The wind moaned about him and somewhere far off he heard the ripping
groan of an overladen tree giving way under its paralysis of sleet. In
himself he felt something also breaking away from its old place. He
felt forces rending their bonds and straining for freedom, and it
almost seemed to his burning eyes that while he gazed toward that spot
hundreds of miles away which he had never seen, there slowly kindled in
the sky a pale and luminous aura, such as hangs over the spires and
shafts of a giant city. His fancy pictured the unsainted halo that
gleams above thronged and never-sleeping streets: streets that always
beckon. Vague echoes of sounds came toward him, warring in the teeth of
the wind; sounds of the many voices and the many clamors that merge into
one dull, insistent roar: the voice of the city.

So he stood there shivering and not realizing that the frost was
shrewdly biting him. His spirit was the spirit of a hatching eaglet
impatiently rapping at the shell which too slowly opens to give it
freedom.

"What I did to Slivers Martin," he told himself, "I can do to the rest
of them. There ain't much difference between doin' big things an' little
things, except that you've got to be where there are big things to do
an' you've got to _know_ you can do 'em."




Part II

THE BOOK OF LIFE