Mike furnished the town's social
touch with the family. It was a strange family to live there in that fat,
corn-growing country, a family with something savage and primitive about
it, one that belonged among western mining camps or among the half savage
dwellers in deep alleys in cities, and the fact that it lived on a corn
farm in Iowa was, in the words of John Telfer, "something monstrous in
Nature."
The McCarthy farm, lying some four miles east of Caxton, had once
contained a thousand acres of good corn-growing land. Lem McCarthy, the
father of the family, had inherited it from a brother, a gold miner, a
forty-niner, a sport owning fast horses, who planned to breed race horses
on the Iowa land. Lem had come out of the back streets of an eastern city,
bringing his brood of tall, silent, savage boys to live upon the land and,
like the forty-niner, to be a sport. Thinking the wealth that had come to
him vast beyond spending, he had plunged into horse racing and gambling.
When, within two years, five hundred acres of the farm had to be sold to
pay gambling debts, and the wide acres lay covered with weeds, Lem became
alarmed, and settled down to hard work, the boys working all day in the
field and at long intervals coming into town at night to get into trouble.
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