“Finally, I was lucky enough to get a place as a newsboy on a train. I sold papers until I was sixteen, and then began braking. I wanted to be an engineer, but I guess my ability lay in another direction. At any rate, they took me off the road and gave me an office position instead. I got to be a division superintendent, and then I met General Cornish. He is one of the directors of the line I was with at the time. Three months ago he made me an offer to take hold here, and so here I am.”
“And you've never been back home, Dannie?”
“Never once. I've wanted to go, but I couldn't.” He hoped his father would understand.
“Well, there ain't much to take you there but her grave. I wish she might have lived, you'd have been a great happiness to her, and she got very little happiness for her portion any ways you look at it. We were only just married when the war came, and I was gone four years. Then there was about eleven years When we were getting on nicely. We had money put by, and owned our own home. Can you remember it, Dannie? The old brick place on the corner across from the post-office. A new Methodist church stands there now. It was sold to get money for my lawyer when the big trouble came. Afterwards, when everything was spent, she must have found it very hard to make a living for herself and you.”
“She did,” said Dan, gently. “But she managed somehow to keep a roof over our heads.”
“When the law sets out to punish it don't stop with the guilty only. When I went to her grave and saw there were flowers growing on it, and that it was being cared for, it told me what you were. She was a very brave woman, Dannie.”
“Yes,” pityingly, “she was.”
“Few women have had the sorrow she had, and few women could have borne up under it as she did. You know that was an awful thing about Sharp.”
He put up his hand and wiped the great drops of perspiration from his forehead.
Dan turned towards him quickly.