used to sit around quarrelling about it, each
blaming the other. Anyway we didn't get along.

"We would sit on the little front porch of our house in the evening,
she bragging of the work she had done in the can factory and I
dreaming of quietude and a chance to work on the violins. I thought I
knew a way to increase the quality and beauty of tone and I had that
idea about varnish I have talked to you about. I even dreamed of doing
things those old fellows of Cremona didn't do.

"When she had been talking of her work in the office for maybe a half
hour she would look up and find that I hadn't been listening. We would
quarrel. We even quarrelled before the children after they came. Once
she said that she didn't see how it would matter if no violins had
ever been made and that night I dreamed of choking her in bed. I woke
up and lay there beside her thinking of it with something like real
satisfaction in just the thought that one long hard grip of my fingers
would get her out of my way for good.

"We didn't always feel that way. Every little while a change would
come over both of us and we would begin to take an interest in each
other. I would be proud of the work she had done in the factory and
would brag of it to men coming into the shop. In the evening she would
be sympathetic about the violins and put the baby to bed to let me
alone at my work in the kitchen.

"Then we would begin to sit in the darkness in the house and hold each
other's hands. We would forgive things that had been said and play a
sort of game, chasing each other about the room in the darkness and
knocking against the chairs and laughing. Then we would begin to look
at each other and kiss. Presently there would be another baby."

The barber threw up his hands with a gesture of impatience. His voice
lost its softer, reminiscent quality. "Such times didn't last," he
said. "On the whole it was no life to live. I came away. The children
are in a state institution and she has gone back to her work in the
office. The town hates me. They have made a heroine of her. I'm here
talking to you with these whiskers on my face so that people from my
town wouldn't know me if they came along. I'm a barber and I would
shave them off fast enough if it wasn't for that."

A woman walking past looked back at McGregor. In her eyes lurked an
invitation. It reminded him of something in the eyes of the pale
daughter of the undertaker of Coal Creek. An uneasy tremor ran through
him. "What do you do about women now?" he asked.

The voice of the smaller man arose harsh and excited in the evening
air. "I get the feeling taken out of me as a man would have a tooth
fixed," he said. "I pay money for the service and keep my mind on what
I want to do. There are plenty of women for that, women who are good
for that only. When I first came here I used to wander about at night,
wanting to go to my room and work but with my mind and my will
paralysed by that feeling. I don't do that now and I won't again. What
I do many men do--good men--men who do good work. What's the use
thinking about it when you only run against a stone wall and get
hurt?"

The black bearded man arose, thrust his hands into his trousers
pockets and looked about him. Then he sat down again. He seemed to be
filled with suppressed excitement. "There is a big hidden something
going on in modern life," he said, talking rapidly and excitedly. "It
used to touch only the men higher up, now it reaches down to men like
me--barbers and workingmen. Men know about it but don't talk and don't
dare think. Their women have changed. Women used to be willing to do
anything for men, just be slaves to them. The best men don't ask that
now and don't want that."

He jumped to his feet and stood over McGregor. "Men don't understand
what's going on and don't care," he said. "They are too busy getting
things done or going to ball games or quarrelling about politics.

"And what do they know about it if they are fools enough to think?
They get thrown into false notions. They see about them a lot of fine
purposeful women maybe caring for their children and they blame
themselves for their vices and are ashamed. Then they turn to the
other women anyway, shutting their eyes and going ahead. They pay for
what they want as they would pay for a dinner, thinking no more of the
women who serve them than they do of the waitresses who serve them in
the restaurants. They refuse to think of the new kind of woman that is
growing up. They know that if they get sentimental about her they'll
get into trouble or get new tests put to them, be disturbed you see,
and spoil their work or their peace of mind. They don't want to get
into trouble or be disturbed. They want to get a better job or enjoy a
ball game or build a bridge or write a book. They think that a man who
gets sentimental about any woman is a fool and of course he is."

"Do you mean that all of them do that?" asked McGregor. He wasn't
upset by what had been said. It struck him as being true. For himself
he was afraid of women. It seemed to him that a road was being built
by his companion along which he might travel with safety. He wanted
the man to go on talking. Into his brain flashed the thought that if
he had the thing to do over there would have been a different ending
to the afternoon spent with the pale girl on the hillside.

The barber sat down upon the bench. The flush out of his cheeks. "Well
I have done pretty well myself," he said, "but then you know I make
violins and don't think of women. I've been in Chicago two years and
I've spent just eleven dollars. I would like to know what the average
man spends. I wish some fellow would get the facts and publish them.
It would make people sit up. There must be millions spent here every
year."

"You see I'm not very strong and I stand all day on my feet in the
barber shop." He looked at McGregor and laughed. "The black-eyed girl
in the hall is after you," he said. "You'd better look out. You let
her alone. Stick to your law books. You are not like me. You are big
and red and strong. Eleven dollars won't pay your way here in Chicago
for no two years."

McGregor looked again at the people moving toward the park entrance in
the gathering darkness. He thought it wonderful that a brain could
think a thing out so clearly and words express thoughts so lucidly.
His eagerness to follow the passing girls with his eyes was gone. He
was interested in the older man's viewpoint. "And what about
children?" he asked.

The older man sat sideways on the bench. There was a troubled look in
his eyes and a suppressed eager quality in his voice. "I'm going to
tell you about that," he said. "I don't want to keep anything back.

"Look here!" he demanded, sliding along the bench toward McGregor and
emphasising his points by slapping one hand down upon the other.
"Ain't all children my children?" He paused, trying to gather his
scattered thoughts into words. When McGregor started to speak he put
his hand up as though to ward off a new thought or another question.
"I'm not trying to dodge," he said. "I'm trying to get thoughts that
have been in my head day after day in shape to tell. I haven't tried
to express them before. I know men and women cling to their children.
It's the only thing they have left of the dream they had before they
married. I felt that way. It held me for a long time. It would be
holding me now only that the violins pulled so hard at me."

He threw up his hand impatiently. "You see I had to find an answer. I
couldn't think of being a skunk--running away--and I couldn't stay. I
wasn't intended to stay. Some men are intended to work and take care
of children and serve women perhaps but others have to keep trying for
a vague something all their lives--like me trying for a tone on a
violin. If they don't get it it doesn't matter, they have to keep
trying.

"My wife used to say I'd get tired of it. No woman ever really
understands a man caring for anything except herself. I knocked that
out of her."

The little man looked up at McGregor. "Do you think I'm a skunk?" he
asked.

McGregor looked at him gravely. "I don't know," he said. "Go on and
tell me about the children."

"I said they were the last things to cling to. They are. We used to
have religion. But that's pretty well gone now--the old kind. Now men
think about children, I mean a certain kind of men--the ones that have
work they want to get on with. Children and work are the only things
that kind care about. If they have a sentiment about women it's only
about their own--the one they have in the house with them. They want
to keep that one finer than they are themselves. So they work the
other feeling out on the paid women.

"Women fuss about men loving children. Much they care. It's only a
plan for demanding adulation for themselves that they don't earn.
Once, when I first came to the city, I took a place as servant in a
wealthy family. I wanted to stay under cover until my beard grew.
Women used to come there to receptions and to meetings in the
afternoon to talk about reforms they were interested in----Bah! They
work and scheme trying to get at men. They are at it all their lives,
flattering, diverting us, giving us false ideas, pretending to be weak
and uncertain when they are strong and determined. They have no mercy.
They wage war on us trying to make us slaves. They want to take us
captive home to their houses as Caesar took captives home to Rome.

"You look here!" He jumped to his feet again and shook his fingers at
McGregor. "You just try something. You try being open and frank and
square with a woman--any woman--as you would with a man. Let her live
her own life and ask her to let you live yours. You try it. She won't.
She will die first."

He sat down again upon the bench and shook his head back and forth.
"Lord how I wish I could talk!" he said. "I'm making a muddle of this
and I wanted to tell you. Oh, how I wanted to tell you! It's part of
my idea that a man should tell a boy all he knows. We've got to quit
lying to them."

McGregor looked at the ground. He was profoundly and deeply moved and
interested as he had never before been moved by anything but hate.

Two women coming along the gravel walk stopped under a tree and looked
back. The barber smiled and raised his hat. When they smiled back at
him he rose and started toward them. "Come on boy," he whispered
behind his hand to McGregor. "Let's get them."

When McGregor looked up the scene before his eyes infuriated him. The
smiling barber with his hat in his hand, the two women waiting under
the tree, the look of half-guilty innocence on the faces of all of
them, stirred a blind fury in his brain. He sprang forward, clutching
the shoulder of Turner with his hand. Whirling him about he threw him
to his hands and knees. "Get out of here you females!" he roared at
the women who ran off in terror down the walk.

The barber sat again upon the bench beside McGregor. He rubbed his
hands together to brush the bits of gravel out of the flesh. "What's
got wrong with you?" he asked.

McGregor hesitated. He wondered how he should tell what was in his
mind. "Everything in its place," he said finally. "I wanted to go on
with our talk."

Lights flashed out of the darkness of the park. The two men sat on the
bench thinking each his own thoughts.

"I want to take some work out of the clamps to-night," the barber
said, looking at his watch. Together the two men walked along the
street. "Look here," said McGregor. "I didn't mean to hurt you. Those
two women that came up and interfered with what we were working out
made me furious."

"Women always interfere," said the barber. "They raise hell with men."
His mind ran out and began to play with the world-old problem of the
sexes. "If a lot of women fall in the fight with us men and become our
slaves--serving us as the paid women do--need they fuss about it? Let
them be game and try to help work it out as men have been game and
have worked and thought through ages of perplexity and defeat."

The barber stopped on the street corner to fill and light his pipe.
"Women can change everything when they want to," he said, looking at
McGregor and letting the match burn out in his fingers. "They can have
motherhood pensions and room to work out their own problem in the
world or anything else that they really want. They can stand up face
to face with men. They don't want to. They want to enslave us with
their faces and their bodies. They want to carry on the old, old weary
fight." He tapped McGregor on the arm. "If a few of us--wanting with
all our might to get something done--beat them at their own game,
don't we deserve the victory?" he asked.

"But sometimes I think I would like a woman to live with, you know,
just to sit and talk with me," said McGregor.

The barber laughed. Puffing at his pipe he walked down the street. "To
be sure! To be sure!" he said. "I would. Any man would. I like to sit
in the room for a spell in the evening talking to you but I would hate
to give up violin making and be bound all my life to serve you and
your purposes just the same."

In the hallway of their own house the barber spoke to McGregor as he
looked down the hallway to where the door of the black eyed girl's
room had just crept open. "You let women alone," he said; "when you
feel you can't stay away from them any longer you come and talk it
over with me."

McGregor nodded and went along the hallway to his own room. In the
darkness he stood by the window and looked down into the court. The
feeling of hidden power, the ability to rise above the mess into which
modern life had sunk that had come to him in the park, returned and he
walked nervously about. When finally he sat down upon a chair and
leaning forward put his head in his hands he felt like one who has
started on a long journey through a strange and dangerous country and
who has unexpectedly come upon a friend going the same way.




CHAPTER IV


The people of Chicago go home from their work at evening--drifting
they go in droves, hurrying along. It is a startling thing to look
closely at them. The people have bad mouths. Their mouths are slack
and the jaws do not hang right. The mouths are like the shoes they
wear. The shoes have become run down at the corners from too much
pounding on the hard pavements and the mouths have become crooked from
too much weariness of soul.

Something is wrong with modern American life and we Americans do not
want to look at it. We much prefer to call ourselves a great people
and let it go at that.

It is evening and the people of Chicago go home from work. Clatter,
clatter, clatter, go the heels on the hard pavements, jaws wag, the
wind blows and dirt drifts and sifts through the masses of the people.
Every one has dirty ears. The stench in the street cars is horrible.
The antiquated bridges over the rivers are packed with people. The
suburban trains going away south and west are cheaply constructed and
dangerous. A people calling itself great and living in a city also
called great go to their houses a mere disorderly mass of humans
cheaply equipped. Everything is cheap. When the people get home to
their houses they sit on cheap chairs before cheap tables and eat
cheap food. They have given their lives for cheap things. The poorest
peasant of one of the old countries is surrounded by more beauty. His
very equipment for living has more solidity.

The modern man is satisfied with what is cheap and unlovely because he
expects to rise in the world. He has given his life to that dreary
dream and he is teaching his children to follow the same dream.
McGregor was touched by it. Being confused by the matter of sex he had
listened to the advice of the barber and meant to settle things in the
cheap way. One evening a month after the talk in the park he hurried
along Lake Street on the West Side with that end in view. It was near
eight o'clock and growing dark and McGregor should have been at the
night school. Instead he walked along the street looking at the ill-
kept frame houses. A fever burned in his blood. An impulse, for the
moment stronger than the impulse that kept him at work over books
night after night there in the big disorderly city and as yet stronger
than any new impulse toward a vigorous compelling march through life,
had hold of him. His eyes stared into the windows. He hurried along
filled with a lust that stultified his brain and will. A woman sitting
at the window of a little frame house smiled and beckoned to him.

McGregor walked along the path leading to the little frame house. The
path ran through a squalid yard. It was a foul place like the court
under his window behind the house in Wycliff Place. Here also
discoloured papers worried by the wind ran about in crazy circles.
McGregor's heart pounded and his mouth felt dry and unpleasant. He
wondered what he should say and how he should say it when he came into
the presence of the woman. He wished there were some one to be hit
with his fist. He didn't want to make love, he wanted relief. He would
have much preferred a fight.

The veins in McGregor's neck began to swell and as he stood in the
darkness before the door of the house he swore. He stared up and down
the street but the sky, the sight of which might have helped him, was
hidden from view by the structure of an elevated railroad. Pushing
open the door of the house he stepped in. In the dim light he could
see nothing but a form sprang out of the darkness and a pair of
powerful arms pinned his hands to his sides. McGregor looked quickly
about A man huge as himself held him tightly against the door. He had
one glass eye and a stubby black beard and in the half light looked
sinister and dangerous. The hand of the woman who had beckoned to him
from the window fumbled in McGregor's pockets and came out clutching a
little roll of money. Her face, set now and ugly like the man's,
looked up at him from under the arms of her ally.

In a moment McGregor's heart stopped pounding and the dry unpleasant
taste went out of his mouth. He felt relieved and glad at this sudden
turn to the affair.

With a quick upward snap of his knees into the stomach of the man who
had held him McGregor freed himself. A swinging blow to the neck sent
his assailant groaning to the floor. McGregor sprang across the room.
In the corner by the bed he caught the woman. Clutching her by the
hair he whirled her about. "Hand over that money," he said fiercely.

The woman put up her hands and plead with him. The grip of his hands
in her hair brought the tears to her eyes. She thrust the roll of
bills into his hands and waited, trembling, thinking he intended to
kill her.

A new feeling swept over McGregor. The thought of having come into the
house at the invitation of this woman was revolting to him. He
wondered how he could have been such a beast. As he stood in the dim
light thinking of this and looking at the woman he became lost in
thought and wondered why the idea given him by the barber, that had
seemed so clear and sensible, now seemed so foolish. His eyes stared
at the woman as his mind returned to the black-bearded barber talking
on the park bench and he was seized with a blind fury, a fury not
directed at the people in the foul little room but at himself and his
own blindness. Again a great hatred of the disorder of life took hold
of him and as though all of the disorderly people of the world were
personified in her he swore and shook the woman as a dog might have
shaken a foul rag.

"Sneak. Dodger. Mussy fool," he muttered, thinking of himself as a
giant attacked by some nauseous beast. The woman screamed with terror.
Seeing the look on her assailant's face and mistaking the meaning of
his words she trembled and thought again of death. Reaching under the
pillow on the bed she got another roll of bills and thrust that also
into McGregor's hands. "Please go," she plead. "We were mistaken. We
thought you were some one else."

McGregor strode to the door past the man on the floor who groaned and
rolled about. He walked around the corner to Madison Street and
boarded a car for the night school. Sitting in the car he counted the
money in the roll thrust into his hand by the kneeling woman and
laughed so that the people in the car looked at him in amazement.
"Turner has spent eleven dollars among them in two years and I have
got twenty-seven dollars in one night," he thought. He jumped off the
car and walked along under the street 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 ever intended to understand us."

Jumping out of the hole he strode over the crest of the hill and began
the descent toward the town. It was late afternoon and the sun had
gone down behind clouds. "I wonder if I understand myself, if any one
understands," he thought as he went swiftly along with the tools
clanking on his shoulder.

McGregor did not want to go back to the town and to the dead woman in
the little room. He thought of the miners' wives, attendants to the
dead, who would sit with crossed hands looking at him and turned out
of the road to sit on the fallen log where once on a Sunday afternoon
he had sat with the black-haired boy who worked in the poolroom and
where the daughter of the undertaker had come to sit beside him.

And then up the long hill came the woman herself. As she drew near he
recognised her tall figure and for some reason a lump came into his
throat She had seen him depart from the town with the pick and shovel
on his shoulder and after waiting what she thought an interval long
enough to still the tongues of gossip had followed. "I wanted to talk
with you," she said, climbing over logs and coming to sit beside him.

For a long time the man and woman sat in silence and stared at the
town in the valley below. McGregor thought she had grown more pale
than ever and looked at her sharply. His mind, more accustomed to look
critically at women than had been the mind of the boy who had once sat
talking to her on the same log, began to inventory her body. "She is
already becoming stooped," he thought. "I would not want to make love
to her now."

Along the log toward him moved the undertaker's daughter and with a
swift impulse toward boldness slipped a thin hand into his. She began
to talk of the dead woman lying in the upstairs room in the town. "We
have been friends since you went away," she explained. "She liked to
talk of you and I liked that too."

Made bold by her own boldness the woman hurried on. "I do not want you
to misunderstand me," she said. "I know I can't get you. I'm not
thinking of that."

She began to talk of her own affairs and of the dreariness of life
with her father but McGregor's mind could not centre itself on her
talk. When they started down the hill he had the impulse to take her
in his arms and carry her as Cracked McGregor had once carried him but
was so embarrassed that he did not offer to help her. He thought that
for the first time some one from his native town had come close to him
and he watched her stooped figure with an odd new feeling of
tenderness. "I won't be alive long, maybe not a year. I've got the
consumption," she whispered softly as he left her at the entrance to
the hallway leading up to her home, and McGregor was so stirred by her
words that he turned back and spent another hour wandering alone on
the hillside before he went to see the body of his mother.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the room above the bakery McGregor sat at an open window and looked
down into the dimly lighted street. In a corner of the room lay his
mother in a coffin and two miners' wives sat in the darkness behind
him. All were silent and embarrassed.

McGregor leaned out of the window and watched a group of miners who
gathered at a corner. He thought of the undertaker's daughter, now
nearing death, and wondered why she had suddenly come so close to him.
"It is not because she is a woman, I know that," he told himself and
tried to dismiss the matter from his mind by watching the people in
the street below.

In the mining town a meeting was being held. A box lay at the edge of
the sidewalk and upon it climbed that same young Hartnet who had once
talked to McGregor and who made his living by gathering birds' eggs
and trapping squirrels in the hills. He was frightened and talked
rapidly. Presently he introduced a large man with a flat nose who,
when he had in turn climbed upon the box, began to tell stories and
anecdotes designed to make the miners laugh.

McGregor listened. He wished the undertaker's daughter were there to
sit in the darkened room beside him. He thought he would like to tell
her of his life in the city and of how disorganised and ineffective
all modern life seemed to him. Sadness invaded his mind and he thought
of his dead mother and of how this other woman would presently die.
"It's just as well. Perhaps there is no other way, no orderly march
toward an orderly end. Perhaps one has to die and return to nature to
achieve that," he whispered to himself.

In the street below the man upon the box, who was a travelling
socialist orator, began to talk of the coming social revolution. As he
talked it seemed to McGregor that his jaw had become loose from much
wagging and that his whole body was loosely put together and without
force. The speaker danced up and down on the box and his arms flapped
about and these also seemed loose, not a part of the body.

"Vote with us and the thing is done," he shouted. "Are you going to
let a few men run things forever? Here you live like beasts paying
tribute to your masters. Arouse yourselves. Join us in the struggle.
You yourselves can be masters if you will only think so."

"You will have to do something more than think," roared McGregor, as
he leaned far out at the window. Again as always when he had heard men
saying words he was blind with anger. Sharply he remembered the walks
he had sometimes taken at night in the city streets and the air of
disorderly ineffectiveness all about him. And here in the mining town
it was the same. On every side of him appeared blank empty faces and
loose badly knit bodies.

"Mankind should be like a great fist ready to smash and to strike. It
should be ready to knock down what stands in its way," he cried,
astonishing the crowd in the street and frightening into something
like hysterics the two women who sat with him beside the dead woman in
the darkened room.




CHAPTER III


The funeral of Nance McGregor was an event in Coal Creek. In the minds
of the miners she stood for something. Fearing and hating the husband
and the tall big-fisted son they had yet a tenderness for the mother
and wife. "She lost her money handing us out bread," they said as they
pounded on the bar in the saloon. Word ran about among them and they
returned again and again to the subject. The fact that she had lost
her man twice--once in the mine when the timber fell and clouded his
brain, and then later when his body lay black and distorted near the
door to the McCrary cut after the dreadful time of the fire in the
mine--was perhaps forgotten but the fact that she had once kept a
store and that she had lost her money serving them was not forgotten.

On the day of the funeral the miners came up out of the mine and stood
in groups in the open street and in the vacant bake shop. The men of
the night shift had their faces washed and had put white paper collars
about their necks. The man who owned the saloon locked the front door
and putting the keys into his pocket stood on the side-walk looking
silently at the windows of Nance McGregor's rooms. Out along the
runway from the mines came other miners--men of the day shift. Setting
their dinner pails on the stone along the front of the saloon and
crossing the railroad they kneeled and washed their blackened faces in
the red stream that flowed at the foot of the embankment The voice of
the preacher, a slender wasp-like young man with black hair and dark
shadows under his eyes, floated out to the listening men. A train of
loaded coke cars rumbled past along the back of the stores.

McGregor sat at the head of the coffin dressed in a new black suit. He
stared at the wall back of the head of the preacher, not hearing,
thinking his own thoughts.

Back of McGregor sat the undertaker's pale daughter. She leaned
forward until she touched the back of the chair in front and sat with
her face buried in a white handkerchief. Her weeping cut across the
voice of the preacher in the closely crowded little room filled with
miners' wives and in the midst of his prayer for the dead she was
taken with a violent fit of coughing and had to get up and hurry out
of the room.

After the services in the rooms above the bake shop a procession
formed on Main Street. Like awkward boys the miners fell into groups
and walked along behind the black hearse and the carriage in which sat
the dead woman's son with the minister. The men kept looking at each
other and smiling sheepishly. There had been no arrangement to follow
the body to its grave and when they thought of the son and the
attitude he had always maintained toward them they wondered whether or
not he wanted them to follow.

And McGregor was unconscious of all this. He sat in the carriage
beside the minister and with unseeing eyes stared over the heads of
the horses. He was thinking of his life in the city and of what he
should do there in the future, of Edith Carson, sitting in the cheap
dance hall and of the evenings he had spent with her, of the barber on
the park bench talking of women and of his life with his mother when
he was a boy in the mining town.

As the carriage climbed slowly up the hill followed by the miners
McGregor began to love his mother. For the first time he realised that
her life was full of meaning and that in her woman's way she had been
quite as heroic in her years of patient toil as had been her man
Cracked McGregor when he ran to his death in the burning mine.
McGregor's hands began to tremble and his shoulders straightened. He
became conscious of the men, the dumb blackened children of toil
dragging their weary legs up the hill.

For what? McGregor stood up in the carriage and turning about looked
at the men. Then he fell upon his knees on the carriage seat and
watched them eagerly, his soul crying out to something he thought must
be hidden away among the black mass of them, something that was the
keynote of their lives, something for which he had not looked and in
which he had not believed.

McGregor, kneeling in the open carriage at the top of the hill and
watching the marching men slowly toiling upward, had of a sudden one
of those strange awakenings that are the reward of stoutness in stout
souls. A strong wind lifted the smoke from the coke ovens and blew it
up the face of the hill on the farther side of the valley and the wind
seemed to have lifted also some of the haze that had covered his eyes.
At the foot of the hill along the railroad he could see the little
stream, one of the blood red streams of the mine country, and the dull
red houses of the miners. The red of the coke ovens, the red sun
setting behind the hills to the west and last of all the red stream
flowing like a river of blood down through the valley made a scene
that burned itself into the brain of the miner's son. A lump came into
his throat and for a moment he tried vainly to get back his old
satisfying hate of the town and the miners but it would not come. Long
he looked down the hill to where the miners of the night shift marched
up the hill after the carriage and the slowly moving hearse. It seemed
to him that they like himself were marching up out of the smoke and
the little squalid houses away from the shores of the blood red river
into something new. What? McGregor shook his head slowly like an
animal in pain. He wanted something for himself, for all these men. It
seemed to him that he would gladly lie dead like Nance McGregor to
know the secret of that want.

And then as though in answer to the cry out of his heart the file of
marching men fell into step. An instantaneous impulse seemed to run
through the ranks of stooped toiling figures. Perhaps they also
looking backward had caught the magnificence of the picture scrawled
across the landscape in black and red and had been moved by it so that
their shoulders straightened and the long subdued song of life began
to sing in their bodies. With a swing the marching men fell into step.
Into the mind of McGregor flashed a thought of another day when he had
stood upon this same hill with the half crazed man who stuffed birds
and sat upon a log by the roadside reading the Bible and how he had
hated these men because they did not march with orderly precision like
the soldiers who came to subdue them. In a flash he knew that he who
had hated the miners hated them no more. With Napoleonic insight he
read a lesson into the accident of the men's falling into step behind
his carriage. A big grim thought flashed into his brain. "Some day a
man will come who will swing all of the workers of the world into step
like that," he thought. "He will make them conquer, not one another
but the terrifying disorder of life. If their lives have been wrecked
by disorder it is not their fault. They have been betrayed by the
ambitions of their leaders, all men have betrayed them." McGregor
thought that his mind swept down over the men, that the impulses of
his mind like living things ran among them, crying to them, touching
them, caressing them. Love invaded his spirit and made his body
tingle. He thought of the workers in the Chicago warehouse and of the
millions of others workers who in that great city, in all cities,
everywhere, went at the end of the day shuffling off along the streets
to their houses carrying with them no song, no hope, nothing but a few
paltry dollars with which to buy food and keep the endless hurtful
scheme of things alive. "There is a curse on my country," he cried.
"Everyone has come here for gain, to grow rich, to achieve. Suppose
they should begin to want to live here. Suppose they should quit
thinking of gain, leaders and followers of leaders. They are children.
Suppose like children they should begin to play a bigger game. Suppose
they could just learn to march, nothing else. Suppose they should
begin to do with their bodies what their minds are not strong enough
to do--to just learn the one simple thing, to march, whenever two or
four or a thousand of them get together, to march."

McGregor's thoughts moved him so that he wanted to yell. Instead his
face grew stern and he tried to command himself. "No, wait," he
whispered. "Train yourself. Here is something to give point to your
life. Be patient and wait." Again his thoughts swept away, running
down to the advancing men. Tears came into his eyes. "Men have taught
them that big lesson only when they wanted to kill. This must be
different. Some one must teach them the big lesson just for their own
sakes, that they also may know. They must march fear and disorder and
purposelessness away. That must come first."

McGregor turned and compelled himself to sit quietly beside the
minister in the carriage. He became bitter against the leaders of men,
the figures in old history that had once loomed so big in his mind.

"They have half taught them the secret only to betray them," he
muttered. "The men of books and of brains have done the same. That
loose-jawed fellow in the street last night--there must be thousands
of such, talking until their jaws hang loose like worn-out gates.
Words mean nothing but when a man marches with a thousand other men
and is not doing it for the glory of some king, then it will mean
something. He will know then that he is a part of something real and
he will catch the rhythm of the mass and glory in the fact that he is
a part of the mass and that the mass has meaning. He will begin to
feel great and powerful." McGregor smiled grimly. "That is what the
great leaders of armies have known," he whispered. "And they have sold
men out. They have used that knowledge to subdue men, to make them
serve their own little ends."

McGregor continued to look back at the men and in an odd sort of way
to wonder at himself and the thought that had come to him. "It can be
done," he presently said aloud. "It will be done by some one,
sometime. Why not by me?"

They buried Nance McGregor in the deep hole dug by her son before the
log on the hillside. On the morning of his arrival he had secured
permission of the mining company who owned the land to make this the
burial place of the McGregors.

When the service over the grave was finished he looked about him at
the miners, standing uncovered along the hill and in the road leading
down into the valley, and felt that he should like to tell them what
was in his mind. He had an impulse to jump upon the log beside the
grave and in the presence of the green fields his father loved and
across the grave of Nance McGregor shout to them saying, "Your cause
shall be my cause. My brain and strength shall be yours. Your enemies
I shall smite with my naked fist." Instead he walked rapidly past them
and topping the hill went down toward the town into the gathering
night.

McGregor could not sleep on that last night he was ever to spend in
Coal Creek. When darkness came he went along the street and stood at
the foot of the stairs leading to the home of the undertaker's
daughter. The emotions that had swept over him during the afternoon
had subdued his spirit and he wanted to be with some one who would
also be subdued and quiet. When the woman did not come down the stairs
to stand in the hallway as she had done in his boyhood he went up and
knocked at her door. Together they went along Main Street and climbed
the hill.

The undertaker's daughter walked with difficulty and was compelled to
stop and sit upon a stone by the roadside. When she attempted to rise
McGregor gathered her into his arms and when she protested patted her
thin shoulder with his big hand and whispered to her. "Be quiet," he
said. "Do not talk about anything. Just be quiet."

The nights in the hills above mining towns are magnificent. The long
valleys, cut and slashed by the railroads and made ugly by the squalid
little houses of the miners are half lost in the soft blackness. Out
of the darkness sounds emerge. Coal cars creak and protest as they are
pushed along rails. Voices cry out. With a long reverberating rattle
one of the mine cars dumps its load down a metal chute into a car
standing on the railroad tracks. In the winter little fires are
started along the tracks by the workmen who are employed about the
tipple and on summer nights the moon comes out and touches with wild
beauty the banks of black smoke that drift upward from the long rows
of coke ovens.

With the sick woman in his arms McGregor sat in silence on the
hillside above Coal Creek and let new thoughts and new impulses play
with his spirit. The love for the figure of his mother that had come
to him during the afternoon returned and he took the woman of the mine
country into his arms and held her closely against his breast.

The struggling man in the hills of his own country, who was trying to
clear his soul of the hatred of men bred in him by the disorder of
life, lifted his head and pressed the body of the undertaker's
daughter hard against his own body. The woman, understanding his mood,
picked with her thin fingers at his coat and wished she might die
there in the darkness in the arms of the man she loved. When he became
conscious of her presence and relaxed the grip of his arms about her
shoulders she lay still and waited for him to forget again and again
to press her tightly and let her feel in her worn-out body his massive
strength and virility.

"It is a job. It is something big I can try to do," he whispered to
himself and in fancy saw the great disorderly city on the western
plains rocked by the swing and rhythm of men, aroused and awakening
with their bodies a song of new life.





BOOK IV



CHAPTER I


Chicago is a vast city and millions of people live within the limits
of its influence. It stands at the heart of America almost within
sound of the creaking green leaves of the corn in the vast corn fields
of the Mississippi Valley. It is inhabited by hordes of men of all
nations who have come across the seas or out of western corn--shipping
towns to make their fortunes. On all sides men are busy making
fortunes.

In little Polish villages the word has been whispered about, "In
America one gets much money," and adventurous souls have set forth
only to land at last, a little perplexed and disconcerted, in narrow
ill--smelling rooms in Halstead Street in Chicago.

In American villages the tale has been told. Here it has not been
whispered but shouted. Magazines and newspapers have done the job. The
word regarding the making of money runs over the land like a wind
among the corn. The young men listen and run away to Chicago. They
have vigour and youth but in them has been builded no dream no
tradition of devotion to anything but gain.

Chicago is one vast gulf of disorder. Here is the passion for gain,
the very spirit of the bourgeoise gone drunk with desire. The result
is something terrible. Chicago is leaderless, purposeless, slovenly,
down at the heels.

And back of Chicago lie the long corn fields that are not disorderly.
There is hope in the corn. Spring comes and the corn is green. It
shoots up out of the black land and stands up in orderly rows. The
corn grows and thinks of nothing but growth. Fruition comes to the
corn and it is cut down and disappears. Barns are filled to bursting
with the yellow fruit of the corn.

And Chicago has forgotten the lesson of the corn. All men have
forgotten. It has never been told to the young men who come out of the
corn fields to live in the city.

Once and once only in modern times the soul of America was stirred.
The Civil War swept like a purifying fire through the land. Men
marched together and knew the feel of shoulder to shoulder action.
Brown stout bearded figures returned after the war to the villages.
The beginning of a literature of strength and virility arose.

And then the time of sorrow and of stirring effort passed and
prosperity returned. Only the aged are now cemented together by the
sorrow of that time and there has been no new national sorrow.

It is a summer evening in America and the citizens sit in their houses
after the effort of the day. They talk of the children in school or of
the new difficulty of meeting the high prices of food stuff. In cities
the bands play in the parks. In villages the lights go out and one
hears the sound of hurrying horses on distant roads.

A thoughtful man walking in the streets of Chicago on such an evening
sees women in white shirt waists and men with cigars in their mouths
who sit on the porches of the houses. The man is from Ohio. He owns a
factory in one of the large industrial towns there and has come to the
city to sell his product. He is a man of the better sort, quiet,
efficient, kindly. In his own community every one respects him and he
respects himself. Now he walks and gives himself over to thoughts. He
passes a house set among trees where a man cuts grass by the streaming
light from a window. The song of the lawn mower stirs the walker. He
idles along the street and looks in through the windows at Prints upon
the walls. A white--clad woman sits playing on a piano. "Life is
good," he says, lighting a cigar; "it climbs on and up toward a kind
of universal fairness."

And then in the light from a street lamp the walker sees a man
staggering along the sidewalk, muttering and helping himself with his
hands upon a wall. The sight does not greatly disturb the pleasant
satisfying thoughts that stir in his mind. He has eaten a good dinner
at the hotel, he knows that drunken men are often but gay money-
spending dogs who to-morrow morning will settle down to their work
feeling secretly better for the night of wine and song.

My thoughtful man is an American with the disease of comfort and
prosperity in his blood. He strolls along and turns a corner. He is
satisfied with the cigar he smokes and, he decides, satisfied with the
age in which he lives. "Agitators may howl," he says, "but on the
whole life is good, and as for me I am going to spend my life
attending to the business in hand."

The walker has turned a corner into a side street. Two men emerge from
the door of a saloon and stand upon the sidewalk under a light. They
wave their arms up and down. Suddenly one of them springs forward and
with a quick forward thrust of his body and the flash of a clenched
fist in the lamp light knocks his companion into the gutter. Down the
street he sees rows of tall smoke-begrimed brick buildings hanging
black and ominous against the sky. At the end of a street a huge
mechanical apparatus lifts cars of coal and dumps them roaring and
rattling into the bowels of a ship that lies tied in the river.

The walker throws his cigar away and looks about. A man walks before
him in the silent street. He sees the man raise his fist to the sky
and notes with a shock the movement of the lips and the hugeness and
ugliness of the face in the lamplight.

Again he goes on, hurrying now, around another corner into a street
filled with pawn shops, clothing stores and the clamour of voices. In
his mind floats a picture. He sees two boys, clad in white rompers,
feeding clover to a tame rabbit in a suburban back lawn and wishes he
were at home in his own place. In his fancy the two sons are walking
under apple trees and laughing and tusseling for a great bundle of
newly pulled sweet smelling clover. The strange looking red man with
the huge face he has seen in the street is looking at the two children
over a garden wall. There is a threat in the look and the threat
alarms him. Into his mind comes the notion that the man who looks over
the wall wants to destroy the future of his children.

The night advances. Down a stairway beside a clothing store comes a
woman with gleaming white teeth who is clad in a black dress. She
makes a Peculiar little jerking movement with her head to the walker.
A patrol wagon with clanging bells rushes through the street, two blue
clad policemen sitting stiffly in the seat. A boy--he can't be above
six--runs along the street pushing soiled newspapers under the noses
of idlers on the corners, his shrill childish voice rises above the
din of the trolley cars and the clanging notes of the patrol wagon.

The walker throws his cigar into the gutter and climbing the steps of
a street car goes back to his hotel. His fine reflective mood is gone.
He half wishes that something lovely might come into American life but
the wish does not persist. He is only irritated and feels that a
pleasant evening has been in some way spoiled. He is wondering if he
will be successful in the business that brought him to the city. As he
turns out the light in his room and putting his head upon the pillow
listens to the noises of the city merged now into a quiet droning roar
he thinks of the brick factory on the banks of the river in Ohio and
as he falls into sleep the face of the red-haired man lowers at him
from the factory door.

       *       *       *       *       *

When McGregor returned to the city after the burial of his mother he
began at once to try to put his idea of the marching men into form.
For a long time he did not know how to begin. The idea was vague and
shadowy. It belonged to the nights in the hills of his own country and
seemed a little absurd when he tried to think of it in the daylight of
North State Street in Chicago.

McGregor felt that he had to prepare himself. He believed that he
could study books and learn much from men's ideas expressed in books
without being overwhelmed by their thoughts. He became a student and
quit the place in the apple-warehouse to the secret relief of the
little bright-eyed superintendent who had never been able to get
himself up to the point of raging at this big red fellow as he had
raged at the German before McGregor's time. The warehouse man felt
that during the meeting on the corner before the saloon on the day
McGregor began to work for him something had happened. The miner's son
had unmanned him. "A man ought to be boss in his own place," he
sometimes muttered to himself, as he walked in the passageways among
rows of piled apple barrels in the upper part of the warehouse
wondering why the presence of McGregor irritated him.

From six o'clock in the evening until two in the morning McGregor now
worked as night-cashier in a restaurant on South State Street below
Van Buren and from two until seven in the morning he slept in a room
whose windows looked down into Michigan Boulevard. On Thursday he was
free, his place being taken for the evening by the man who owned the
restaurant, a small excitable Irishman by the name of Tom O'Toole.

McGregor got his chance to become a student through the bank account
belonging to Edith Carson. The opportunity arose in this way. On a
summer evening after his return from Pennsylvania he sat with her in
the darkened store back of the closed screen door. McGregor was morose
and silent. On the evening before he had tried to talk to several men
at the warehouse about the Marching Men and they had not understood.
He blamed his inability with words and sat in the half darkness with
his face in his hands and looked up the street saying nothing and
thinking bitter thoughts.

The idea that had come to him made him half drunk with its
possibilities and he knew that he must not let it make him drunk. He
wanted to begin forcing men to do the simple thing full of meaning
rather than the disorganised ineffective things and he had an ever-
present inclination to arise, to stretch himself, to run into the
streets and with his great arms see if he could not sweep the people
before him, starting them on the long purposeful march that was to be
the beginning of the rebirth of the world and that was to fill with
meaning the lives of men. Then when he had walked the fever out of his
blood and had frightened the people in the streets by the grim look in
his face he tried to school himself to sit quietly waiting.

The woman sitting beside him in a low rocking chair began trying to
tell him of something that had been in her mind. Her heart jumped and
she talked slowly, pausing between sentences to conceal the trembling
of her voice. "Would it help you in what you want to do if you could
quit at the warehouse and spend your days in study?" she asked.

McGregor looked at her and nodded his head absent-mindedly. He thought
of the nights in his room when the hard heavy work of the day in the
warehouse seemed to have benumbed his brain.

"Besides the business here I have seventeen hundred dollars in the
savings bank," said Edith, turning aside to conceal the eager hopeful
look in her eyes. "I want to invest it. I do not want it lying there
doing nothing. I want you to take it and make a lawyer of yourself."

Edith sat rigid in her chair waiting for his answer. She felt that she
had put him to a test. In her mind was a new hope. "If he takes it he
will not be walking out at the door some night and never coming back."

McGregor tried to think. He had not tried to explain to her his new
notion of life and did not know how to begin.

"After all why not stick to my plan and be a lawyer?" he asked
himself. "That might open the door. I'll do that," he said aloud to
the woman. "Both you and mother have talked of it so I'll give it a
trial. Yes, I'll take the money."

Again he looked at her as she sat before him flushed and eager and was
touched by her devotion as he had been touched by the devotion of the
undertaker's daughter in Coal Creek. "I don't mind being under
obligations to you," he said; "I don't know any one else I would take
it from."

In the street later the troubled man walked about trying to make new
plans for the accomplishment of his purpose. He was annoyed by what he
thought to be the dulness of his own brain and he thrust his fist up
into the air to look at it in the lamplight. "I'll get ready to use
that intelligently," he thought; "a man wants trained brains backed up
by a big fist in the struggle I'm going into."

It was then that the man from Ohio walked past with his hands in his
pockets and attracted his attention. To McGregor's nostrils came the
odour of rich fragrant tobacco. He turned and stood staring at the
intruder on his thoughts. "That's what I am going to fight," he
growled; "the comfortable well-to-do acceptance of a disorderly world,
the smug men who see nothing wrong with a world like this. I would
like to frighten them so that they throw their cigars away and run
about like ants when you kick over ant hills in the field."




CHAPTER II


McGregor began to attend some classes at Chicago University and walked
about among the massive buildings, erected for the most part through
the bounty of one of his country's leading business men, wondering why
the great centre of learning seemed so little a part of the city. To
him the University seemed something entirely apart, not in tune with
its surrounding. It was like an expensive ornament worn on the soiled
hand of a street urchin. He did not stay there long.

One day he got into disfavour with the professor in one of the
classes. He sat in a room among other students, his mind busy with
thoughts of the future and of how he might get his movement of the
marching men under way. In a chair beside him sat a large girl with
blue eyes and hair like yellow wheat. She like McGregor was
unconscious of what was going on about her and sat with half-closed
eyes watching him. In the corners of her eyes lurked a gleam of
amusement. She drew sketches of his huge mouth and nose on a pad of
Paper.

At McGregor's left with his legs sprawled into the aisle sat a youth
who was thinking of the yellow-haired girl and planning a campaign
against her. His father was a manufacturer of berry boxes in a brick
building on the West Side and he wished he were in school in another
city so that it would not be necessary to live at home. All day he
thought of the evening meal and of the coming of his father, nervous
and tired, to quarrel with his mother about the management of the
servants. Now he was trying to evolve a plan for getting money from
his mother with which to enjoy a dinner at a downtown restaurant. With
delight he contemplated such an evening with a box of cigarettes on
the table and the yellow-haired girl sitting opposite him under red
lights. He was a typical American youth of the upper middle class and
was in the University only because he was in no hurry to begin his
life in the commercial world.

In front of McGregor sat another typical student, a pale nervous young
man who drummed with his fingers on the back of a book. He was very
serious about acquiring learning and when the professor paused in his
talk he threw up his hands and asked a question. When the professor
smiled he laughed loudly. He was like an instrument on which the
professor struck chords.

The professor, a short man with a bushy black beard, heavy shoulders
and large powerful eye-glasses, spoke in a shrill voice surcharged
with excitement.

"The world is full of unrest," he said; "men are struggling like
chicks in the shell. In the hinterland of every man's mind uneasy
thoughts stir. I call your attention to what is going on in the
Universities of Germany."

The professor paused and glared about. McGregor was so irritated by
what he took to be the wordiness of the man that he could not restrain
himself. He felt as he had felt when the socialist orator talked on
the streets of Coal Creek. With an oath he arose and kicked out his
foot to push his chair away. The pad of paper fell out of the large
girl's lap and scattered its leaves about the floor. A light burned in
McGregor's blue eyes. As he stood in the classroom before the startled
class his head, big and red, had something of nobility about it like
the head of a fine beast. His voice rumbled out of his throat and the
girl looked at him, her mouth standing open.

"We go from room to room hearing talk," began McGregor. "On the street
corners downtown in the evenings and in towns and villages men talk
and talk. Books are written, jaws wag. The jaws of men are loose. They
wabble about--saying nothing."

McGregor's excitement grew. "If there is all this unrest why does it
not come to something?" he demanded. "Why do not you who have trained
brains strive to find the secret of order in the midst of this
disorder? Why is something not done?"

The professor ran up and down on the platform. "I do not know what you
mean," he cried nervously. McGregor turned slowly and stared at the
class. He tried to explain. "Why do not men lead their lives like
men?" he asked. "They must be taught to march, hundreds of thousands
of men. Do you not think so?"

McGregor's voice rose and his great fist was raised. "The world should
become a great camp," he cried. "The brains of the world should be at
the organisation of mankind. Everywhere there is disorder and men
chatter like monkeys in a cage. Why should some man not begin the
organisation of a new army? If there are men who do not understand
what is meant let them be knocked down."

The professor leaned forward and peered through his spectacles at
McGregor. "I understand your kind," he said, and his voice trembled.
"The class is dismissed. We deprecate violence here."

The professor hurried through a door and down a long hallway with the
class chattering at his heels. McGregor sat in his chair in the empty
class room and stared at the wall. As the professor hurried away he
muttered to himself: "What's getting in here? What's getting into our
schools?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Late on the following afternoon McGregor sat in his room thinking of
what had happened in the class. He had decided that he would not spend
any more time at the University but would devote himself entirely to
the study of law. Several young men came in.

Among the students at the University McGregor had seemed very old.
Secretly he was much admired and had often been the subject of talk.
Those who had now come to see him wanted him to join a Greek Letter
Fraternity. They sat about his room, on the window sill and on a trunk
by the wall. They smoked pipes and were boyishly eager and
enthusiastic. A glow shone in the cheeks of the spokesman--a clean-
looking youth with black curly hair and round pink--and--white cheeks,
the son of a Presbyterian minister from Iowa.

"You have been picked by our fellows to be one of us," said the
spokesman. "We want you to become an Alpha Beta Pi. It is a grand
fraternity with chapters in the best schools in the country. Let me
tell you."

He began reeling off a list of names of statesmen, college professors,
business men and well known athletes who belonged to the order.

McGregor sat by the wall looking at his guests and wondering what he
would say. He was a little amused and half hurt and felt like a man
who has had a Sunday School scholar stop him on the street to ask him
about the welfare of his soul. He thought of Edith Carson waiting for
him in her store on Monroe Street, of the angry miners standing in the
saloon in Coal Creek plotting to break into the restaurant while he
sat with the hammer in his hands waiting for battle, of old Mother
Misery walking at the heels of the soldiers' horses through the
streets of the mining village, and last of all of the terrible
certainty that these bright-eyed boys would be destroyed, swallowed up
by the huge commercial city in which they were to live.

"It means a lot to be one of us when a chap gets out into the world,"
the curly-haired youth said. "It helps you get on, get in with the
right people. You can't go on without men you know. You ought to get
in with the best fellows." He hesitated and looked at the floor. "I
don't mind telling you," he said with an outburst of frankness, "that
one of our stronger men--Whiteside, the mathematician--wanted us to
have you. He said you were worth while. He thought you ought to see us
and get to know us and that we ought to see and get to know you."

McGregor got up and took his hat from a nail on the wall. He felt the
utter futility of trying to express what was in his mind and walked
down the stairs to the street with the file of boys following in
embarrassed silence and stumbling in the darkness of the hallway at
his heels. At the street door he stopped and faced them, struggling to
put his thoughts into words.

"I can't do what you ask," he said. "I like you and like your asking
me to come in with you, but I'm going to quit the University." His
voice softened. "I would like to have you for friends," he added. "You
say a man needs to know people after awhile. Well, I would like to
know you while you are what you are now. I don't want to know you
after you become what you will become."

McGregor turned and ran down the remaining steps to the stone sidewalk
and went rapidly up the street. A stern hard look was in his face and
he knew he would spend a silent night thinking of what had happened.
"I hate hitting boys," he thought as he hurried away to his evening's
work at the restaurant.




CHAPTER III


When McGregor was admitted to the bar and ready to take his place
amo