father of the family, had inherited it from a brother, a gold miner, a
forty-niner, a sport owning fast horses, who planned to breed race horses
on the Iowa land. Lem had come out of the back streets of an eastern city,
bringing his brood of tall, silent, savage boys to live upon the land and,
like the forty-niner, to be a sport. Thinking the wealth that had come to
him vast beyond spending, he had plunged into horse racing and gambling.
When, within two years, five hundred acres of the farm had to be sold to
pay gambling debts, and the wide acres lay covered with weeds, Lem became
alarmed, and settled down to hard work, the boys working all day in the
field and at long intervals coming into town at night to get into trouble.
Having no mother or sister, and knowing that no Caxton woman could be
hired to go upon the place, they did their own housework; and on rainy
days sat about the old farmhouse playing cards and fighting. On other days
they would stand around the bar in Art Sherman's saloon in Piety Hollow
drinking until they had lost their savage silence and had become loud and
quarrelsome, going from there upon the streets to seek trouble. Once,
going into Hayner's restaurant, they took stacks of plates from shelves
back of the counter and, standing in the doorway, threw them at people
passing in the street, the crash of the breaking crockery accompanying
their roaring laughter. When they had driven the people to cover they got
upon their horses and with wild shouts raced up and down Main Street
between the rows of tied horses until Hop Higgins, the town marshal,
appeared, when they rode off into the country awakening the farmers along
the darkened road as they fled, shouting and singing, toward home.

When the McCarthy boys got into trouble in Caxton, old Lem McCarthy drove
into town and got them out of it, paying for the damage done and going
about declaring the boys meant no harm. When told to keep them out of town
he shook his head and said he would try.