As it happened he had need of seed wheat, and it was with deep satisfaction that I repaid the money I had borrowed of him, together with three hundred dollars more and so faced the new year clear of debt.
Like the miner who, having suddenly uncovered a hidden vein of gold, bends to his pick in a confident belief in his "find" so I humped above my desk without doubts, without hesitations. I had found my work in the world. If I had any thought of investment at this time, which I am sure I had not, it was concerned with the west. I had no notion of settling permanently in the east.
My success in entering both the Century and the Arena emboldened me to say to Dr. Cross, "I shall be glad to come down out of the attic and take a full-sized chamber at regular rates."
Alas! he had no such room, and so after much perturbation, my brother and I hired a little apartment on Moreland street in Roxbury and moved into it joyously. With a few dollars in my pocket, I went so far as to buy a couple of pictures and a new book rack, the first property I had ever owned, and when, on that first night, with everything in place we looked around upon our "suite," we glowed with such exultant pride as only struggling youth can feel. After years of privation, I had, at last, secured a niche in the frowning escarpment of Boston's social palisade.
Frank was twenty-seven, I was thirty, and had it not been for a haunting sense of our father's defeat and a growing fear of mother's decline, we would have been entirely content. "How can we share our good fortune with her and with sister Jessie?" was the question which troubled us most. Jessie's fate seemed especially dreary by contrast with our busy and colorful life.
"We can't bring them here," I argued. "They would never be happy here. Father is a borderman. He would enjoy coming east on a visit, but to shut him up in Boston would be like caging an eagle. The case seems hopeless."
The more we discussed it the more insoluble the problem became. The best we could do was to write often and to plan for frequent visits to them.
One day, late in March, Flower, who had been using my stories in almost every issue of his magazine, said to me: "Why don't you put together some of your tales of the west, and let us bring them out in book form? I believe they would have instant success."
His words delighted me for I had not yet begun to hope for an appearance as the author of a book. Setting to work at once to prepare such a volume I put into it two unpublished novelettes called Up the Cooley and The Branch Road, for the very good reason that none of the magazines, not even The Arena, found them "available." This reduced the number of sketches to six so that the title page read:
MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS
Six Mississippi Valley Stories
By Hamlin Garland