saying things with a

flourish.”

Sam shook his head.

“Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh,” he said

stoutly. “Here is something at you--it is tearing at you--it has got to

be met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter over

in their minds. To-morrow they will be at you again. There is but one

way and we must take it. You and I will have to marry.”

Mary looked at the serious new lines of his face.

“What a proposal!” she cried.

On an impulse she began singing, her voice fine and strong running

through the quiet night.

“He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,”

she sang, and laughed again.

“You should come like that,” she said, and then, “you poor muddled boy.

Don’t you know that I am your new mother?” she added, taking hold of

his two arms and turning him about facing her. “Don’t be absurd. I don’t

want a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him.

I adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick

and covered with mud. As for these women--away with them--I’ll face them

down--I did it once before and I’ll do it again. Go to your city and

make your fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman’s fight.”

“It is horrible. You don’t understand,” Sam protested.

A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood’s face.

“I understand,” she said. “I have been on that battlefield. It is to be

won only by silence and tireless waiting. Your very effort to help would

make the matter worse.”

The woman and the tall boy, suddenly become a man, stood in thought.

She was thinking of the end toward which her life was drifting.

How differently she had planned it. She thought of the college in

Massachusetts and of the men and women walking under the elm trees

there.

“But I have got me a son and I am going to keep him,” she said aloud,

putting her hand on Sam’s arm.

Very serious and troubled, Sam went down the gravel path toward the

road. He felt there was something cowardly in the part she had given him

to play, but he could see no alternative.

“After all,” he reflected, “it is sensible--it is a woman’s battle.”

Half way to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his

arms and gave her a great hug.

“Good-bye, little Mother,” he cried and kissed her upon the lips.

And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was

overcome with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning

against the house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling

through her tears she called after him.

“Did you crack their heads hard, boy?” she asked.

* * * * *

From Mary’s house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had

come to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen

table with pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the

parlour he could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and

writing again. Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read

over and over what he had written, and putting on his coat went through

the dawn to the house of Tom Comstock, editor of the _Caxton Argus_, and

roused him out of bed.

“I’ll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won’t cost you anything,”

Comstock promised. “But why run it? Let the matter drop.”

“I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago,”

Sam thought.

Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at

Valmore’s suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter’s jewelry store. For an

hour they bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When

the choice was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a

box on the counter Telfer made a speech.

“I will talk straight to that boy,” he declared, laughing. “I am not

going to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have

him fail me. I shall tell him that if he doesn’t make money in that

Chicago I shall come and take the watch from him.”

Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along

the street to Eleanor’s shop. He strutted through the display room and

into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.

“What am I going to do, Eleanor?” he demanded, standing with legs spread

apart and frowning down upon her, “what am I going to do without Sam?”

A freckle-faced boy opened the shop door and threw a newspaper on the

floor. The boy had a ringing voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer went

again through the display room, touching with his cane the posts upon

which hung the finished hats, and whistling. Standing before the shop,

with the cane hooked upon his arm, he rolled a cigarette and watched the

boy running from door to door along the street.

“I shall have to be adopting a new son,” he said musingly.

After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood in his white nightgown and re-read

the statement just given him. He read it over and over, and then, laying

it on the kitchen table, filled and lighted a corncob pipe. A draft of

wind blew into the room under the kitchen door chilling his thin shanks

so that he drew his bare feet, one after the other, up behind the

protective walls of his nightgown.

“On the night of my mother’s death,” ran the statement, “I sat in the

kitchen of our house eating my supper when my father came in and began

shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother who was asleep. I

put my hand at his throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, and

carried him around the house and threw him into the road. Then I ran to

the house of Mary Underwood, who was once my schoolteacher, and told her

what I had done. She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went

to look for the body of my father, who was not dead after all. John

McPherson knows this is true, if he can be made to tell the truth.”

Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous woman with red cheeks,

who set up type in the shop, did her own housework, and gathered most of

the news and advertising for _The Argus_.

“Ain’t that a slasher?” he asked, handing her the statement Sam had

written.

“Well, it ought to stop the mean things they are saying about Mary

Underwood,” she snapped. Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and

looking at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her much help

with _The Argus_, was the best checker player in Caxton and had once

been to a state tournament of experts in that sport, she added, “Poor

Jane McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better father for him

than that liar Windy. Choked him, eh? Well, if the men of this town had

any spunk they would finish the job.”

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns

in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like

Freedom Smith, bought the farmers’ products. On Sundays he sat in chairs

before country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or,

getting back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown

streets and among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on

the road. From time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with

the men in Wildman’s, stealing away later for an evening with Mary

Underwood.

In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the

farmer’s widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In

the store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose--the same John Telfer

had watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show

Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker

barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging

cane and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer

had not got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad

station and make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the

loss of that opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and

thinking of many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour

to the speech he had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam,

while the gift had touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind

the essential solid goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he

lost much of the bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood,

had been able to make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his

room in Chicago he had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting

in and taking out flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of

thanks.

Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now

that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom

Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in

the wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore’s shop as the blacksmith

walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.

“What has happened to Sam--he has changed so much?” he asked, dropping

a foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel. “Already the

city has changed him,” he added regretfully.

Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.

“He bites off his words,” continued Valmore; “he sits for an hour in the

store and then goes away, and doesn’t come back to say good-bye when he

leaves town. What has got into him?”

Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust

of the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had

been hurled at him.

“If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all

right,” he exploded. “He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes

to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like

it.”

* * * * *

For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing,

hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy

from the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the

money-maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems

of life and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great

game in which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited

patiently until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would

possess. With the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they

pounced and Sam felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with

country buyers used it ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look

that came into the eyes of unsuccessful business men at critical moments

and watched for it and took advantage of it as a successful prize

fighter watches for a similar vague, uncertain look in the eyes of an

opponent.

He had found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that

comes with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the

successful business men about him is the stroke also of the master

painter, scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of

Whistler, Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been

in him when as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook,

and now and then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road.

In the city where men of wealth and power in affairs rubbed elbows with

him in the street cars and walked past him in hotel lobbies he watched

and waited saying to himself, “I also will be such a one.”

Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked

on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of

himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a

knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of

vast work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but

for the most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about

him, keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.

During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton

family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but

that still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer

vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed

him during the month after his mother’s death, and letters regarding him

had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down

to dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and

talk of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.

“I was thinking of old John Moore to-day--does he still drive that

team of black ponies?” the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman

of thirty, would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a

conversation of baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new

office building to be erected in the Loop.

“No, he don’t,” Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in

a machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake

been the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that

he looked upon Sam as an intruder. “John told me last summer when I was

home that he intended to sell the blacks and buy mules,” he would add,

looking at the youth challengingly.

The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar

and bustle of Chicago’s vast west side, it still turned with hungry

heart toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for

Jake, its mainstay, could be found in that paradise.

Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey

moustache, and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so

that they stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of

a lawn, worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night,

going to bed at nine o’clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling,

from room to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers,

or sitting in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the

habits formed in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home

with his pay in his pocket, settled with the two sisters for the

week’s living, sat down to dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then

disappeared upon the troubled waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening

he re-appeared, with empty pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and

a noisy attempt at self-possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl

into bed in preparation for another week of toil and respectability. The

man had a certain Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new

ladies met on his weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall.

He once took Sam upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half

around the room.

Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of

thirty-five who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and

blessed with a remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical

student in the front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired

woman stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer

from a wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little

Southern wife.

The women in the Pergrin house seemed to Sam tremendously concerned

about their health and each evening talked of the matter, he thought,

more than his mother had talked during her illness. While Sam lived with

them they were all under the influence of a strange sort of faith healer

and took what they called “Health Suggestion” treatments. Twice each

week the faith healer came to the house, laid his hands upon their backs

and took their money. The treatment afforded Jake a never-ending source

of amusement and in the evening he went through the house putting his

hands upon the backs of the women and demanding money from them, but

the dry-goods buyer’s wife, who for years had coughed at night, slept

peacefully after some weeks of the treatment and the cough did not

return while Sam remained in the house.

In the house Sam had a standing. Glowing tales of his shrewdness in

business, his untiring industry, and the size of his bank account, had

preceded him from Caxton, and these tales the Pergrins, in their loyalty

to the town and to all the products of the town, did not allow to shrink

in the re-telling. The housekeeping sister, a kindly woman, became fond

of Sam, and in his absence would boast of him to chance callers or to

the boarders gathered in the living room in the evening. She it was who

laid the foundation of the medical student’s belief that Sam was a kind

of genius in money matters, a belief that enabled him later to make a

successful assault upon a legacy which came to that young man.

Frank Eckardt, the medical student, Sam took as a friend. On Sunday

afternoons they went to walk in the streets, or, taking two girl friends

of Frank’s, who were also students at the medical school, on their arms,

they went to the park and sat upon benches under the trees.

For one of these young women Sam conceived a regard that approached

tenderness. Sunday after Sunday he spent with her, and once, walking

through the park on an evening in the late fall, the dry brown leaves

rustling under their feet and the sun going down in red splendour before

their eyes, he took her hand and walked in silence, feeling tremendously

alive and vital as he had felt on that other night walking under the

trees of Caxton with the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker.

That nothing came of the affair and that after a time he did not see

the girl again was due, he thought, to his own growing interest in money

making and to the fact that there was in her, as in Frank Eckardt, a

blind devotion to something that he could not himself understand.

Once he had a talk with Eckardt of the matter. “She is fine and

purposeful like a woman I knew in my home town,” he said, thinking of

Eleanor Telfer, “but she will not talk to me of her work as sometimes

she talks to you. I want her to talk. There is something about her that

I do not understand and that I want to understand. I think that she

likes me and once or twice I have thought she would not greatly mind my

making love to her, but I do not understand her just the same.”

One day in the office of the company for which he worked Sam became

acquainted with a young advertising man named Jack Prince, a brisk, very

much alive young fellow who made money rapidly, spent it lavishly, and

had friends and acquaintances in every office, every hotel lobby, every

bar room and restaurant in the down-town section of the city. The chance

acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. The clever, witty Prince made

a kind of hero of Sam, admiring his reserve and good sense and boasting

of him far and wide through the town. With Prince, Sam occasionally went

on mild carouses, and, once, in the midst of thousands of people sitting

about tables and drinking beer at the Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, he and

Prince got into a fight with two waiters, Prince declaring he had been

cheated and Sam, although he thought his friend in the wrong, striking

out with his fist and dragging Prince through the door and into a

passing street car in time to avoid a rush of other waiters hurrying to

the aid of the one who lay dazed and sputtering on the sawdust floor.

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.

One night in September, when he was walking alone in the streets, an

incident happened that showed him also a silent power within himself,

a power that startled and for the moment frightened him. Walking into

a little street back of Dearborn, he was suddenly aware of the faces of

women looking out at him through small square windows cut in the fronts

of the houses. Here and there, before and behind him, were the faces;

voices called, smiles invited, hands beckoned. Up and down the street

went men looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their

necks, their hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces

of the women pressed against the little squares of glass and then,

turning, suddenly, sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued.

Among the walkers on the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats

whose feet scuffled as they hurried along, and young boys with the pink

of virtue in their cheeks. In the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It

got into Sam’s brain and he stood hesitating and uncertain, startled,

nerveless, afraid. He remembered a story he had once heard from John

Telfer, a story of the disease and death that lurks in the little side

streets of cities, and ran into Van Buren Street and from that into

lighted State. He climbed up the stairway of the elevated railroad and

jumping on the first train went away south to walk for hours on a gravel

roadway at the edge of the lake in Jackson Park. The wind from the lake

and the laughter and talk of people passing under the lights cooled

the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the eloquence of John

Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his voice marshalling

the armies of the standing corn.

Into Sam’s mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great

masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there

was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of,

moving always forward, silent, powerful--the force of sex. He wondered

how the force would be broken in his own case, against what breakwater

it would spend itself. At midnight, he went home across the city and

crept into his alcove in the Pergrin house, puzzled and for the time

utterly tired. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and

resolutely closing his eyes tried to sleep. “There are things not to

be understood,” he told himself. “To live decently is a matter of good

sense. I will keep thinking of what I want to do and not go into such a

place again.”

One day, when he had been in Chicago two years, there happened an

incident of another sort, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, so full

of youth, that for days after it happened he thought of it with delight,

and walked in the streets or sat in a passenger train laughing joyfully

at the remembrance of some new detail of the affair.

Sam, who was the son of Windy McPherson and who had more than once

ruthlessly condemned all men who put liquor into their mouths, got

drunk, and for eighteen hours went shouting poetry, singing songs, and

yelling at the stars like a wood god on the bend.

Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in

DeJonge’s restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before

him on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers,

talked to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.

“He will be late, of course,” he exclaimed, refilling Sam’s glass. “The

man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would

take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from

the cheeks of a maiden.”

Sam had already seen the man for whom they waited. He was thirty-five,

small and narrow-shouldered, with a little wrinkled face, a huge nose,

and a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. Sam had seen him in

a Michigan Avenue club with Prince solemnly pitching silver dollars at a

chalk mark on the floor with a group of serious, solid-looking old men.

“They are the crowd that have just put through the big deal in Kansas

oil stock and the little one is Morris, who handled the publicity for

them,” Prince had explained.

Later, when they were walking down Michigan Avenue, Prince talked at

length of Morris, whom he admired immensely. “He is the best advertising

and publicity man in America,” he declared. “He isn’t a four-flusher,

as I am, and does not make as much money, but he can take another man’s

ideas and express them so simply and forcibly that they tell the

man’s story better than he knew it himself. And that’s all there is to

advertising.”

He began laughing.

“It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the

man for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every

pat phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He

will howl like a beast at paying Tom’s bill, and then the next time he

will try to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so

that he has to send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like

shelling corn off the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him.”

Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge

pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. “I am on my way

to the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company,” he

explained to Prince. “I can’t stop at all. I have here the layout of

a circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common

stock of theirs that hasn’t paid a dividend for ten years.”

Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. “Never mind

the Biscuit Machine people and their stock,” he commanded; “they will

always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to

meet McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help

him with.”

Morris reached across the table and took Sam’s hand; his own was small

and soft like that of a woman. “I am worked to death,” he complained;

“I have my eye on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am going down there to

live.”

For an hour the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked of

a place in Wisconsin where the fish should be biting. “A man has told me

of the place twenty times,” he declared; “I am sure I could find it on

a railroad folder. I have never been fishing nor have you, and Sam here

comes from a place to which they carry water in wagons over the plains.”

The little man who had been drinking copiously of the wine looked from

Prince to Sam. From time to time he took off his glasses and wiped them

with a handkerchief. “I don’t understand your being in such society,” he

announced; “you have the solid, substantial look of a bucket-shop man.

Prince here will get nowhere. He is honest, sells wind and his charming

society, and spends the money that he gets, instead of marrying and

putting it in his wife’s name.”

Prince arose. “It is useless to waste time in persiflage,” he began

and then turning to Sam, “There is a place in Wisconsin,” he said

uncertainly.

Morris picked up the portfolio and with a grotesque effort at steadiness

started for the door followed by Prince and Sam walking with wavering

steps. In the street Prince took the portfolio out of the little man’s

hand. “Let your mother carry it, Tommy,” he said, shaking his finger

under Morris’s nose. He began singing a lullaby. “When the bough bends

the cradle will fall.”

The three men walked out of Monroe and into State Street, Sam’s head

feeling strangely light. The buildings along the street reeled against

the sky. A sudden fierce longing for wild adventure seized him. On a

corner Morris stopped, took the handkerchief from his pocket and again

wiped his glasses. “I want to be sure that I see clearly,” he said; “it

seems to me that in the bottom of that last glass of wine I saw three

of us in a cab with a basket of life oil on the seat between us going

to the station to catch the train for that place Jack’s friend told fish

lies about.”

The next eighteen hours opened up a new world to Sam. With the fumes of

liquor rising in his brain, he rode for two hours on a train, tramped

in the darkness along dusty roads and, building a bonfire in a woods,

danced in the light of it upon the grass, holding the hands of Prince

and the little man with the wrinkled face. Solemnly he stood upon a

stump at the edge of a wheatfield and recited Poe’s “Helen,” taking on

the voice, the gestures and even the habit of spreading his legs apart,

of John Telfer. And then overdoing the last, he sat down suddenly on the

stump, and Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand said, “Fill

the lamp, man--the light of reason has gone out.”

From the bonfire in the woods and Sam’s recital from the stump, the

three friends emerged again upon the road, and a belated farmer driving

home half asleep on the seat of his wagon caught their attention. With

the skill of an Indian boy the diminutive Morris sprang upon the wagon

and thrust a ten dollar bill into the farmer’s hand. “Lead us, O man of

the soil!” he shouted, “Lead us to a gilded palace of sin! Take us to a

saloon! The life oil gets low in the can!”

Beyond the long, jolting ride in the wagon Sam never became quite clear.

In his mind ran vague notions of a wild carousal in a country tavern, of

himself acting as bartender, and a huge red-faced woman rushing here and

there under the direction of a tiny man, dragging reluctant rustics to

the bar and commanding them to keep on drinking the beer that Sam drew

until the last of the ten dollars given to the man of the wagon should

have gone into her cash drawer. Also, he thought that Jack Prince

had put a chair upon the bar and that he sat on it explaining to the

hurrying drawer of beer that although the Egyptian kings had built great

pyramids to celebrate themselves they never built anything more gigantic

than the jag Tom Morris was building among the farm hands in the room.

Later Sam thought that he and Jack Prince tried to sleep under a pile of

grain sacks in a shed and that Morris came to them weeping because every

one in the world was asleep and most of them lying under tables.

And then, his head clearing, Sam found himself with the two others

walking again upon the dusty road in the dawn and singing songs.

On the train, with the help of a Negro porter, the three men tried

to efface the dust and the stains of the wild night. The pasteboard

portfolio containing the circular for the Biscuit Machine Company was

still under Jack Prince’s arm and the little man, wiping and re-wiping

his glasses, peered at Sam.

“Did you come with us or are you a child we have adopted here in these

parts?” he asked.