Will went up stairs and put his things, overalls and a few shirts, into a bundle. Then he went down stairs and took a walk—went out along a road that led into the country, and stopped on a bridge. It was near a place where he and other kids used to come swimming on summer afternoons. A thought had come into his head. There was a young fellow worked in Pawsey’s jewelry store came to see Kate sometimes on Sunday evenings and they went off to walk together. “Did Kate want to get married?” If she did his going away now might be for good. He hadn’t thought about that before. On that afternoon, and quite suddenly, all the world outside of Bidwell seemed huge and terrible to him and a few secret tears came into his eyes, but he managed to choke them back. For just a moment his mouth opened and closed queerly, like the mouth of a fish, when you take it out of the water and hold it in your hand.
When he returned to the house at supper time things were better. He had left his bundle on a chair in the kitchen and Kate had wrapped it more carefully, and had put in a number of things he had forgotten. His father called him into the front room. “It’s all right, Will. Every young fellow ought to take a whirl out in the world. I did it myself, at about your age,” Tom had said, a little pompously.
Then supper was served, and there was apple pie. That was a luxury the Appletons had perhaps better not have indulged in at that time, but Will knew Kate had baked it during the afternoon,—it might be as a way of showing him how she felt. Eating two large slices had rather set him up.
And then, before he realized how the time was slipping away, ten o’clock had come, and it was time for him to go. He was going to beat his way out of town on a freight train, and there was a local going toward Cleveland at ten o’clock. Fred had gone off to bed, and his father was asleep in the rocking chair in the front room. He had picked up his bundle, and Kate had put on her hat. “I’m going to see you off,” she had said.
Will and Kate had walked in silence along the streets to where he was to wait, in the shadow of Whaley’s Warehouse, until the freight came along. Later when he thought back over that evening he was glad, that although she was three years older, he was taller than Kate.
How vividly everything that happened later stayed in his mind. After the train came, and he had crawled into an empty coal car, he sat hunched up in a corner. Overhead he could see the sky, and when the train stopped at towns there was always the chance the car in which he was concealed would be shoved into a siding, and left. The brakemen walked along the tracks beside the car shouting to each other and their lanterns made little splashes of light in the darkness.
“How black the sky!” After a time it began to rain. “His suit would be in a pretty mess. After all a fellow couldn’t come right out and ask his sister if she intended to marry. If Kate married, then his father would also marry again. It was all right for a young woman like Kate, but for a man of forty to think of marriage—the devil! Why didn’t Tom Appleton have more dignity? After all, Fred was only a kid and a new woman coming in, to be his mother—that might be all right for a kid.”
All during that night on the freight train Will had thought a good deal about marriage—rather vague thoughts—coming and going like birds flying in and out of a bush. It was all a matter—this business of man and woman—that did not touch him very closely—not yet. The matter of having a home—that was something else. A home was something at a fellow’s back. When one went off to work all week at some farm, and at night maybe went into a strange room to sleep, there was always the Appleton house—floating as it were, like a picture at the back of the mind—the Appleton house, and Kate moving about. She had been up town, and now had come home and was going up the stairs. Tom Appleton was fussing about in the kitchen. He liked a bite before he went off to bed for the night but presently he would go up stairs and into his own room. He liked to smoke his pipe before he slept and sometimes he got out his cornet and blew two or three soft sad notes.
At Cleveland Will had crawled off of the freight train and had gone across the city in a street-car. Workingmen were just going to the factories and he passed among them unnoticed. If his clothes were crumpled and soiled, their clothes weren’t so fine. The workingmen were all silent, looking at the car floor, or out at the car windows. Long rows of factories stood along the streets through which the car moved.