I took a look at myself in
the glass, and felt that even at the first glance, my mother would feel
that in casting her lot with me she would be choosing not only the
comfort of living with her only son but the protection of one who had
proved himself a man.
I glowed with pride as I thought of our future together, and of all I
would do to make her life happy and easy. I never was a better boy in my
life than on that winter evening when I went up the hilly street from
the tavern in Madison to the place on a high bluff overlooking a sheet
of ice, stretching away almost as far as I could see, which they told me
was Fourth Lake, to the house in which I was informed Doctor Rucker
lived--a small frame house among stocky, low burr oak trees, on which
the dead leaves still hung, giving forth a dreary hiss as the bitter
north wind blew through them.
I knocked at the door, and was answered by a red-haired young woman,
with a silly grin on her face, the smirk flanked on each side with
cork-screw curls which hung down over her bright blue dress; which, as I
could see, was pulled out at the seams under her round and shapely arms.
She put out a soft and plump hand to me, but I did not take it. She
looked in my face, and shrank back as if frightened.
"Where's Rucker?" I asked; but before I had finished the question he
came forward from the other room, clothed in dirty black broadcloth, his
patent-medicine-pedler's smile all over his face, with a soiled frilled
shirt showing back of his flowered vest, which was unbuttoned except at
the bottom, to show the nasty finery beneath.
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