And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was overcome with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning against the house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling through her tears she called after him.
“Did you crack their heads hard, boy?” she asked.
From Mary’s house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had come to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen table with pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the parlour he could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and writing again. Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read over and over what he had written, and putting on his coat went through the dawn to the house of Tom Comstock, editor of the Caxton Argus, and roused him out of bed.
“I’ll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won’t cost you anything,” Comstock promised. “But why run it? Let the matter drop.”
“I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago,” Sam thought.
Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at Valmore’s suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter’s jewelry store. For an hour they bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When the choice was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a box on the counter Telfer made a speech.
“I will talk straight to that boy,” he declared, laughing. “I am not going to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have him fail me. I shall tell him that if he doesn’t make money in that Chicago I shall come and take the watch from him.”
Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along the street to Eleanor’s shop. He strutted through the display room and into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.
“What am I going to do, Eleanor?” he demanded, standing with legs spread apart and frowning down upon her, “what am I going to do without Sam?”