And yet Sam McPherson was no evil-minded boy. He had, as a matter
of fact, a quality of intellectual honesty that appealed strongly to the
clean-minded, simple-hearted old blacksmith Valmore; he had awakened
something like love in the hearts of the women school teachers in the
Caxton schools, at least one of whom continued to interest herself in him,
taking him with her on walks along country roads, and talking to him
constantly of the development of his mind; and he was the friend and boon
companion of Telfer, the dandy, the reader of poems, the keen lover of
life. The boy was struggling to find himself. One night when the sex call
kept him awake he got up and dressed, and went and stood in the rain by
the creek in Miller's pasture. The wind swept the rain across the face of
the water and a sentence flashed through his mind: "The little feet of the
rain run on the water." There was a quality of almost lyrical beauty in
the Iowa boy.
And this boy, who couldn't get hold of his impulse toward God, whose sex
impulses made him at times mean, at times full of beauty, and who had
decided that the impulse toward bargaining and money getting was the
impulse in him most worth cherishing, now sat beside his mother in church
and watched with wide-open eyes the man who took off his coat, who sweated
profusely, and who called the town in which he lived a cesspool of vice
and its citizens wards of the devil.
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