church-going dress. An evangelist was at work in Caxton and she had
decided to hear him. Sam shuddered. In the house it was an understood
thing that when Jane McPherson went to church her son went with her. There
was nothing said. Jane McPherson did all things without words, always
there was nothing said. Now she stood waiting in her black dress when her
son came in at the door and he hurriedly put on his best clothes and went
with her to the brick church.

Valmore, John Telfer, and Freedom Smith, who had taken upon themselves a
kind of common guardianship of the boy and with whom he spent evening
after evening at the back of Wildman's grocery, did not go to church. They
talked of religion and seemed singularly curious and interested in what
other men thought on the subject but they did not allow themselves to be
coaxed into a house of worship. To the boy, who had become a fourth member
of the evening gatherings at the back of the grocery store, they would not
talk of God, answering the direct questions he sometimes asked by changing
the subject. Once Telfer, the reader of poetry, answered the boy. "Sell
papers and fill your pockets with money but let your soul sleep," he said
sharply.

In the absence of the others Wildman talked more freely. He was a
spiritualist and tried to make Sam see the beauties of that faith. On long
summer afternoons the grocer and the boy spent hours driving through the
streets in a rattling old delivery wagon, the man striving earnestly to
make clear to the boy the shadowy ideas of God that were in his mind.

Although Windy McPherson had been the leader of a Bible class in his
youth, and had been a moving spirit at revival meetings during his early
days in Caxton, he no longer went to church and his wife did not ask him
to go. On Sunday mornings he lay abed. If there was work to be done about