Manhood had come to him. Why! the man should have wrapped the
entire store, package after package, and sent it to the ends of the earth.
He lingered in the shadows at the first of the store lights where ages
before he had gone, a mere boy, to meet her, a mere girl, and looked with
wonder at the lighted way before him.
Sam crossed the street and, from the front of Sawyer's barber shop, looked
into Wildman's. He felt like a spy looking into the camp of an enemy.
There before him sat the men into whose midst he had it in his power to
cast a thunderbolt. He might walk to the door and say, truthfully enough,
"Here before you is a boy that by the flutter of a white hand has been
made into a man; here is one who has wrung the heart of womankind and
eaten his fill at the tree of the knowledge of life."
In the grocery the talk still continued among the men upon the cracker
barrels who seemed unconscious of the boy's slinking entrance. Indeed,
their talk had sunk. From talking of love and of poets they talked of corn
and of steers. Banker Walker, his packages of groceries lying on the
counter, smoked a cigar.
"You can fairly hear the corn growing to-night," he said. "It wants but
another shower or two and we shall have a record crop.
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