Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall over Geiger's drug store and
to a man the citizens of Caxton had turned out for the meeting. The
housepainter had come down off his ladder, the clerks were locking the
doors of the stores, men went along the streets in groups bound for the
hall. As they went they shouted to each other. "The old town has woke up,"
they called.

On a corner by Hunter's jewelry store Windy McPherson leaned against a
building and harangued the passing crowd.

"Let the old flag wave," he shouted excitedly, "let the men of Caxton show
the true blue and rally to the old standards."

"That's right, Windy, expostulate with them," shouted a wit, and a roar of
laughter drowned Windy's reply.

Sam McPherson also went to the meeting in the hall. He came out of the
grocery store with Wildman and went along the street looking at the
sidewalk and trying not to see the drunken man talking in front of the
jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up and
down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the town's
life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned. He
squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window ledge
where he could watch the men come in and find seats.

As Caxton's one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a
living and a kind of standing in the town's life. To be a newsboy or a
bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in
the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great men
and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day