Windy McPherson's Son eBook

CHAPTER II

Windy McPherson, the father of the Caxton newsboy, Sam McPherson, had been war touched.  The civilian clothes that he wore caused an itching of the skin.  He could not forget that he had once been a sergeant in a regiment of infantry and had commanded a company through a battle fought in ditches along a Virginia country road.  He chafed under the fact of his present obscure position in life.  Had he been able to replace his regimentals with the robes of a judge, the felt hat of a statesman, or even with the night stick of a village marshal life might have retained something of its sweetness, but to have ended by becoming an obscure housepainter in a village that lived by raising corn and by feeding that corn to red steers —­ugh!—­the thought made him shudder.  He looked with envy at the blue coat and the brass buttons of the railroad agent; he tried vainly to get into the Caxton Cornet Band; he got drunk to forget his humiliation and in the end he fell to loud boasting and to the nursing of a belief within himself that in truth not Lincoln nor Grant but he himself had thrown the winning die in the great struggle.  In his cups he said as much and the Caxton corn grower, punching his neighbour in the ribs, shook with delight over the statement.

When Sam was a twelve year old, barefooted boy upon the streets a kind of backwash of the wave of glory that had swept over Windy McPherson in the days of ’61 lapped upon the shores of the Iowa village.  That strange manifestation called the A. P. A. movement brought the old soldier to a position of prominence in the community.  He founded a local branch of the organisation; he marched at the head of a procession through the streets; he stood on a corner and pointing a trembling forefinger to where the flag on the schoolhouse waved beside the cross of Rome, shouted hoarsely, “See, the cross rears itself above the flag!  We shall end by being murdered in our beds!”

But although some of the hard-headed, money-making men of Caxton joined the movement started by the boasting old soldier and although for the moment they vied with him in stealthy creepings through the streets to secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands the movement subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its leader more desolate.

In the little house at the end of the street by the shores of Squirrel Creek, Sam and his sister Kate regarded their father’s warlike pretensions with scorn.  “The butter is low, father’s army leg will ache to-night,” they whispered to each other across the kitchen table.

Following her mother’s example, Kate, a tall slender girl of sixteen and already a bread winner with a clerkship in Winney’s drygoods store, remained silent under Windy’s boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate them, did not always succeed.  There was now and then a rebellious muttering that should have warned Windy.  It had once burst into an open quarrel in which the victor of a hundred battles withdrew defeated from the field.  Windy, half-drunk, had taken an old account book from a shelf in the kitchen, a relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when he had first come to Caxton, and had begun reading to the little family a list of names of men who, he claimed, had been the cause of his ruin.