Windy McPhersons Son | Page 6

of our Civil War he will
make much of our Windy McPhersons. He will see something big and
pathetic in their hungry search for auditors and in their endless war talk.
He will go filled with eager curiosity into little G. A. R. halls in the
villages and think of the men who coming there night after night, year
after year, told and re-told endlessly, monotonously, their story of
battle.
Let us hope that in his fervour for the old fellows he will not fail to
treat tenderly the families of those veteran talkers; the families that
with their breakfasts and their dinners, by the fire at evening, through
fast day and feast day, at weddings and at funerals got again and again
endlessly, everlastingly this flow of war words. Let him reflect that
peaceful men in corn-growing counties do not by choice sleep among
the dogs of war nor wash their linen in the blood of their country's foe.
Let him, in his sympathy with the talkers, remember with kindness the
heroism of the listeners.
* * * * *
On a summer day Sam McPherson sat on a box before Wildman's
grocery lost in thought. In his hand he held the little yellow account
book and in this he buried himself, striving to wipe from his
consciousness a scene being enacted before his eyes upon the street.
The realisation of the fact that his father was a confirmed liar and
braggart had for years cast a shadow over his days and the shadow had
been made blacker by the fact that in a land where the least fortunate
can laugh in the face of want he had more than once stood face to face
with poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation was
money in the bank and with all the ardour of his boy's heart he strove to
realise that answer. He wanted to be a money-maker and the totals at
the foot of the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones
that marked the progress he had already made. They told him that the
daily struggles with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton's streets on
bleak winter evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when
crowds filled the stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he
worked among them tirelessly and persistently were not without fruit.

Suddenly, above the murmur of men's voices on the street, his father's
voice rose loud and insistent. A block further down the street, leaning
against the door of Hunter's jewelry store, Windy talked at the top of
his lungs, pumping his arms up and down with the air of a man making
a stump speech.
"He is making a fool of himself," thought Sam, and returned to his
bankbook, striving in the contemplation of the totals at the foot of the
pages to shake off the dull anger that had begun to burn in his brain.
Glancing up again, he saw that Joe Wildman, son of the grocer and a
boy of his own age, had joined the group of men laughing and jeering
at Windy. The shadow on Sam's face grew heavier.
Sam had been at Joe Wildman's house; he knew the air of plenty and of
comfort that hung over it; the table piled high with meat and potatoes;
the group of children laughing and eating to the edge of gluttony; the
quiet, gentle father who amid the clamour and the noise did not raise
his voice, and the well-dressed, bustling, rosy-cheeked mother. As a
contrast to this scene he began to call up in his mind a picture of life in
his own home, getting a kind of perverted pleasure out of his
dissatisfaction with it. He saw the boasting, incompetent father telling
his endless tales of the Civil War and complaining of his wounds; the
tall, stoop-shouldered, silent mother with the deep lines in her long face,
everlastingly at work over her washtub among the soiled clothes; the
silent, hurriedly-eaten meals snatched from the kitchen table; and the
long winter days when ice formed upon his mother's skirts and Windy
idled about town while the little family subsisted upon bowls of
cornmeal mush everlastingly repeated.
Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half gone
in drink, and knew that he was boasting of his part in the Civil War.
"He is either doing that or telling of his aristocratic family or lying
about his birthplace," he thought resentfully, and unable any longer to
endure the sight of what seemed to him his own degradation, he got up
and went into the grocery where a group of Caxton citizens stood
talking to Wildman of a meeting to be held that morning at the town
hall.

Caxton was to