At the edge of the wood he stopped and leaning on a rail fence watched
until he saw his mother come out to the pump in the back yard. She had
begun to draw water for the day's washing. For her also the holiday was at
an end. A flood of tears ran down the boy's cheeks, and he shook his fist
in the direction of the town. "You may laugh at that fool Windy, but you
shall never laugh at Sam McPherson," he cried, his voice shaking with
excitement.
CHAPTER III
One evening, when he had grown so that he outtopped Windy, Sam McPherson
returned from his paper route to find his mother arrayed in her black,
church-going dress. An evangelist was at work in Caxton and she had
decided to hear him. Sam shuddered. In the house it was an understood
thing that when Jane McPherson went to church her son went with her. There
was nothing said. Jane McPherson did all things without words, always
there was nothing said. Now she stood waiting in her black dress when her
son came in at the door and he hurriedly put on his best clothes and went
with her to the brick church.
Valmore, John Telfer, and Freedom Smith, who had taken upon themselves a
kind of common guardianship of the boy and with whom he spent evening
after evening at the back of Wildman's grocery, did not go to church.
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