of standing corn which men had set up in the fields
to protect themselves against the march of pitiless
Nature, and Sam, holding the picture in his mind as
he followed the sense of Telfer’s talk, thought
that all society had resolved itself into a few sturdy
souls who went on and on regardless, and a hunger to
make of himself such another arose engulfing him.
The desire within him seemed so compelling that he
turned and haltingly tried to express what was in
his mind.
“I will try,” he stammered, “I will
try to be a man. I will try to not have anything
to do with them—with women. I will
work and make money— and—and——”
Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on
his stomach looked at the ground.
“To Hell with women and girls,” he burst
forth as though throwing something distasteful out
of his throat.
In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving
up the pursuit of rabbits, came barking and growling
into sight and scampered up the grassy bank, covering
the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction
upon his sensitive nature of the emotions of the boy
Telfer arose. His sang froid had returned
to him. Cutting right and left with his stick
at the dogs he cried joyfully, “We have had
enough of eloquence from man, boy, and dog. We
will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home
and tucked into bed.”
Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call
of the city came to him. For six years he had
been upon the streets. He had seen the sun come
up hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled
through the streets in the bleak darkness of winter
mornings, when the trains from the north came into
Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on
the deserted little platform whipping their arms and
calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry with his work that
they might get back into the warm stale air of the
smoking car.
In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined
to become a man of money. Fed by banker Walker,
the silent mother, and in some subtle way by the very
air he breathed, the belief within him that to make
money and to have money would in some way make up
for the old half-forgotten humiliations in the life
of the McPherson family and would set it on a more
secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had provided,
grew and influenced his thoughts and his acts.
Tirelessly he kept at his efforts to get ahead.
In his bed at night he dreamed of dollars. Jane
McPherson had herself a passion for frugality.
In spite of Windy’s incompetence and her own
growing ill health, she would not permit the family
to go into debt, and although, in the long hard winters,
Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush until his mind revolted
at the thought of a corn field, yet was the rent of
the little house paid on the scratch, and her boy fairly
driven to increase the totals in the yellow bankbook.
Even Valmore, who since the death of his wife had
lived in a loft above his shop and who was a blacksmith
of the old days, a workman first and a money maker
later, did not despise the thought of gain.
