"I will try," he stammered, "I will try to be a man. I will try to not
have anything to do with them--with women. I will work and make money--
and--and----"

Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the
ground.

"To Hell with women and girls," he burst forth as though throwing
something distasteful out of his throat.

In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits,
came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the grassy bank,
covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his sensitive
nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. His _sang froid_ had
returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the dogs he
cried joyfully, "We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy, and dog.
We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked into bed."




CHAPTER V


Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to him.
For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun come up
hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the streets in
the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from the north came
into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on the deserted