Шервуд Андерсон. Сын Винди МакФерсон(engl)

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windy McPherson's Son, by Sherwood Anderson

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Title: Windy McPherson's Son

Author: Sherwood Anderson

Release Date: February, 2005  [EBook #7443]
[This file was first posted on April 30, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON ***




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, f