“What am I going to do, Eleanor?” he demanded,
standing with legs spread apart and frowning down
upon her, “what am I going to do without Sam?”
A freckle-faced boy opened the shop door and threw
a newspaper on the floor. The boy had a ringing
voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer went again
through the display room, touching with his cane the
posts upon which hung the finished hats, and whistling.
Standing before the shop, with the cane hooked upon
his arm, he rolled a cigarette and watched the boy
running from door to door along the street.
“I shall have to be adopting a new son,”
he said musingly.
After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood in his white nightgown
and re-read the statement just given him. He
read it over and over, and then, laying it on the
kitchen table, filled and lighted a corncob pipe.
A draft of wind blew into the room under the kitchen
door chilling his thin shanks so that he drew his
bare feet, one after the other, up behind the protective
walls of his nightgown.
“On the night of my mother’s death,”
ran the statement, “I sat in the kitchen of
our house eating my supper when my father came in and
began shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother
who was asleep. I put my hand at his throat and
squeezed until I thought he was dead, and carried
him around the house and threw him into the road.
Then I ran to the house of Mary Underwood, who was
once my schoolteacher, and told her what I had done.
She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went
to look for the body of my father, who was not dead
after all. John McPherson knows this is true,
if he can be made to tell the truth.”
Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous
woman with red cheeks, who set up type in the shop,
did her own housework, and gathered most of the news
and advertising for The Argus.
“Ain’t that a slasher?” he asked,
handing her the statement Sam had written.
“Well, it ought to stop the mean things they
are saying about Mary Underwood,” she snapped.
Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and looking
at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her
much help with The Argus, was the best checker
player in Caxton and had once been to a state tournament
of experts in that sport, she added, “Poor Jane
McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better
father for him than that liar Windy. Choked him,
eh? Well, if the men of this town had any spunk
they would finish the job.”
For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer,
visiting towns in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and
making deals with men who, like Freedom Smith, bought
the farmers’ products. On Sundays he sat
in chairs before country hotels and walked in the
streets of strange towns, or, getting back to the
city at the week end, went through the downtown streets
and among the crowds in the parks with young men he
had met on the road. From time to time he went
to Caxton and sat for an hour with the men in Wildman’s,
stealing away later for an evening with Mary Underwood.
