He put the letter in a pocket nearest his heart, while a new look came to his tired face. Almost unconsciously he began to build a new future on the ruins of the old.
He swiftly mapped out his course. The season for farmwork was at hand. He would go back to the open skies and broad fields of God's world. He packed a few belongings in the rusty brown-paper suitcase and boarded the trolley for the long ride. He knew what he should do if he could rent a suitable piece of land.
He had spent the previous summer on a farm in the onion-growing section of the Connecticut Valley; he knew what large profits might be gotten with hard labor from a comparatively small plot of ground. He figured that three or four acres would give him the needed amount in the fall, if he had health and good weather.
He found the man whom he sought, secured the land, and went to work. All that season he slaved early and late, weeding on his knees in the damp earth the interminable rows of tiny, delicate plants where the weeds sprang like magic. He heeded neither scorching sun, nor soaking rain. He cared nothing for the monotony of the toil. Always he saw before him the steamer that should bring Agatha, from the hazards of war, to him and security.
By September he had once again the dream within his grasp. He was back in the old room in the crowded boarding house, and in his bluish tin trunk at the foot of the bed were hidden five hundred and fifteen dollars in crisp, clean notes. His earliest belief in his trunk had come back a hundredfold. He would not trust any bank, private or national, with the fruit of his heart-breaking toil. Banking systems and government investments were all beyond his grasp. Skeemersky had taught him to distrust others—the little thin trunk would not run away.
This conviction of safety obsessed him. He preached it to others, to his fellow-boarders, especially to the friendly young man in the room across the hall. "See," he would say, waving a hand toward the great untrustworthy world of finance beyond his little window. "They run away—those bankers. I have a better place."
He did not tell the friendly young man where or how much he had hidden. He merely smiled mysteriously. His faith in his trunk was absolute. Day after day, when returning from work in the factory, he took out his roll of notes and rejoiced that he had found the solution; he counted the days when he should send for his love. It was hard for him to wait for the lagging spring, but a winter journey in war-time from Russian Poland to New England was not to be thought of for his Agatha.
Blind faith often leads to the pit. Stefan, upon a night in late winter, found his theory shattered. The friendly young man had gone, and the crisp, clean notes had disappeared with him!
In this second crash of his hopes he was numbed. He neither wept nor cursed. He silently shrank into himself. He grew abstracted. He stared at the world with unseeing eyes. In the turmoil of his distracted mind there was but one growing determination not to be beaten by fate.