He is going down into the markets where men pay the price for these things that he has. He is going to fight men for that price which he knows his things are worth.
Jeffrey’s mother came out carrying a canvas satchel which she put on the sled under Cassius Bascom’s feet.
“Don’t kick that, Catty,” she warned, “Jeff’s lunch is in it. And, Jeff, don’t you go and check it with the trunk.” There was just a little catch in the laugh with which she said this. She was remembering a day more than twenty years before when she had started, a bride, with big, lumbering, slow-witted, adoring Dan Whiting, Jeffrey’s father, on her wedding trip to Niagara Falls, with their lunch in that same satchel. Dan Whiting checked the satchel through from Lowville to Buffalo, and they had nearly starved on the way. It was easy to forgive Dan Whiting his stupidity. But she never quite forgave him for telling it on himself when they got back. It had been a standing joke in the hills all these years.
She was just a typical mother of the hills. She loved her boy. She needed him. She knew that she would never have him again. The boys do not come back from the market place. She knew that she would cry for him through many a lonely night, as she had cried all last night. But she was not crying now.
Her deep grey eyes smiled steadily up into his as she stretched her arms up around the neck of her tall boy and drew his head down to kiss her.
He was not a dull boy. He was quick of heart. He knew his mother very well. So he began with 47 the old, old lie; the lie that we all tried to tell when we were leaving.
“It’ll only be a little while, Mother. You won’t find the time slipping by, and I’ll be back.”
She knew it was a lie. All the mothers of boys always knew it was a lie. But she backed him up sturdily:
“Why, of course, Jeff. Don’t worry about me. You’ll be back in no time.”