Windy McPherson's Son

in Street and out along a country road. Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He had forgotten the purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The unexpected and

mething," he thought;

beyond the graveyard and the last of the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled on the tin roof

he was a boy and his mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the house singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did not hear, and in his bed upstairs Sam had l

graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the windows of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which he stood made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees through wh

ht, his mind fixed on the singing of his m

tin roof, the air was filled with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted her head and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her fine contralto voice rising a

thought of her

on the railing of the little porch

. The figure of the woman standing singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother singing on the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on, seeing pictures as he

on his wet, wet cloak," went

made her seem near and likeable as she ha

s wrong about h

tning cut the darkness, illuminating the spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud u

doing here? You had bett

am, lifting his head and lo

ng with her hand upon the knob

time coming to see me,

t drumming. Piles of books lay upon a table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the sh

ar the door looking abou

th quick curiosity, and began moving about the room picking up odds and ends of woman's clothing scattered

usly, and then briskly, "we shall have to be drying you out; y

t Sam became talkative. An

ht; "I have come to ask Mary Underwoo

she wore, falling away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by the kimono, wet and clinging to them. The sle

been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept streets and along the mud-c

cross the room and grasping her roughly by th

en, to be a money-maker, to drive about the country like Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen him driving at evening through the street to Freedom's house, going in and out of Wildman's, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim way she knew that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from the things of which she had dreamed and she had secre

ling of the boy came back to Sam, and he

t go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew tired of the school teachers, dru

ruct an old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer's, that had years before come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and Telfer had made of the ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central figure, a s

be the kind of man he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of the world and making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get expressed when he was a boy and her friend, coming

"I am going to quit the schools. It is not you

and. A light came into her eyes. Going to the door opening into a stairway leading to sleepin

g voice answered fro

hand gently on his shoulder, said, "It is your mother and you are o

ve just killed my father," he announced. "I choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in

room. She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam's presence, raised her skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the stocki

come over Sam. He felt he had accomplished something-something he had set out to accomplish. He again thought of his mother and dr

he Chicago company and of what I will

darkness she could see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and shouted as it rushed through the bare branc

at asleep in a chair before the ki

a chair beside his mother's bed, picking up her hand and

hair beside his mother's bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little stand beside the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a tall, aristocratic-looking woman with r

ting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands lying in her lap in imi

votion to one of the father's pretensions. "It is a fraud he has picked up some

had gone into a spasm of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the floor with her foot. Then she had ru

e emotions of the sister had seemed to him to

cident. "She likes believing in lies. She is like

at the door. With Telfer she went back through the streets to the front of Sam's house thinking of the terrible choked and disfigured man they should find there. She wen

own swinging the lantern and peering into gutters. The woman walked b

laughed. Taking her hand he led Mary wit

that old war horse! He was in at Wildman's grocery after nine o'clock to-night covered with mud and swearing he had been in a fig

. In the parlour they found Sam, his head upon the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand of Jane McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood