Windy McPherson's Son

-going dress. An evangelist was at work in Caxton and she had decided to hear him. Sam shuddered. In the house it was an understood thing that when Ja

on came in at the door and he hurriedly put on his

singularly curious and interested in what other men thought on the subject but they did not allow themselves to be coaxed into a house of worship. To the boy, who had become a fourth member of the evening gatherings at the back of the grocery sto

of that faith. On long summer afternoons the grocer and the boy spent hours driving through the streets in a rattling

y abed. If there was work to be done about the house or yard he complained of his wounds. He complained of his wounds when the rent fell due, and when there was a shortage of food in the house. Later in his life and after the death of Jane McPher

er and she did not mind his sleeping the time away. Knowing how late he had been upon the streets at the paper selling on Saturday evenings, she looked at him with eyes filled with tenderness and sympathy. Once the minister, a man

he streets and among the little pools of water on the sidewalks were dry spots from which steam arose. Nature had forgotten herself. A day that should have sent old f

pride in its possession. The overcoat had an air. It had been made by Gunther the tailor after a design sketched on the back of a piece of wrapping paper by John Telfer and ha

ngelist, a short, athletic-looking man in a grey business suit, seemed to the boy out of place in the church. He had the assured business-like air of the travelling men who come to the New Leland House, and Sam thought he looked like a man who had goods to be sold. He did not stand quietly back of the pulpit givin

town. As he talked he grew more and more excited. "The town is a cesspool of

r ran up and down the platform and into the aisles among the people, shouting, threatening, pleading. People began to stir

or of his room waiting for him. When in the winter he had a cold and coughed, he trembled at the thought of tuberculosis. Once, when he was taken with a fever, he fell asleep and dreamed that he had died and w

t of his soul. As he thought a tenderness came over him; a lump came into his throat and he piti

mes he would awaken on summer nights and be so filled with strange longing that he would creep out of bed and, pushing open the window, sit upon the floor, his bare legs sticking out beyond his white nightgown, and, thus sitting, yearn eagerly t

to her-had sat with her son in the warm darkness in the little grass plot at the front of the house. It was a clear, warm

and what he declared her lack of even a primitive sense of colour. "I am sick of it all," he shouted, going out of the house and up the street with uncertain steps. His wife had been unmoved by his outburst, but in the presence of the quiet boy whose chair touched her own she trembled with a strange new fear and began to talk of the life after death,

there was something insincere. With all his heart he wanted to repeat a sentence he had heard from the lips of grey-haired, big-fisted Valmore-"How can they believe and not lead a life of simple, fervent devotion to their belief?" He thought himself superior to the thin-lipped man who talked with him and had he been able to express what was

er endless task among the soiled clothes in the kitchen and Windy McPherson off drinking and boasting about town. Sam read the book in secret. He had a lamp on a little stand beside his bed and a novel, lent him by John Telfer, beside it. When his mother came up the stairway he slipped the Bible under the cover of the bed and became

nd the stove in the grocery; the brown-bearded, thin-lipped minister in the brick church; the shouting, pleading evangelists who came to visit the town in the winter; the gentle old grocer who talked vaguely of the spirit world,-all these voices were at the mind o

stood an act of cowardice. In his mind the soul became a thing to be hidden away, covered up, not thought of. One might be allowed to speak of the matter at the moment of death, but for the healthy man or boy to have the thought of his sou

in the most petty meannesses, and following these with flashes of a kind of loftiness of mind. Looking at a girl passing in the street, he had unbelievably mean thoughts; and the

Ruth in the suggestion of intimacy between man and woman that it brought to him. And yet Sam McPherson was no evil-minded boy. He had, as a matter of fact, a quality of intellectual honesty that appealed strongly to the clean-minded, simple-hearted old blacksmith Valmore; he had awakened something like love in the hearts of the women school teachers in the Caxton schools, at least one of whom continued to interest herself in him, taking him with her on walks along country roads, and talking to him constantly

the impulse toward bargaining and money getting was the impulse in him most worth cherishing, now sat beside his mother in church and watched with wide-open

stead of heaven and hell and his earnestness caught the

d about the heads of the people who writhed in the pit. "Art Sherman would be there," t

Sherman. More than once he had felt the touch of human kindness in the man. The roaring, blustering saloonkeeper had helped the bo

kind of passion akin to a young girl's blind devotion to her lover. With a shudder he realised that Mik

anding that they stand upon their feet. "Stand up for Jesus," he

ress, hoping to pass through the storm unnoticed. The call to the faithful to stand was a thing to be complied with or resisted as the pe

the hands of people in the pews, talking and praying aloud. "Welcome among us," they said to certain ones who stood upon their feet

Sawyer's barber shop, was upon his knees and in a loud voice was praying for the soul of Sam McPherson

Williams had treated lightly the honour of his sister at the time of her disappearance, and he wanted to get upon his feet and pour out his wrath on the head of the

ng himself off as one of the lambs safely within the fold. His mind was bent

confidence in their voices, some tremblingly and hesitatingly. One woman wept loudly shouting between the paroxysms of sobbing that seized her, "The weight of my sins is heavy

oman, the wife of a baker to whom Sam delivered papers. They were urging her to rise and get within the fold, and Sam turned and w

y and the blood rose to his cheeks. "Here is another sinner saved," shouted Jim, point

. An ingratiating smile played about his lips. "Let us hear from the young man, Sam McPherson," he sa

at seized him. He looked over his shoulder to the door at the back of the church and thought longingly of the quiet street outside. He hesitated, stammered,

put her handkerchief to her face and throwing back her head rocked back and forth. A man ne

never coming back again," he whispered, and, stepping into the aisle, walked boldly toward the door. He had made up his mind that if th

air. The public avowals he had heard in the church seemed to him cheap and unworthy. He wondered why his mother stayed in there.

e came upon the street with the papers the next morning. Freedom Smith would be there sitting in the old worn buggy and roaring so that all the street would listen and laugh. "Going to lie out in any green pastures to-night, Sam?" he would shout. "Ain't you afraid you'll take cold?" By Geiger's drug store wo

ke a stand-up fight with some one. And, then, hurrying and avoiding the people, he merged with the

ng hoarsely. Mike McCarthy, the man who had denied God and who had won a place for himself in the affection of the newsboy, had assaulted a man w

t, boasting and talking. He had sat for hours in a chair under a tree before the New Leland House, reading b

two men had gone out of the house together to fight in the road. The woman, weeping in the house, followed to ask forgiveness of her husband. Running in the gathering darkness along

the crowd declaring that the men of Caxton should arise in the defence of their homes and string the murderer to a lamp post. Hop Higgins, driving a horse from Culvert's livery, appeared on Main Street. "He will be at the McCarthy farm," he shouted. When several men, coming out of Geiger's drug store, stopped the marshal's ho

was a strange family to live there in that fat, corn-growing country, a family with something savage and primitive about it, one that belonged among western mining camps or

f the farm had to be sold to pay gambling debts, and the wide acres lay covered with weeds, Lem became alarmed, and settled down to hard work, the boys working all day in the field and at long intervals coming into town at night to get into trouble. Having no mother or sister, and knowing that no Caxton woman could be hired to go upon the place, they did their own housework; and on rainy days sat about the old farmhouse playing cards and fighting. On other days they would stand around the bar in Art Sherman's saloon in Piety Hollow drinking until they had lost their savage silence and had become loud and quarrelsome,

d got them out of it, paying for the damage done and going about declaring the boys me

ttention to the study of law, but with infinite patience had so trained his hands that he became wonderfully dexterous with coins and cards, plucking them out of the air and making them appear in the shoes, the hats, and even in the mouths, of bystanders. During the day he walked the streets looking at the girl clerks in the stores, or stood upon the station platform waving his hand to women passengers on passing trains. He told John Telfer that the flattery of women was a lost art that he intended to restore. Mike McCarthy carried in his pockets books which he read sit

discussing a novel or a poem; Sam in the background listened eagerly. Valmore did not car

a socialist, an anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone cared greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations of his passion for them. Before the men ga

dare," thought the boy. "He is the freest, the boldest, the bravest man in town." When the young Irishman, seeing the admiration in his eyes, flung him a silver dollar saying, "That is for your fi

had gone from one to another of the muttering groups, his heart quaking with fear. Now he stood at the back of the mass of men gathered at the jail door. An oil lamp, burning at the top of the post above

itting in the buggy beside him. A man rushed forward to hold the horse. McCarthy'

filthy jail shall be my sanctuary. In there I shall talk aloud with my Father," he roared hoarsely, shaking his fist at the cro

the clank of locks, the low murmur of the voice of Higgins and the wild laughter o

nst the wall of Tom Folger's wagon shop slipped between them. Telfer put out his arm and laid it upon the boy's shoulder.

risoned man, loud, and filled with a startling b

on, grow to manhood. I am Michael, Thy son. They have put me in this jail where rats run across

lickering lamp by the jail entrance drew back against the walls of the building. Sam cou

ithout children. I have seen them hoarding pennies and denying Thee new life on which to work Thy will. To these

ning? I have been with your wives. Eleven Caxton wives without babes have I been with and it has been fruitless. The twelfth woman I have just left, leaving her man in the road a b

night. Among the men standing along the wall of the jail a murmur arose. Again they grouped themselves under the flickering light by the jail door, disregard

n't hurt him. I would not go myself, nor would you, and the boy shall not go. This McCarthy has a brai

axton wives. Voices in the group before the jail door began

oh Father, they squirm; I have them in

e repeated over and over through the town. One of the women whose names had been called out had stood with the evangel

er and the hailstones rattled on the roofs of buildings. Some of the men joined Telfer and Valmore

raying, Mike McCarthy seemed also to be ta

and knock us about so that we vermin who pretend to be made in Thy image will understand. Let him go into churches and into courthouses, into cities, and into towns like this, shouting, 'Be

lips and a lump cam

ng in the sun, this life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls with their long legs and freckl

er!" shouted the broken voice, "I have taken a life, a man that moved an

listening men began going silently away. The lump in Sam's throat grew larger. Tears stood in his eyes. He went with Telfer

derstood him and knew why men like Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and Telfer loved each other and went on being friends year after year in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings. He thought that he had got hold of the i

ly to Valmore, the two men stumbling along in

the voice from the jail; "it is an odd thought that but for a quirk in the brain th

in the darkness at a street c

er terribly. In success or in such failures as has come to this imaginative, strangely perverted Irishman their l

d peacefully, and up the stairway to his own room. He undressed and, putting out the light, knelt upon the floor. From the wild ravings of the man in the jail he had got hold of something. In the midst of t

nce of the little room, "make me stick to the thought th

ore waited on the sidewalk, T

g men need a religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man like Mike