“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.
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.
