“I will do my part here,” shouted McGregor.
“I will find the way.” His body shook
and his voice roared along the footpath of the bridge.
Men stopped to look back at the big shouting figure.
Two women walking past screamed and ran into the roadway.
McGregor walked rapidly away toward his own room and
his books. He did not know how he would be able
to use the new impulse that had come to him but as
he swung along through dark streets and past rows
of dark buildings he thought again of the great machine
running crazily and without purpose and was glad he
was not a part of it. “I will keep myself
to myself and be ready for what happens,” he
said, burning with new courage.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
When McGregor had secured the place in the apple-warehouse
and went home to the house in Wycliff Place with his
first week’s pay, twelve dollars, in his pocket
he thought of his mother, Nance McGregor, working
in the mine offices in the Pennsylvania town and folding
a five dollar bill sent it to her in a letter.
“I will begin to take care of her now,”
he thought and with the rough sense of equity in such
matters, common to labouring people, had no intention
of giving himself airs. “She has fed me
and now I will begin to feed her,” he told himself.
The five dollars came back. “Keep it.
I don’t want your money,” the mother wrote.
“If you have money left after your expenses are
paid begin to fix yourself up. Better get a new
pair of shoes or a hat. Don’t try to take
care of me. I won’t have it. I want
you to look out for yourself. Dress well and
hold up your head, that’s all I ask. In
the city clothes mean a good deal. In the long
run it will mean more to me to see you be a real man
than to be a good son.”
Sitting in her rooms over the vacant bake-shop in
Coal Creek Nance began to get new satisfaction out
of the contemplation of herself as a woman with a
son in the city. In the evening she thought of
him moving along the crowded thoroughfares among men
and women and her bent little old figure straightened
with pride. When a letter came telling of his
work in the night school her heart jumped and she wrote
a long letter filled with talk of Garfield and Grant
and of Lincoln lying by the burning pine knot reading
his books. It seemed to her unbelievably romantic
that her son should some day be a lawyer and stand
up in a crowded court room speaking thoughts out of
his brain to other men. She thought that if this
great red-haired boy, who at home had been so unmanageable
and so quick with his fists, was to end by being a
man of books and of brains then she and her man, Cracked
McGregor, had not lived in vain. A sweet new
sense of peace came to her. She forgot her own
years of toil and gradually her mind went back to the
silent boy sitting on the steps with her before her
house in the year after her husband’s death
while she talked to him of the world, and thus she
thought of him, a quiet eager boy, going about bravely
there in the distant city.
Copyrights
Marching Men from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
