At times he had stirring dreams of vast
work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but for the
most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about him,
keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.
During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton
family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but that
still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer
vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed
him during the month after his mother's death, and letters regarding him
had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down to
dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and talk
of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.
"I was thinking of old John Moore to-day--does he still drive that team of
black ponies?" the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman of thirty,
would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a conversation of
baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new office building to be
erected in the Loop.
"No, he don't," Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in a
machine shop and the man of the house, would answer.
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