Come to the office on Saturday and I’ll tell you of a dozen fellows who have made good with a worse start than you have.”
The train was stopping at the Junction. “Sorry,” Billy replied, rising. “I have to meet a friend here.”
He took up his grain-bag, reddening. He had a momentary idea of leaving it under the seat, but it contained everything he had left.
“You can get a train back home in ten minutes,” the Representative suggested, with a friendly grip. “I’ll look for you Saturday.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t meet you sooner,” Billy replied calmly. “As it is, I’ve promised to go north. Anyway I think perhaps you don’t understand just how things are at our place.”
The Representative looked away and frowned with sympathy. “I know it’s rotten enough,” he said, “but if you want to play fair, why don’t you go back and put it right up to your father? You know this is pretty rough on the mother.”
And Billy, standing alone on the platform, wished the Representative had kept that last argument to himself. That was what had been his undoing every time before, and Lou had shown him quite clearly that he could never do anything for his mother by staying on the wretched farm where they could scarcely make enough to keep alive. Now this young man said he could show him how to make money out of the
place. He said that boys with a worse beginning had gone ahead right at home and made good, even realized their ambitions for themselves and made the right kind of homes for their families. Family considerations weren’t troubling Billy. He was just sixteen years old, and the social side of his nature had been sadly neglected. What he wanted was freedom to do something. Then, while Lou had persuaded him that he was not only a fool, but a weak one to stay at home, this agricultural fellow had somehow made him feel like a coward for running away.
The train for home was whistling nearer while Billy argued wildly. When it came around the bend he had about made his decision. He picked up his grain bag and sauntered coolly across to meet it, then he saw Lou coming, and waited.
It was not easy to dispose of Lou—he had met cases like this before; but Billy’s struggles from childhood, with a man’s work, crop failures, an unjust government and himself, had not been for nothing. Also, a certain dogged will-power, bred of these struggles, and their achievements, and more than ever dominant in the teen age, gave him an aversion to being “talked into” anything. The Representative hadn’t shown any effort at trying to persuade him. He had told him just what he thought without reserve and quite forcibly enough, it seemed; then he had left him to make his own decision, and it gave Billy no