Sam shook his head.
"Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh," he said stoutly. "Here is something at you--it is tearing at you--it has got to be met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter over in their minds. To-morrow they will be at you again. There is but one way and we must take it. You and I will have to marry."
Mary looked at the serious new lines of his face.
"What a proposal!" she cried.
On an impulse she began singing, her voice fine and strong running through the quiet night.
"He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"
she sang, and laughed again.
"You should come like that," she said, and then, "you poor muddled boy.
Don"t you know that I am your new mother?" she added, taking hold of his two arms and turning him about facing her. "Don"t be absurd. I don"t want a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him.
I adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick and covered with mud. As for these women--away with them--I"ll face them down--I did it once before and I"ll do it again. Go to your city and make your fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman"s fight."
"It is horrible. You don"t understand," Sam protested.
A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood"s face.
"I understand," she said. "I have been on that battlefield. It is to be won only by silence and tireless waiting. Your very effort to help would make the matter worse."
The woman and the tall boy, suddenly become a man, stood in thought.
She was thinking of the end toward which her life was drifting.
How differently she had planned it. She thought of the college in Ma.s.sachusetts and of the men and women walking under the elm trees there.
"But I have got me a son and I am going to keep him," she said aloud, putting her hand on Sam"s arm.
Very serious and troubled, Sam went down the gravel path toward the road. He felt there was something cowardly in the part she had given him to play, but he could see no alternative.
"After all," he reflected, "it is sensible--it is a woman"s battle."
Half way to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his arms and gave her a great hug.
"Good-bye, little Mother," he cried and kissed her upon the lips.
And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was overcome with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning against the house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling through her tears she called after him.
"Did you crack their heads hard, boy?" she asked.
From Mary"s house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had come to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen table with pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the parlour he could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and writing again. Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read over and over what he had written, and putting on his coat went through the dawn to the house of Tom Comstock, editor of the _Caxton Argus_, and roused him out of bed.
"I"ll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won"t cost you anything,"
Comstock promised. "But why run it? Let the matter drop."
"I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago,"
Sam thought.
Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at Valmore"s suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter"s jewelry store. For an hour they bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When the choice was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a box on the counter Telfer made a speech.
"I will talk straight to that boy," he declared, laughing. "I am not going to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have him fail me. I shall tell him that if he doesn"t make money in that Chicago I shall come and take the watch from him."
Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along the street to Eleanor"s shop. He strutted through the display room and into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.
"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 gla.s.ses 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 s.p.u.n.k they would finish the job."
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
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.
In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the farmer"s widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In the store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose--the same John Telfer had watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging cane and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer had not got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad station and make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the loss of that opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and thinking of many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour to the speech he had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam, while the gift had touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind the essential solid goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he lost much of the bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood, had been able to make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his room in Chicago he had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting in and taking out flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of thanks.
Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in the wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore"s shop as the blacksmith walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.
"What has happened to Sam--he has changed so much?" he asked, dropping a foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel. "Already the city has changed him," he added regretfully.
Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.
"He bites off his words," continued Valmore; "he sits for an hour in the store and then goes away, and doesn"t come back to say good-bye when he leaves town. What has got into him?"
Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust of the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had been hurled at him.
"If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all right," he exploded. "He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like it."