So long had Jake been
the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that he looked
upon Sam as an intruder. "John told me last summer when I was home that he
intended to sell the blacks and buy mules," he would add, looking at the
youth challengingly.
The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar and
bustle of Chicago's vast west side, it still turned with hungry heart
toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for Jake, its
mainstay, could be found in that paradise.
Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey moustache,
and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so that they
stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn,
worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night, going to
bed at nine o'clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling, from room
to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers, or sitting
in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the habits formed
in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home with his pay in his
pocket, settled with the two sisters for the week's living, sat down to
dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then disappeared upon the troubled
waters of the town.
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