eet lights striving to think things
out. "I can't depend on any one," he muttered. "I have to make my own
way. The barber is as confused as the rest of them and he doesn't know
it. There is a way out of the confusion and I'm going to find it, but
I'll have to do it alone. I can't take any one's word for anything."




CHAPTER V


The matter of McGregor's attitude toward women and the call of sex was
not of course settled by the fight in the house in Lake Street. He was
a man who, even in the days of his great crudeness, appealed strongly
to the mating instinct in women and more than once his purpose was to
be shaken and his mind disturbed by the forms, the faces and the eyes
of women.

McGregor thought he had settled the matter. He forgot the black-eyed
girl in the hallway and thought only of advancement in the warehouse
and of study in his room at night. Now and then he took an evening off
and went for a walk through the streets or in one of the parks.

In the streets of Chicago, under the night lights, among the restless
moving people he was a figure to be remembered. Sometimes he did not
see the people at all but went swinging along in the same spirit in
which he had walked in the Pennsylvania hills. He was striving to get
a hold of some elusive quality in life that seemed to be forever out
of reach. He did not want to be a lawyer or a warehouseman. What did
he want? Along the street he went trying to make up his mind and
because his was not a gentle nature his perplexity drove him to anger
and he swore.

Up and down Madison Street he went striding along, his lips muttering
words. In a corner saloon some one played a piano. Groups of girls
passed laughing and talking. He came to the bridge that led over the
river into the loop district and then turned restlessly back. On the
sidewalks along Canal Street he saw strong-bodied men loitering before
cheap lodging houses. Their clothing was filthy with long wear and
there was no light of determination in their faces. In the little fine
interstices of the cloth of which their clothes were made was gathered
the filth of the city in which they lived and in the stuff of their
natures the filth and disorder of modern civilisation had also found
lodging.

On walked McGregor looking at man-made things and the flame of anger
within burned stronger and stronger. He saw the drifting clouds of
people of all nations that wander at night in Halstead Street and
turning into a side street saw also the Italians, Poles and Russians
that at evening gather on the sidewalks before tenements in that
district.

The desire in McGregor for some kind of activity became a madness. His
body shook with the strength of his desire to end the vast disorder of
life. With all the ardour of youth he wanted to see if with the
strength of his arm he could shake mankind out of its sloth. A drunken
man passed and following him came a large man with a pipe in his
mouth. The large man did not walk with any suggestion of power in his
legs. He shambled along. He was like a huge child with fat cheeks and
great untrained body, a child without muscles and hardness, clinging
to the skirts of life.

McGregor could not bear the sight of the big ungainly figure. The man
seemed to personify all of the things against which his soul was in
revolt and he stopped and stood crouched, a ferocious light burning in
his eyes.

Into the gutter rolled the man stunned by the force of the blow dealt
him by the miner's son. He crawled on his hands and knees and cried
for help. His pipe had rolled away into the darkness. McGregor stood
on the sidewalk and waited. A crowd of men standing before a tenement
house started to run toward him. Again he crouched. He prayed that
they would come on and let him fight them also. In anticipation of a
great struggle joy shone in his eyes and his muscles twitched.

And then the man in the gutter got to his feet and ran away. The men
who had started to run toward him stopped and turned back. McGregor
walked on, his heart heavy with the sense of defeat. He was a little
sorry for the man he had struck and who had made so ridiculous a
figure crawling about on his hands and knees and he was more perplexed
than ever.

       *       *       *       *       *

McGregor tried again to solve the problem of women. He had been much
pleased by the outcome of the affair in the little frame house and the
next day bought law books with the twenty-seven dollars thrust into
his hand by the frightened woman. Later he stood in his room
stretching his great body like a lion returned from the kill and
thought of the little black-bearded barber in the room at the end of
the hall stooping over his violin, his mind busy with the attempt to
justify himself because he would not face one of life's problems. The
feeling of resentment against the man had gone. He thought of the
course laid out for himself by that philosopher and laughed. "There is
something about it to avoid, like giving yourself up to digging in the
dirt under the ground," he told himself.

McGregor's second adventure began on a Saturday night and again he let
himself be led into it by the barber. The night was hot and the
younger man sat in his room filled with a desire to go forth and
explore the city. The quiet of the house, the distant rumble of street
cars, the sound of a band playing far down the street disturbed and
diverted his mind. He wished that he might take a stick in his hands
and go forth to prowl among the hills as he had gone on such nights in
his youth in the Pennsylvania town.

The door to his room opened and the barber came in. In his hand he
held two tickets. He sat on the window sill to explain.

"There is a dance in a hall on Monroe Street," said the barber
excitedly. "I have two tickets here. A politician sold them to the
boss in the shop where I work." The barber threw back his head and
laughed. To his mind there was something delicious in the thought of
the boss barber being forced by the politicians to buy dance tickets.
"They cost two dollars each," he cried and shook with laughter "You
should have seen my boss squirm. He didn't want the tickets but was
afraid not to take them. The politician could make trouble for him and
he knew it. You see we make a hand-book on the races in the shop and
that is against the law. The politician could make trouble for us. The
boss paid out the four dollars swearing under his breath and when the
politician had gone out he threw them at me. 'There, take them,' he
shouted, 'I don't want the rotten things. Is a man a horse trough at
which every beast can stop to drink?'"

McGregor and the barber sat in the room laughing at the boss barber
who had smilingly bought the tickets while consumed with inward wrath.
The barber urged McGregor to go with him to the dance. "We will make a
night of it," he said. "We will see women there--two that I know. They
live upstairs over a grocery store. I have been with them. They will
open your eyes. They are a kind of women you haven't known, bold and
clever and good fellows too."

McGregor got up and pulled his shirt over his head. A wave of feverish
excitement ran over his body. "We shall see about this," he said, "we
shall see if this is another wrong trail you are starting me on. You
go to your room and get ready. I am going to fix myself up."

In the dance hall McGregor sat on a seat by the wall with one of the
two women lauded by the barber and a third one who was frail and
bloodless. To him the adventure had been a failure. The swing of the
dance music struck no answering chord in him. He saw the couples on
the floor clasped in each other's arms, writhing and turning, swaying
back and forth, looking into each other's eyes and turned aside
wishing himself back in his room among the law books.

The barber talked to two of the women, bantering them. McGregor
thought the conversation inane and trivial. It skirted the edge of
things and ran off into vague references to other times and adventures
of which he knew nothing.

The barber danced away with one of the women. She was tall and the
head of the barber barely Passed her shoulder. His black beard shone
against her white dress. The two women sat beside him and talked.
McGregor gathered that the frail woman was a maker of hats. Something
about her attracted him and he leaned against the wall and looked at
her, not hearing the talk.

A youth came up and took the other woman away. From across the hall
the barber beckoned to him.

A thought flashed into his mind. This woman beside him was frail and
thin and bloodless like the women of Coal Creek. A feeling of intimacy
with her came over him. He felt as he had felt concerning the tall
pale girl of Coal Creek when they together gether had climbed the hill
to the eminence that looked down into the valley of farms.




CHAPTER VI


Edith Carson the milliner, whom fate had thrown into the company of
McGregor, was a frail woman of thirty-four and lived alone in two
rooms at the back of her millinery store. Her life was almost devoid
of colour. On Sunday morning she wrote a long letter to her family on
an Indiana farm and then put on a hat from among the samples in the
show case along the wall and went to church, sitting by herself in the
same seat Sunday after Sunday and afterward remembering nothing of the
sermon.

On Sunday afternoon Edith went by street-car to a park and walked
alone under the trees. If it threatened rain she sat in the larger of
the two rooms back of the shop sewing on new dresses for herself or
for a sister who had married a blacksmith in the Indiana town and who
had four children.

Edith had soft mouse-coloured hair and grey eyes with small brown
spots on the iris. She was so slender that she wore pads about her
body under her dress to fill it out. In her youth she had had a
sweetheart--a fat round-cheeked boy who lived on the next farm. Once
they had gone together to the fair at the county seat and coming home
in the buggy at night he had put his arm about her and kissed her.
"You ain't very big," he had said.

Edith sent to a mail order house in Chicago and bought the padding
which she wore under her dress With it came an oil which she rubbed on
herself. The label on the bottle spoke of the contents with great
respect as a wonderful developer. The heavy pads wore raw places on
her side against which her clothes rubbed but she bore the pain with
grim stoicism, remembering what the fat boy had said.

After Edith came to Chicago and opened a shop of her own she had a
letter from her former admirer. "It pleases me to think that the same
wind that blows over me blows also over you," it said. After that one
letter she did not hear from him again. He had the phrase out of a
book he had read and had written the letter to Edith that he might use
it. After the letter had gone he thought of her frail figure and
repented of the impulse that had tricked him into writing. Half in
alarm he began courting and soon married another girl.

Sometimes on her rare visits home Edith had seen her former lover
driving along the road. The sister who had married the blacksmith said
that he was stingy, that his wife had nothing to wear but a cheap
calico dress and that on Saturday he drove off to town alone, leaving
her to milk the cows and feed the pigs and horses. Once he encountered
Edith on the road and tried to get her into the wagon to ride with
him. Although she had walked along the road ignoring him she took the
letter about the wind that blew over them both out of a drawer on
spring evenings or after a walk in the park and read it over. After
she had read it she sat in the darkness at the front of the store
looking through the screen door at people in the street and wondered
what life would mean to her if she had a man on whom she could bestow
her love. In her heart she believed that, unlike the wife of the fat
youth, she would have borne children.

In Chicago Edith Carson had made money. She had a genius for economy
in the management of her business. In six years she had cleared a
large debt from the shop and had a comfortable balance in the bank.
Girls who worked in factories or in stores came and left most of their
meagre surplus in her shop and other girls who didn't work came in,
throwing dollars about and talking about "gentlemen friends." Edith
hated the bargaining but attended to it with shrewdness and with a
quiet disarming little smile on her face. What she liked was to sit
quietly in the room and trim hats. When the business grew she had a
woman to tend the shop and a girl to sit beside her and help with the
hats. She had a friend, the wife of a motorman on the street-car line,
who sometimes came to see her in the evening. The friend was a plump
little woman, dissatisfied with her marriage, and she got Edith to
make her several new hats a year for which she paid nothing.

Edith went to the dance at which she met McGregor with the motorman's
wife and a girl who lived upstairs over a bakery next door to the
shop, The dance was held in a hall over a saloon and was given for the
benefit of a political organisation in which the baker was a leader.
The wife of the baker came in and sold Edith two tickets, one for
herself and one for the wife of the motorman who happened to be
sitting with her at the time.

That evening after the motorman's wife had gone home Edith decided to
go to the dance and the decision was something like an adventure in
itself. The night was hot and sultry, lightning flashed in the sky and
clouds of dust swept down the street. Edith sat in the darkness behind
the bolted screen door and looked at the people who hurried homeward
down the street. A wave of revolt at the narrowness and emptiness of
her life ran through her. Tears sprang to her eyes. She closed the
shop door and going into the room at the back lighted the gas and
stood looking at herself in the mirror. "I'll go to the dance," she
thought. "Perhaps I shall get a man. If he won't marry me he can have
what he wants of me anyway."

In the dance hall Edith sat demurely by the wall near a window and
watched the couples whirl about on the floor. Through an open door she
could see couples sitting in another room around tables and drinking
beer. A tall young man in white trousers and white slippers went about
on the dance floor. He smiled and bowed to the women. Once he started
across the floor toward Edith and her heart beat rapidly, but just
when she thought he intended to speak to her and to the motorman's
wife he turned and went to another part of the room. Edith followed
him with her eyes, admiring his white trousers and his shining white
teeth.

The wife of the motorman went away with a small straight man with a
grey moustache whom Edith thought had unpleasant eyes and two girls
came and sat beside her. They were customers of her store and lived
together in a flat over a grocery on Monroe Street. Edith had heard
the girl who sat in the workroom with her speak slightingly of them.
The three sat together along the wall and talked of hats.

And then across the floor of the dance hall came two men, a huge red-
haired fellow and a little man with a black beard. The two women
hailed them and the five sat together making a party by the wall, the
little man keeping up a running stream of comments about the people on
the floor with Edith's two companions. A dance struck up and taking
one of the women the black-bearded man danced away. Edith and the
other woman again talked of hats. The huge fellow beside her said
nothing but followed the women about the dance hall with his eyes.
Edith thought she had never seen so homely a fellow.

At the end of the dance the black-bearded man went through the door
into the room filled with little tables and made a sign to the red-
haired man to follow. A boyish looking fellow appeared and went away
with the other woman and Edith sat alone on the bench by the wall
beside McGregor.

"This place doesn't interest me," said McGregor quickly. "I don't like
to sit watching people hop about on their toes. If you want to come
with me we'll get out of here and go to some place where we can talk
and get acquainted."

       *       *       *       *       *

The little milliner walked across the floor on the arm of McGregor,
her heart jumping with excitement. "I've got a man," she thought,
exulting. That the man had deliberately chosen her she knew. She had
heard the introductions and the bantering talk of the black-bearded
man and had noted the indifference of the big man to the other women.

Edith looked at her companion's huge frame and forgot his homeliness.
Into her mind came a picture of the fat boy, grown into a man, driving
down the road in the wagon and leeringly asking her to ride with him.
A flood of anger at the memory of the look of greedy assurance in his
eyes came over her. "This one could knock him over a six-rail fence,"
she thought.

"Where are we going now?" she asked.

McGregor looked down at her. "To some place where we can talk," he
said. "I was sick of this place. You ought to know where we're going.
I'm going with you. You aren't going with me."

McGregor wished he were in Coal Creek. He felt he would like to take
this woman over the hill and sit on the log to talk of his father.

As they walked along Monroe Street Edith thought of the resolution she
had made as she stood before the mirror in her room at the back of the
shop on the evening when she had decided to come to the dance. She
wondered if the great adventure was about to come to her and her hand
trembled on McGregor's arm. A hot wave of hope and fear shot through
her.

At the door of the millinery shop she fumbled with uncertain hands as
she unlocked the door. A delicious feeling shook her. She felt like a
bride, glad and yet ashamed and afraid.

In the room at the back of the shop McGregor lighted the gas and
pulling off his overcoat threw it on the couch at the side of the
room. He was not in the least excited and with a steady hand lighted
the fire in the little stove and then looking up he asked Edith if he
might smoke. He had the air of a man come home to his own house and
the woman sat on the edge of her chair to unpin her hat and waited
hopefully to see what course the night's adventure would take.

For two hours McGregor sat in the rocking chair in Edith Carson's room
and talked of Coal Creek and of his life in Chicago. He talked freely,
letting himself go as a man might in talking to one of his own people
after a long absence. His attitude and the quiet ring in his voice
confused and puzzled Edith. She had expected something quite
different.

Going to the little room at the side she brought forth a teakettle and
prepared to make tea. The big man still sat in her chair smoking and
talking. A delightful feeling of safety and coziness crept over her.
She thought her room beautiful but mingled with her satisfaction was a
faint grey streak of fear. "Of course he won't come back again," she
thought.




CHAPTER VII


In the year following the beginning of his acquaintanceship with Edith
Carson McGregor continued to work hard and steadily in the warehouse
and with his books at night. He was promoted to be foreman, replacing
the German, and he thought he had made progress with his studies. When
he did not go to the night school he went to Edith Carson's place and
sat reading a book and smoking his pipe by a little table in the back
room.

About the room and in and out of her shop moved Edith, going softly
and quietly. A light began to come into her eyes and colour into her
cheeks. She did not talk but new and daring thoughts visited her mind
and a thrill of reawakened life ran through her body. With gentle
insistence she did not let her dreams express themselves in words and
almost hoped that she might be able to go on forever thus, having this
strong man come into her presence and sit absorbed in his own affairs
within the walls of her house. Sometimes she wanted him to talk and
wished that she had the power to lead him into the telling of little
facts of his life. She wanted to be told of his mother and father, of
his boyhood in the Pennsylvania town, of his dreams and his desires
but for the most part she was content to wait and only hoped that
nothing would happen to bring an end to her waiting.

McGregor began to read books of history and became absorbed in the
figures of certain men, all soldiers and leaders of soldiers who
stalked across the pages wherein was written the story of man's life.
The figures of Sherman, Grant, Lee, Jackson, Alexander, Caesar,
Napoleon, and Wellington seemed to him to stand starkly up among the
other figures in the books and going to the Public Library at the noon
hour he got books concerning these men and for a time lost interest in
the study of law and devoted himself to contemplation of the breakers
of laws.

There was something beautiful about McGregor in those days. He was as
virginal and pure as a chunk of the hard black coal out of the hills
of his own state and like the coal ready to burn himself out into
power. Nature had been kind to him. He had the gift of silence and of
isolation. All about him were other men, perhaps as strong physically
as himself and with better trained minds who were being destroyed and
he was not being destroyed. For the others life let itself run out in
the endless doing of little tasks, the thinking of little thoughts and
the saying of groups of words over and over endlessly like parrots
that sit in cages and earn their bread by screaming two or three
sentences to passers by.

It is a terrible thing to speculate on how man has been defeated by
his ability to say words. The brown bear in the forest has no such
power and the lack of it has enabled him to retain a kind of nobility
of bearing sadly lacking in us. On and on through life we go,
socialists, dreamers, makers of laws, sellers of goods and believers
in suffrage for women and we continuously say words, worn-out words,
crooked words, words without power or pregnancy in them.

The matter is one to be thought of seriously by youths and maidens
inclined to garrulousness. Those who have the habit of it will never
change. The gods who lean over the rim of the world to laugh at us
have marked them for their barrenness.

And yet the word must run on. McGregor, the silent, wanted his word.
He wanted his true note as an individual to ring out above the hubbub
of voices and then he wanted to use the strength and the virility
within himself to carry his word far. What he did not want was that
his mouth become foul and his brain become numb with the saying of the
words and the thinking of the thoughts of other men and that he in his
turn become a mere toiling food-consuming chattering puppet to the
gods.

For a long time the miner's son wondered what power lay in the men
whose figures stood up so boldly in the pages of the books he read. He
tried to think the matter out as he sat in Edith's room or walked by
himself through the streets. In the warehouse he looked with new
curiosity at the men who worked in the great rooms piling and unpiling
apple barrels and the boxes of eggs and fruit When he came into one of
the rooms the men who had been standing in groups idly talking of
their own affairs began to run busily about. They no longer chattered
but as long as he remained worked desperately, furtively watching as
he stood staring at them.

McGregor wondered. He tried to fathom the mystery of the power that
made them willing to work until their bodies were bent and stooped,
that made them unashamed to be afraid and that left them in the end
mere slaves to words and formulas.

The perplexed young man who watched the men in the warehouse began to
think that the passion for reproduction might have something to do
with the matter. Perhaps his constant association with Edith awakened
the thought. His own loins were heavy with the seeds of children and
only his absorption in the thought of finding himself kept him from
devoting himself to the feeding of his lusts. One day he had a talk
concerning the matter with a at the warehouse. The talk came about in
this way.

In the warehouse the men came in at the door in the morning, drifting
in like flies that wander in at the open windows on a summer day. With
downcast eyes they shuffled across the long floor, white with lime.
Morning after morning they came in at the door and went silently to
their places looking at the floor and scowling. A slender bright-eyed
young man who acted as shipping clerk during the day sat in a little
coop and to him the men as they passed called out their numbers. From
time to time the shipping clerk who was an Irishman tried to joke with
one of them, tapping sharply upon his desk with a pencil as though to
compel attention. "They are no good," he said to himself, when in
response to his sallies they only smiled vaguely. "Although they get
but a dollar and a half a day they are overpaid!" Like McGregor he had
nothing but contempt for the men whose numbers he put in the book.
Their stupidity he took as a compliment to himself. "We are the kind
who get things done," he thought as he put the pencil back of his ear
and closed the book. In his mind the futile pride of the middle class
man flamed up. In his contempt for the workers he forgot also to have
contempt for himself.

One morning McGregor and the shipping clerk stood upon a board
platform facing the street and the shipping clerk talked of parentage.
"The wives of the workers here have children as cattle have calves,"
said the Irishman. Moved by some hidden sentiment within himself he
added heartily. "Oh well, what's a man for? It's nice to see kids
around the house. I've got four kids myself. You should see them play
about in the garden at my place in Oak Park when I come home in the
evening."

McGregor thought of Edith Carson and a faint hunger began to grow
within him. A desire that was later to come near to upsetting the
purpose of his life began to make itself felt. With a growl he fought
against the desire and confused the Irishman by making an attack upon
him. "Well how are you any better?" he asked bluntly. "Do you think
your children any more important than theirs? You may have a better
mind but their bodies are better and your mind hasn't made you a very
striking figure as far as I can see."

Turning away from the Irishman who had begun to sputter with wrath
McGregor went up an elevator to a distant part of the building to
think of the Irishman's words. From time to time he spoke sharply to a
workman who loitered in one of the passages between the piles of boxes
and barrels. Under his hand the work in the warehouse had begun to
take on order and the little grey-haired superintendent who had
employed him rubbed his hands with delight.

In a corner by a window stood McGregor wondering why he also did not
want to devote his life to being the father of children. In the dim
light across the face of the window a fat old spider crawled slowly.
In the hideous body of the insect there was something that suggested
to the mind of the struggling thinker the sloth of the world. Vaguely
his mind groped about trying to get hold of words and ideas to express
what was in his brain. "Ugly crawling things that look at the floor,"
he muttered. "If they have children it is without order or orderly
purpose. It is an accident like the accident of the fly that falls
into the net built by the insect here. The coming of the children is
like the coming of the flies, it feeds a kind of cowardice in men. In
the children men hope vainly to see done what they have not the
courage to try to do."

With an oath McGregor smashed with his heavy leather glove the fat
thing wandering aimlessly across the light. "I must not be confused by
little things. There is still going on the attempt to force me into
the hole in the ground. There is a hole here in which men live and
work just as there is in the mining town from which I came."

       *       *       *       *       *

Hurrying out of his room that evening McGregor went to see Edith. He
wanted to look at her and to think. In the little room at the back he
sat for an hour trying to read a book and then for the first time
shared his thoughts with her. "I am trying to discover why men are of
so little importance," he said suddenly. "Are they mere tools for
women? Tell me that. Tell me what women think and what they want?"

Without waiting for an answer he turned again to the reading of the
book. "Oh well," he added "it doesn't need to bother me. I won't let
any women lead me into being a reproductive tool for her."

Edith was alarmed. She took McGregor's outburst as a declaration of
war against herself and her influence and her hands began to tremble.
Then a new thought came to her. "He needs money to get on in the
world," she told herself and a little thrill of joy ran through her as
she thought of her own carefully guarded hoard. She wondered how she
could offer it to him so that there would be no danger of a refusal.

"You're all right," said McGregor, preparing to depart. "You do not
interfere with a man's thoughts."

Edith blushed and like the workmen in the warehouse looked at the
floor. Something in his words startled her and when he was gone she
went to her desk and taking out her bankbook turned its pages with new
pleasure. Without hesitation she who indulged herself in nothing would
have given all to McGregor.

And out into the street went the man, thinking of his own affairs. He
dismissed from his mind the thoughts of women and children and began
again to think of the stirring figures of history that had made so
strong an appeal to him. As he passed over one of the bridges he
stopped and stood leaning over the rail to look at the black water
below. "Why has thought never succeeded in replacing action?" he asked
himself. "Why are the men who write books in some way less full of
meaning than the men who do things?"

McGregor was staggered by the thought that had come to him and
wondered if he had started on a wrong trail by coming to the city and
trying to educate himself. For an hour he stood in the darkness and
tried to think things out. It began to rain but he did not mind. Into
his brain began to creep a dream of a vast order coming out of
disorder. He was like one standing in the presence of some gigantic
machine with many intricate parts that had begun to run crazily, each
part without regard to the purpose of the whole. "There is danger in
thinking too," he muttered vaguely. "Everywhere there is danger, in
labour, in love and in thinking. What shall I do with myself?"

McGregor turned about and threw up his hands. A new thought swept like
a broad path of light across the darkness of his mind. He began to see
that the soldiers who had led thousands of men into battle had
appealed to him because in the working out of their purposes they had
used human lives with the recklessness of gods. They had found the
courage to do that and their courage was magnificent. Away down deep
in the hearts of men lay sleeping a love of order and they had taken
hold of that love. If they had used it badly did that matter? Had they
not pointed the way?

Back into McGregor's mind came a night scene in his home town. Vividly
he saw in fancy the poor unkempt little street facing the railroad
tracks and the groups of striking miners huddled in the light before
the door of a saloon while in the road a body of soldiers marched
past, their uniforms looking grey and their faces grim in the
uncertain light. "They marched," whispered McGregor. "That's what made
them seem so powerful. They were just ordinary men but they went
swinging along, all as one man. Something in that fact ennobled them.
That's what Grant knew and what Caesar knew. That's what made Grant
and Caesar seem so big. They knew and they were not afraid to use
their knowledge. Perhaps they did not bother to think how it would all
come out. They hoped for another kind of man to do the thinking.
Perhaps they did not think of anything at all but just went ahead and
tried to do each his own part.

"I will do my part here," shouted McGregor. "I will find the way." His
body shook and his voice roared along the footpath of the bridge. Men
stopped to look back at the big shouting figure. Two women walking
past screamed and ran into the roadway. McGregor walked rapidly away
toward his own room and his books. He did not know how he would be
able to use the new impulse that had come to him but as he swung along
through dark streets and past rows of dark buildings he thought again
of the great machine running crazily and without purpose and was glad
he was not a part of it. "I will keep myself to myself and be ready
for what happens," he said, burning with new courage.





BOOK III



CHAPTER I


When McGregor had secured the place in the apple-warehouse and went
home to the house in Wycliff Place with his first week's pay, twelve
dollars, in his pocket he thought of his mother, Nance McGregor,
working in the mine offices in the Pennsylvania town and folding a
five dollar bill sent it to her in a letter. "I will begin to take
care of her now," he thought and with the rough sense of equity in
such matters, common to labouring people, had no intention of giving
himself airs. "She has fed me and now I will begin to feed her," he
told himself.

The five dollars came back. "Keep it. I don't want your money," the
mother wrote. "If you have money left after your expenses are paid
begin to fix yourself up. Better get a new pair of shoes or a hat.
Don't try to take care of me. I won't have it. I want you to look out
for yourself. Dress well and hold up your head, that's all I ask. In
the city clothes mean a good deal. In the long run it will mean more
to me to see you be a real man than to be a good son."

Sitting in her rooms over the vacant bake-shop in Coal Creek Nance
began to get new satisfaction out of the contemplation of herself as a
woman with a son in the city. In the evening she thought of him moving
along the crowded thoroughfares among men and women and her bent
little old figure straightened with pride. When a letter came telling
of his work in the night school her heart jumped and she wrote a long
letter filled with talk of Garfield and Grant and of Lincoln lying by
the burning pine knot reading his books. It seemed to her unbelievably
romantic that her son should some day be a lawyer and stand up in a
crowded court room speaking thoughts out of his brain to other men.
She thought that if this great red-haired boy, who at home had been so
unmanageable and so quick with his fists, was to end by being a man of
books and of brains then she and her man, Cracked McGregor, had not
lived in vain. A sweet new sense of peace came to her. She forgot her
own years of toil and gradually her mind went back to the silent boy
sitting on the steps with her before her house in the year after her
husband's death while she talked to him of the world, and thus she
thought of him, a quiet eager boy, going about bravely there in the
distant city.

Death caught Nance McGregor off her guard. After one of her long days
of toil in the mine office she awoke to find him sitting grim and
expectant beside her bed. For years she in common with most of the
women of the coal town had been afflicted with what is called "trouble
with the heart." Now and then she had "bad spells." On this spring
evening she got into bed and sitting propped among the pillows fought
out her fight alone like a worn-out animal that has crept into a hole
in the woods.

In the middle of the night the conviction came to her that she would
die. Death seemed moving about in the room and waiting for her. In the
street two drunken men stood talking, their voices concerned with
their own human affairs coming in through the window and making life
seem very near and dear to the dying woman. "I've been everywhere,"
said one of the men. "I've been in towns and cities I don't even
remember the names of. You ask Alex Fielder who keeps a saloon in
Denver. Ask him if Gus Lamont has been there."

The other man laughed. "You've been in Jake's drinking too much beer,"
he jeered.

Nance heard the two men stumble off down the street, the traveller
protesting against the unbelief of his friend. It seemed to her that
life with all of its colour sound and meaning was running away from
her presence. The exhaust of the engine over at the mine rang in her
ears. She thought of the mine as a great monster lying asleep below
the ground, its huge nose stuck into the air, its mouth open to eat
men. In the darkness of the room her coat, flung over the back of a
chair, took the shape and outline of a face, huge and grotesque,
staring silently past her into the sky.

Nance McGregor gasped and struggled for breath. She clutched the
bedclothes with her hands and fought grimly and silently. She did not
think of the place to which she might go after death. She was trying
hard not to go there. It had been her habit of life to fight not to
dream dreams.

Nance thought of her father, drunk and throwing his money about in the
old days before her marriage, of the walks she as a young girl had
taken with her lover on Sunday afternoons and of the times when they
had gone together to sit on the hillside overlooking the farming
country. As in a vision the dying woman saw the broad fertile land
spread out before her and blamed herself that she had not done more
toward helping her man in the fulfilment of the plans she and he had
made to go there and live. Then she thought of the night when her boy
came and of how, when they went to bring her man from the mine, they
found him apparently dead under the fallen timbers so that she thought
life and death had visited her hand in hand in one night.

Nance sat stiffly up in bed. She thought she heard the sound of heavy
feet on the stairs. "That will be Beaut coming up from the shop," she
muttered and fell back upon the pillow dead.




CHAPTER II


Beaut McGregor went home to Pennsylvania to bury his mother and on a
summer afternoon walked again on the streets of his native town. From
the station he went at once to the empty bake-shop, above which he had
lived with his mother but he did not stay there. For a moment he stood
bag in hand listening to the voices of the miners' wives in the room
above and then put the bag behind an empty box and hurried away. The
voices of women broke the stillness of the room in which he stood.
Their thin sharpness hurt something within him and he could not bear
the thought of the equally thin sharp silence he knew would fall upon
the women who were attending his mother's body in the room above when
he came into the presence of the dead.

Along Main Street he went to a hardware store and from there went to
the mine office. Then with a pick and shovel on his shoulder he began
to climb the hill up which he had walked with his father when he was a
lad. On the train homeward bound an idea had come to him. "I will her
among the bushes on the hillside that looks down into the fruitful
valley," he told himself. The details of a religious discussion
between two labourers that had gone on one day during the noon hour at
the warehouse had come into his mind and as the train ran eastward he
for the first time found himself speculating on the possibility of a
life after death. Then he brushed the thoughts aside. "Anyway if
Cracked McGregor does come back it is there you will find him, sitting
on the log on the hillside," he thought.

With the tools on his shoulder McGregor climbed the long hillside
road, now deep with black dust. He was going to dig the grave for the
burial of Nance McGregor. He did not glare at the miners who passed
swinging their dinner-pails as they had done in the old days but
looked at the ground and thought of the dead woman and a little
wondered what place a woman would yet come to occupy in his own life.
On the hillside the wind blew sharply and the great boy just emerging
into manhood worked vigorously making the dirt fly. When the hole had
grown deep he stopped and looked to where in the valley below a man
who was hoeing corn shouted to a woman who stood on the porch of a
farm house. Two cows that stood by a fence in a field lifted up their
heads and bawled lustily. "It is the place for the dead to lie,"
whispered McGregor. "When my own time comes I shall be brought up
here." An idea came to him. "I will have father's body moved," he told
himself. "When I have made some money I will have that done. Here we
shall all lie in the end, all of us McGregors."

The thought that had come to McGregor pleased him and he was pleased
also with himself for thinking the thought. The male in him made him
throw back his shoulders. "We are two of a feather, father and me," he
muttered, "two of a feather and mother has not understood either of
us. Perhaps no woman was ev