She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had
driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a house,
and had grown brown and strong at the work.
"And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has
gained eleven pounds," she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her
heavy, muscular forearms.
She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle factory
in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods store, with
her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her hearer's
interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the west and the
loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they sometimes made her
heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved success, although he
did not see how her experience could serve as a guide to him.
"You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth," he said, taking
her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.
At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through southern
Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse, asked, "Where
are you going?" adding genially, "I may be able to give you a lift.
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