We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked into bed."
CHAPTER V
Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to him.
For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun come up
hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the streets in
the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from the north came
into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on the deserted
little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry
with his work that they might get back into the warm stale air of the
smoking car.
In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become a
man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some subtle
way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that to make money
and to have money would in some way make up for the old half-forgotten
humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and would set it on a
more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had provided, grew and
influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly he kept at his efforts to
get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of dollars. Jane McPherson had
herself a passion for frugality.
Pages:
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104