Windy McPherson's Son
After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted a chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and hides he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged persistency with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank had caught Freedom’s imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the fact.
Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business, backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the cashier telling of Sam’s record as a depositor, and the seven hundred dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with Freedom, Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his savings as he had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was impressed. He thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a week Sam had seen the silent suggestive power of cash.
The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to more than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have two-thirds of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other hand was to furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam was to take care of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things bought were to be fixed each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at less than the prices named two-thirds of the savings went to him. The arrangement was suggested by Sam, who thought he would make more from the saving than from the wage.
Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice, roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man, woman and child he knew and liked. “Old Maybe-Not” he called Windy McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip in the top. To Sam’s knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying. Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar until the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him. And then haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his way while the farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward child.
Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton’s best streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing and roaring about it. “Good morning, Mary,” he would shout at the neat German woman across the street. “Wait and you’ll see me clean up about here. I’m going at it right now. I’m going to brush the flies off the fence first.”
Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the county.
Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and agricultural implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard, gathering rust and decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the lot were a half dozen buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction engine, a mowing machine, several farm wagons and other farm tools gone beyond naming. Every few days he came home bringing a new prize. They overflowed the yard and crept onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell any of this stuff. He had at one time sixteen sets of harness all broken and unrepaired in the barn and in a shed back of the house. A great flock of chickens and two or three pigs wandered about among this junk and all the children of the neighbourhood joined Freedom’s four and ran howling and shouting over and under the mass.
Freedom’s wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house. She had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally stood at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at evening as he stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both she and Freedom treated him with great respect.
As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling. He was a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very systematically and within a year more than doubling the bulk of Freedom’s purchases.
There is a little of Windy McPherson’s grotesque pretentiousness in every man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of it. He let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value of their goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they had recovered from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam’s day, farmers did not watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets were not systematised and regulated as they were later, and the skill of the buyer was of the first importance. Having the skill, Sam used it constantly to put money into his pockets, but in some way kept the confidence and respect of the men with whom he traded.
The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.
“Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy,” he would shout to the loafers in the store.
Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his own affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom’s affairs, but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and apples, butter and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working always to swell his commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business and many times profited little, but the two liked and respected each other and it was through Freedom’s efforts that Sam finally got out of Caxton and into larger affairs.
One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam stood taking the harness off his horse.
“Here is a chance for you, my boy,” he said, putting his hand affectionately on Sam’s shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had replied making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might hope for in Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.
When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told him that in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and filled with uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom’s stable wishing that he also might be gone.
Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken from the horse upon a peg in the wall.
“I will be glad to go,” he said heavily.
Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who had come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man of eighteen. He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago company because of his affection for the boy and because he believed him capable of something more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence holding the lantern aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the yard, filled with regrets.
By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who, putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street, Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From a street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could see them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom’s hand and the slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.
CHAPTER VI
Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom’s hand. At the front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on the gate and looking at the sky.
“We shall have a rain,” he said in a quavering voice, as though giving a decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an answer went along a narrow path into the house.
The incident brought a smile to Sam’s lips followed by a kind of weariness of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had, day after day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking at the sky. The man was one of Sam’s old newspaper customers who stood as a kind of figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he had been a gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part in more than one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he had come to end his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself by keeping year after year a carefully tabulated record of weather variations. Once or twice a month during the warm season he stumbled into Wildman’s and, sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the accuracy of his records and the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at his heels. In his present mood the endless sameness and uneventfulness of the man’s life seemed to Sam amusing and in some way sad.
“To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point to a day—to look forward to and depend upon that—what deadliness!” he thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt with pleasure the letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much of the big outside world to him.
In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought on by his mother’s approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost cheerful. The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom was renewed by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at the sky.
“I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching a mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer,” he thought.
The three years in Freedom Smith’s service had taught Sam not to doubt his ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his way. He knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business man, one of the men who direct and control the affairs in which they are concerned because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He recalled with pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped calling him a bright boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.
At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old man he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his mother’s life had been as barren as that of the man who depended for companionship upon a dog and a thermometer.
“Indeed,” he said to himself, pursuing the thought, “it has been worse. She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the last days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old man watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house chasing playthings.” The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the wind singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional drop of rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with his mother. During the last two or three years he had been trying to make things up to her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the beginning of his success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub and since the beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after evening with her instead of going to Wildman’s to sit with the four friends and hear the talk that went on among them. No more did he walk with Telfer or Mary Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the bedside of the sick woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an arm chair upon the grass plot at the front of the house.
The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to the ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together, the mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought of the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had been made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which he had been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the doings of the pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane’s illness continued to go off after pension day for long periods of drunkenness, and who only came home to weep and wail through the house, when the pension money was gone, regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the loss of both the washwoman and the wife.
“She has been the most wonderful woman in the world,” he told himself and tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend, John Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy trotting beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of her long gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A picture of George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness in the kitchen of Freedom Smith’s house, had caught his eye some days before, and in the darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his lips, realising that in some indescribable way it was like his mother as she had been before her illness. Freedom’s wife had given him the picture and he had been carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on lonely stretches of road as he went about his work.
Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of an attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue the thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details of a long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It was extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy’s mind. She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of a thin-lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a farm, and of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved to buy books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a school teacher, and of her marriage to Windy—then John McPherson.
Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in the town’s life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man who walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and who taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.
When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.
“And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour and unhappiness for me,” the sick woman had told her son.
After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton where he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the store into the sheriff’s hands and his wife into the position of town laundress.
In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy and another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the state giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs and had written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the applause that greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances, the little dimly-lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces shining in the light of the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted Windy running here and there, talking the jargon of stageland, arraying himself in his motley and strutting upon the little stage.
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