"Is those lights where we're goin', daddy?" he asked.
"That's where," said the man. He put his hand in his pocket and felt for the fifteen cents that lay there, wrapped in paper. The fancied odour and warmth of something to drink caught at him until he could hardly bear the longing.
But before he could get to the drink he must do something else. The man had been fighting away the thought of what he meant to do. But when they entered the village and were actually upon its main street, lonely in the rainy, eight o'clock summer dusk, what he meant to do had to be faced. So he began looking this way and that for a place to leave the child. There was a wagon shop. Old wagons stood under the open shed, their thills and tongues hanging, not expectant of journeys like those of new wagons, but idle, like the worn arms of beaten men. Some men, he thought, would leave the boy there, to sleep under a seat and be found in the morning; but he was no such father as that, he reflected complacently. He meant to leave the boy in a home, give him a fair start. There was a little house with a broken picket fence—someway she wouldn't have liked him to be there; she always liked things nice. He had never been able to give the boy much that was nice, but now, he said to himself, he would take nothing second rate. There was a grocery with a light above stairs where very likely the family lived, and there, too, was a dry stairway where the child could sit and wait until somebody came—no, not there either.... "The best ain't none too good for the little fellow," thought the man.
"Dad-ee!" cried the child suddenly.
He had run a few steps on and stood with his nose against the misty pane of Abagail Arnold's Home Bakery. Covered with pink mosquito-netting were a plate of sugar rolls, a fruit cake, a platter of cream puffs, and a tall, covered jar of shelled nuts.
"Hustle up—you!" said the man roughly, and took him by the arm again.
"I was comin'," said the little boy.
Why not leave the child at the bakery? No—a house. It must be a house, with a porch and a front stair and big upstairs rooms and a look of money-in-the-bank. He was giving care to the selection. It was as if he were exercising some natural paternal office, to be scrupulously discharged. Music issued from the wooden saloon building with the false two-story front and the coloured windows; from a protesting piano a dance tune was being furiously forced, and, as the door swung open, the tap and thud of feet, the swell of voices and laughter, the odour of the spirits caught at the cold and weary man. "Hurry along—hurry along!" he bade the boy roughly. That was where he would come back afterward, but first he must find the right place for the boy.