Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken him to its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had encouraged him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father, and patronised him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was a boy, scurrying between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a Saturday night, there was always some one to speak a word to him of his morals and to shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected to remain there, with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the Savings Bank—built to that during his years with Freedom Smith—he might soon become one of the town’s solid men.
He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the train and be off.
One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences, hearing the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the smell of the new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town and sat down on a low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the railroad station, to wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken on a new meaning to him since any day might see him on such a train bound into his new life.
A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed by two women.
“Here, watch these,” he said to the women, setting the bags upon the platform; “I will go for the tickets,” and disappeared into the darkness.
The two women resumed their interrupted talk.
“Ed’s wife has been poorly these ten years,” said one of them. “It will be better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long ride. I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to be train-sick.”
Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John Telfer’s old talks with him.
“They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away from here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain.”
He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending shoes on a side street back of Geiger’s drug store and the two women, one short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery shop and were Eleanor Telfer’s only competitors.