Sam walked over and held open the door.
“Good night,” he said.
Jake looked annoyed.
“Ain’t you even going to make a bid against
Crofts?” he asked. “We ain’t
tied to him if you do better by us. I’m
in this thing because you put me in. That piece
you wrote up the river scared ’em stiff.
I want to do the right thing by you. Don’t
be sore about Ed. He wouldn’t a done it if he’d
known.”
Sam shook his head and stood with his hand still on
the door.
“Good night,” he said again. “I
am not in it. I have dropped it. No use
trying to explain.”
For weeks and months Sam led a wandering vagabond
life, and surely a stranger or more restless vagabond
never went upon the road. In his pocket he had
at almost any time from one to five thousand dollars,
his bag went on from place to place ahead of him,
and now and then he caught up with it, unpacked it,
and wore a suit of his former Chicago clothes upon
the streets of some town. For the most part,
however, he wore the rough clothes bought from Ed,
and, when these were gone, others like them, with
a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a
pair of heavy boots lacing half way up the legs.
Among the people, he passed for a rather well-set-up
workman with money in his pocket going his own way.
During all those months of wandering, and even when
he had returned to something nearer his former way
of life, his mind was unsettled and his outlook on
life disturbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that
he, among all men, was a unique, an innovation.
Day after day his mind ground away upon his problem
and he was determined to seek and to keep on seeking
until he found for himself a way of peace. In
the towns and in the country through which he passed
he saw the clerks in the stores, the merchants with
worried faces hurrying into banks, the farmers, brutalised
by toil, dragging their weary bodies homeward at the
coming of night, and told himself that all life was
abortive, that on all sides of him it wore itself
out in little futile efforts or ran away in side currents,
that nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward
giving point to the tremendous sacrifice involved
in just living and working in the world. He thought
of Christ going about seeing the world and talking
to men, and thought that he too would go and talk
to them, not as a teacher, but as one seeking eagerly
to be taught. At times he was filled with longing
and inexpressible hopes and, like the boy of Caxton,
would get out of bed, not now to stand in Miller’s
pasture watching the rain on the surface of the water,
but to walk endless miles through the darkness getting
the blessed relief of fatigue into his body and often
paying for and occupying two beds in one night.
