The Forbidden Trail | Page 5

The way things are going now with me, I'll have a real place for the boy
when he finishes school. Dean Erskine's about persuaded me to let him
go to college. I've been dead set against a college engineer until I met
Erskine. He's made me feel as I'd have had less of an uphill pull if I'd
gone to engineering school, and he says I've made him feel as if he
never had enough shop practice."
Moore stopped to chuckle. Then he went on, after refilling his pipe,
"Yes, machinery is the greatest thing in the world. I took on five more
men to-day, Mamma. All union men. I've decided to give in on that
point and have a strictly union shop."
"I think you're right," said Mrs. Moore. "After all the union is the
working man's only protection."
Moore grunted. "I don't care so much about the right of it as I do the
expediency. And I haven't time to buck the union."

"You've changed a lot since you left off working with your hands,"
commented his wife, noncommittally.
"A man has to change his point of view when he becomes an employer
instead of an employee. Old girl, we're on our way up the ladder and
nothing but old Grim, himself, can stop us. And when I came in from
the old farm, when I was twelve years old, I had only my two hands
and the clothes I stood in."
"You've been wonderful!" murmured Mrs. Moore. "Do you know, Mr.
Wolf has done well too. His wife said he couldn't speak a word of
English when he came to this country--at just twelve, too, and now he's
manager of the Grand Dry Goods Company."
"He's a nice fellow with a mighty pretty wife."
It was Mrs. Moore's turn to grunt, which she did, in the manner of a
wifely sniff. And the two sat in silence, hands clasped in the lovely
summer night.
After all, Roger did not get beyond a first attempt at the railroad
building. He began the tunnel the next day, he and the two little Wolfs
digging vigorously until a hole as large as a bath tub was completed.
While resting from this toil, Roger conceived the idea of making a
wading pool, with the aid of the hose. Some vague lesson won from
previous experience made him ask permission of his mother and this
given, the three children spent an ecstatic, though muddy, day in the
improvised pond.
Roger's father suggested that evening that the pool be gradually
enlarged to make a swimming pool. He enlisted Mr. Wolf's aid for the
summer evenings and in a couple of weeks a very creditable pool, brick
and concrete lined, made a summer heaven of the back yard for the
little friends.
It was the pool that made this summer perhaps the most memorable one
of Roger's childhood. It was the one, anyway, to which in after years
his mind harked back with the most pleasure and with the greatest

frequency.
Even little Charley learned to swim. Roger never was to forget her
slender beauty, as she stood ready for her dive on the pool edge. This
was his last memory of the little girl, for the Prebles gave up farming
that fall and moved away. Somebody said that Mr. Preble drank up his
farm, which at the time seemed mere nonsense to Roger.
Roger's tenth summer was memorable too. But he ceased to think of
himself as a child then, because that was the summer his mother had
typhoid fever and all summer long he was practically his own man. His
father could give him no time, for there was a strike in the factory that
lasted during the six weeks that Mrs. Moore was the sickest. The night
that his mother was passing through her crisis, men threw stones in the
kitchen windows.
Mrs. Moore believed that she was going to die. One day when her mind
was clear, despite her deathly weakness, she made them leave the little
boy alone with her while she told him of her consuming anxiety over
his temper. And she talked to him too about a motherless young
manhood and how he must try to keep clean and straight. She made
him promise that if any of the facts of life puzzled him, he would go to
his father and not let naughty minded little boys tell him bad stories.
Then while Roger sobbed, she fell asleep and when she woke she was
definitely better. But Roger never felt like a child again. He felt that he
knew all that men knew about life, and death as well.
Mrs. Moore never was really strong again. Their keeping a servant
dated from that summer and so did a little