little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry
with his work that they might get back into the warm stale air of the
smoking car.

In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become a
man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some subtle
way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that to make money
and to have money would in some way make up for the old half-forgotten
humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and would set it on a
more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had provided, grew and
influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly he kept at his efforts to
get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of dollars. Jane McPherson had
herself a passion for frugality. In spite of Windy's incompetence and her
own growing ill health, she would not permit the family to go into debt,
and although, in the long hard winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush
until his mind revolted at the thought of a corn field, yet was the rent
of the little house paid on the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to
increase the totals in the yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the
death of his wife had lived in a loft above his shop and who was a
blacksmith of the old days, a workman first and a money maker later, did
not despise the thought of gain.

"It is money makes the mare go," he said with a kind of reverence as
banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of
Wildman's grocery.

Of John Telfer's attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain. The
man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.

"That's right," he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express