XI.
YOUNG AMERICA.
When Pierson, laggard as usual, returned to Battle Field a week after the end of the long vacation, he found Scarborough just establishing himself. He had taken two small and severely plain rooms in a quaint old frame cottage, one story high, but perched importantly upon a bank at the intersection of two much-traveled streets.
"What luck?" asked Pierson, lounging in on him.
"A hundred days' campaign; a thousand dollars net," replied the book agent. "And I'm hard as oak from tramping those roads, and I've learned—you ought to have been along, Pierson. I know people as I never could have come to know them by any other means—what they think, what they want, how they can be reached."
There was still much of the boy in Pierson's face. But Scarborough looked the man, developed, ready.
Pierson wandered into the bedroom to complete his survey. "I see you're going to live by the clock," he called out presently. He had found, pasted to the wall, Scarborough's schedule of the daily division of his time; just above it, upon a shelf, was a new alarm clock, the bell so big that it overhung like a canopy. "You don't mean you're going to get up at four?"
"Every morning—all winter," replied Scarborough, without stopping his unpacking. "You see, I'm going to finish this year—take the two years in one. Then I've registered in a law office—Judge Holcombe's. And there's my speaking—I must practise that every day."
Pierson came back to the sitting-room and collapsed into a chair. "I see you allow yourself five hours for sleep," he said. "It's too much, old man. You're self-indulgent."