u are getting too old to sell papers and you know
too much."

Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday
night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year he
had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he nodded
his head as he hurried away.

"It is the end of romance," shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom Smith
before Geiger's drug store and who had heard the offer. "A boy, who has
seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe and
Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am overcome
by the thought."

The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to
Sam of the matter at length.

"For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place," he
declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time to
time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. "For any boy I put
money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who despise
money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she puts into the
selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been the making of
her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without the millinery
business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon clothes and with it
she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to her."

Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the
ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking
thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the
boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret
regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by
throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making
the words roll and tumble from his lips.

"No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes
many virtues that are forever on men's lips," he declared fiercely as
though trying to down an opponent. "It is one of the virtues that proves
man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power to
make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys fear.
Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings into
men's lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go
adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.

"Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
wealth," he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. "No doubt the
things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct
to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty,
the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of
the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the
defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man's
city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at
the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and
I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not
acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables him to get on, may
build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is diseased and decaying."

Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his
eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.

"The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that makes
our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for shrewd
money getting or it will destroy itself," he declared. "And the really
great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve in
garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages on Fifth
Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for yourself. Visit
the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to one that you will
find him not only incapable in money getting but also incapable in the
very art for which he starves."

After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer
for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted a
chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and hides
he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged persistency
with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank had caught
Freedom's imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the fact.

Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty
dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn
business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with
the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business,
backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the
cashier telling of Sam's record as a depositor, and the seven hundred
dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with Freedom,
Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his savings as he
had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was impressed. He
thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a week Sam had seen
the silent suggestive power of cash.

The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to more
than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have two-thirds
of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other hand was to
furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam was to take care
of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things bought were to be fixed
each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at less than the prices named
two-thirds of the savings went to him. The arrangement was suggested by
Sam, who thought he would make more from the saving than from the wage.

Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice,
roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great
inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man,
woman and child he knew and liked. "Old Maybe-Not" he called Windy
McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed
rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low
phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip in
the top. To Sam's knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed
during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying.
Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar until
the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him. And then
haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his way while the
farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward child.

Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton's best
streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked
him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing
and roaring about it. "Good morning, Mary," he would shout at the neat
German woman across the street. "Wait and you'll see me clean up about
here. I'm going at it right now. I'm going to brush the flies off the
fence first."

Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the
county.

Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and agricultural
implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard, gathering rust and
decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the lot were a half dozen
buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction engine, a mowing machine,
several farm wagons and other farm tools gone beyond naming. Every few
days he came home bringing a new prize. They overflowed the yard and crept
onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell any of this stuff. He had at
one time sixteen sets of harness all broken and unrepaired in the barn and
in a shed back of the house. A great flock of chickens and two or three
pigs wandered about among this junk and all the children of the
neighbourhood joined Freedom's four and ran howling and shouting over and
under the mass.

Freedom's wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house. She
had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally stood
at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at evening as he
stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both she and Freedom
treated him with great respect.

As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling. He was
a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very systematically
and within a year more than doubling the bulk of Freedom's purchases.

There is a little of Windy McPherson's grotesque pretentiousness in every
man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of it. He
let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value of their
goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they had recovered
from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam's day, farmers did not
watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets were not systematised
and regulated as they were later, and the skill of the buyer was of the
first importance. Having the skill, Sam used it constantly to put money
into his pockets, but in some way kept the confidence and respect of the
men with whom he traded.

The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading
ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the
streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.

"Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy," he would shout to the
loafers in the store.

Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his own
affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom's affairs,
but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and apples, butter
and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working always to swell his
commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business and many times
profited little, but the two liked and respected each other and it was
through Freedom's efforts that Sam finally got out of Caxton and into
larger affairs.

One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam stood
taking the harness off his horse.

"Here is a chance for you, my boy," he said, putting his hand
affectionately on Sam's shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his
voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the
things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had replied
making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might hope for in
Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.

When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for
him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at
last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in
the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the
door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb
to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told him that
in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and filled with
uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom's stable wishing
that he also might be gone.

Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken
from the horse upon a peg in the wall.

"I will be glad to go," he said heavily.

Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who had
come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man of eighteen.
He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago company because of
his affection for the boy and because he believed him capable of something
more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence holding the lantern
aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the yard, filled with
regrets.

By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who,
putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her
eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street,
Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From a
street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could see
them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom's hand and the
slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.




CHAPTER VI


Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving
March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom's hand. At the
front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on
the gate and looking at the sky.

"We shall have a rain," he said in a quavering voice, as though giving a
decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an answer
went along a narrow path into the house.

The incident brought a smile to Sam's lips followed by a kind of weariness
of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had, day after
day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking at the sky.
The man was one of Sam's old newspaper customers who stood as a kind of
figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he had been a
gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part in more than
one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he had come to end
his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself by keeping year
after year a carefully tabulated record of weather variations. Once or
twice a month during the warm season he stumbled into Wildman's and,
sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the accuracy of his records and
the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at his heels. In his present mood
the endless sameness and uneventfulness of the man's life seemed to Sam
amusing and in some way sad.

"To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point to
a day--to look forward to and depend upon that--what deadliness!" he
thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt with pleasure the
letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much of the big
outside world to him.

In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he
felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought
on by his mother's approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of
confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost cheerful.
The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom was renewed
by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at the sky.

"I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching a
mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer," he
thought.

The three years in Freedom Smith's service had taught Sam not to doubt his
ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his way. He
knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business man, one of
the men who direct and control the affairs in which they are concerned
because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He recalled with
pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped calling him a bright
boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.

At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these
things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old man
he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his mother's life
had been as barren as that of the man who depended for companionship upon
a dog and a thermometer.

"Indeed," he said to himself, pursuing the thought, "it has been worse.
She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the
remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the last
days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old man
watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house chasing
playthings." The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the wind
singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional drop of
rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with his mother.
During the last two or three years he had been trying to make things up to
her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the beginning of his
success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub and since the
beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after evening with her
instead of going to Wildman's to sit with the four friends and hear the
talk that went on among them. No more did he walk with Telfer or Mary
Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the bedside of the sick
woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an arm chair upon the
grass plot at the front of the house.

The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an
understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to the
ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together, the
mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much
speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it
unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought of
the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had been
made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which he had
been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the doings of the
pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane's illness continued to go off
after pension day for long periods of drunkenness, and who only came home
to weep and wail through the house, when the pension money was gone,
regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the loss of both the washwoman
and the wife.

"She has been the most wonderful woman in the world," he told himself and
tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend, John
Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy trotting
beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of her long
gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A picture of
George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness in the kitchen of
Freedom Smith's house, had caught his eye some days before, and in the
darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his lips, realising that
in some indescribable way it was like his mother as she had been before
her illness. Freedom's wife had given him the picture and he had been
carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on lonely stretches of road as he
went about his work.

Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of an
attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue the
thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details of a
long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It was
extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could
remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her
youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy's mind.
She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of a thin-
lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a farm, and
of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved to buy
books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a school
teacher, and of her marriage to Windy--then John McPherson.

Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in the
town's life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man who
walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and who
taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.

When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him
eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should
have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.

"And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour and
unhappiness for me," the sick woman had told her son.

After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton where
he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the store into
the sheriff's hands and his wife into the position of town laundress.

In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted
across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy and
another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the state
giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs and had
written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the applause that
greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances, the little dimly-
lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces shining in the light of
the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted Windy running here and there,
talking the jargon of stageland, arraying himself in his motley and
strutting upon the little stage.

"And all winter he did not send me a penny," the sick woman had said,
interrupting his thoughts.

Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth,
the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been killed
in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an anecdote,
touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her son.

The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for an
hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old woman
looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter feel she
had been a fool to come.

At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The story
ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding the woman
alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman, then in her
prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house. The railroad
agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and laughed.

"She knocked him out, too," he said, "knocked him cold upon the ground and
then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town
declaring her the finest woman in the state."

In the darkness by the broken shed Sam's mind turned from thoughts of his
mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young farmer. He
thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of the failings
of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of the house to
wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of war talk
always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of the night
when, getting a rig from Culvert's livery, she had driven off alone into
the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show her wedding
ring.

Before him there rose a picture of a summer afternoon when he had seen a
part of the love making that had preceded this. He had gone into the store
to see his sister when the young farmer came in, looked awkwardly about
and pushed a new gold watch across the counter to Kate. A sudden wave of
respect for his sister had pervaded the boy. "What a sum it must have
cost," he thought, and looked with new interest at the back of the lover
and at the flushed cheek and shining eyes of his sister. When the lover,
turning, had seen young McPherson standing at the counter, he laughed
self-consciously and walked out at the door. Kate had been embarrassed and
secretly pleased and flattered by the look in her brother's eyes, but had
pretended to treat the gift lightly, twirling it carelessly back and forth
on the counter and walking up and down swinging her arms.

"Don't go telling," she had said.

"Then don't go pretending," the boy had answered.

Sam thought that his sister's indiscretion, which had brought her a babe
and a husband in the same month had, after all, ended better than the
indiscretion of his mother in her marriage with Windy.

Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for
the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of
his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.

Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and
presently returned, bringing a daughter.

There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in a
house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an
attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code, if
she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The
thought amused and saddened him.

"You would have thought her safe," he mused. She was fifty, small, nervous
and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled as she
talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue because of
nervousness.

In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the door
holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of himself.

"My wife--my wife is dying. She may die any day," he wailed, tears
standing in his eyes.

The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed had
been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with anger
and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and began
sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped and Sam
could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as the man
turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels rose a
voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had begun to
rain.

"He has got into the wrong street," thought the boy stupidly.

Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs
echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air
of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother's ironing board stood
against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering
in Sam's heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store
doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of his
father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate's wedding, when Windy
had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and the
mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house, sick
with humiliation.

The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores
replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy's anger. Sam began thinking
again of his mother's life.

The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now
seemed utterly fruitless. "I would like to repay him," he thought, shaken
with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him. The
cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages on
the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol of
the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he turned
his face and stared at the wall.

He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith's house. Freedom
had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just as to-night
he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and just as Sam was
shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the stable door had
come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy girl of fourteen with
the strength of a man and an inclination to burst out of her clothes at
unexpected places, they had come charging into the stables to carry Sam
off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them on, his voice roaring in
the stable so that the horses jumped about in their stalls. Into the house
they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of four, sitting astride his back
and beating on his head with a woollen cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern
and giving an occasional helpful push with his hand.

A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of the
big dining room in Freedom's house came back into the mind of the boy now
sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted, badly-cooked
food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great dishes heaped
with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had always been just enough
food for the single meal. The thing was nicely calculated, when you had
finished the table was bare.

How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a
flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and
passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh
supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the
children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the tomboy
girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of the boy.

"My mother never knew anything like that," he thought.

The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking
loudly--some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he talked of
the cost of school books.

"They change the books in the school too often," he declared in a loud
voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an
audience. "It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I
will not stand it."

Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a
message upon it.

"Be silent," he wrote. "If you say another word or make another sound to
disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the
street."

Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a fork
taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under the
lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a desire to
spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had brought his
mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking at her very
death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared about the
kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.

Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not
understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his
pocket.

"A dog is dead, eh?" he shouted. "Well you're getting too big and smart,
lad. What do I care for a dead dog?"

Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put
his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.

"I must not kill," he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a
stranger. "I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill."

In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise,
struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at him
and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a start
that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly it
stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had become.

"I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub
by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with so
little extra pressure," he thought.

The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the
forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon of
drunken carousing.

"If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it looks
now all the days of my life," thought the boy.

In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman
speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the
sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and went
carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down upon
him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind, shaking
loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it against
his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before the house
he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into the road.
Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the street.

"I will go for Mary Underwood," he thought, his mind returning to the
friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose
friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer's tirades against all
women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his bare
head.

"We need a woman in our house," he kept saying over and over to himself.
"We need a woman in our house."




CHAPTER VII


Leaning against the wall under the veranda of Mary Underwood's house, Sam
tried to get in his mind a remembrance of what had brought him there. He
had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along a country road.
Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He had forgotten the
purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The unexpected and terrible
hatred of his father that had come upon him in the tense silence of the
kitchen had so paralysed his brain that he now felt light-headed and
wonderfully happy and carefree.

"I have been doing something," he thought; "I wonder what it is."

The house faced a grove of pine trees and was reached by climbing a little
rise and following a winding road out beyond the graveyard and the last of
the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled on the tin
roof overhead, and Sam, his back closely pressed against the front of the
house, fought to regain control of his mind.

For an hour he stood there staring into the darkness and watched with
delight the progress of the storm. He had--an inheritance from his mother
--a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a boy and his
mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the house
singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did not hear, and
in his bed upstairs Sam had lain awake listening to the noises--the rain
on the roof, the occasional crash of thunder, the snoring of Windy, and
the unusual and, he thought, beautiful sound of the mother singing in the
storm.

Now, lifting up his head, he looked about with delight. Trees in the grove
in front of him bent and tossed in the wind. The inky blackness of the
night was relieved by the flickering oil lamp in the road beyond the
graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the windows
of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which he stood
made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees through which
the raindrops fell gleaming and sparkling. An occasional flash of
lightning lit up the trees and the winding road, and the cannonry of the
skies rolled and echoed overhead. A kind of wild song sang in Sam's heart.

"I wish it would last all night," he thought, his mind fixed on the
singing of his mother in the dark house when he was a boy.

The door opened and a woman stepped out upon the veranda and stood before
him facing the storm, the wind tossing the soft kimono in which she was
clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air was filled
with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted her head
and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her fine
contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and going
on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover riding
through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the song--

  "He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"

sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch and
leaning forward into the storm.

Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who had
been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind had
turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman standing
singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother singing on
the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on, seeing pictures as
he used to see them when a boy walking under the stars and listening to
the talk of John Telfer. He saw a broad-shouldered man shouting defiance
to the storm as he rode down a mountain path.

"And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak," went on the voice of
the singer.

Mary Underwood's singing there in the rain made her seem near and likeable
as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.

"John Telfer was wrong about her," he thought.

She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down
across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating the
spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon his
clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation of
surprise broke from her lips:

"Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the
rain."

"I like it here," replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at
the storm.

Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary looked
into the darkness.

"You have been a long time coming to see me," she said, "come in."

Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the
veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon a
table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the shelves
along the walls. On a table burned a student's lamp and in the corners of
the room lay heavy shadows.

Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes.

Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned clad
in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began moving
about the room picking up odds and ends of woman's clothing scattered on
the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks piled in an
open grate at the side of the room.

"It was the storm made me want to sing," she said self-consciously, and
then briskly, "we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in the
road and got yourself covered with mud."

From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into
his mind.

"I have come here courting," he thought; "I have come to ask Mary
Underwood to be my wife and live in my house."

The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused
something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore, falling
away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by the kimono,
wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the soft grey hair
and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks caused a jumping of
his heart.

"We are needing a woman in our house," he said heavily, repeating the
words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept
streets and along the mud-covered roads. "We are needing a woman in our
house, and I have come to take you there.

"I intend to marry you," he added, lurching across the room and grasping
her roughly by the shoulders. "Why not? I am needing a woman."

Mary Underwood was dismayed and frightened by the face looking down at
her, and by the strong hands clenched upon her shoulders. In his youth she
had conceived a kind of maternal passion for the newsboy and had planned a
future for him. Her plans if followed would have made him a scholar, a man
living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had chosen to live his
life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about the country like
Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen him driving at
evening through the street to Freedom's house, going in and out of
Wildman's, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim way she knew
that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from the things of
which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John Telfer, the
talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had come back to
her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of the road, and
talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother, of marriage and of
coming to live with him in his house. She stood, chilled, looking into the
eager, strong face and the eyes with the pained, dazed look in them.

Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to Sam,
and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.

"It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you," he began, "it was
because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired of
them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little
schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew
tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks and
looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to get
out of there and into the streets myself."

Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and stared
into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from his trousers
legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to reconstruct an
old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer's, that had years before
come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and Telfer had made of the
ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central figure, a stoop-shouldered,
feeble old man stumbling along the street, muttering to himself and poking
in a gutter with a stick. The picture was a caricature of puttering old
Frank Huntley, superintendent of the Caxton schools.

Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood's house, become, for the moment,
a boy, facing a boy's problems, Sam did not want to be such a man. He
wanted only that in sch