him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing
and roaring about it. "Good morning, Mary," he would shout at the neat
German woman across the street. "Wait and you'll see me clean up about
here. I'm going at it right now. I'm going to brush the flies off the
fence first."

Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the
county.

Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and agricultural
implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard, gathering rust and
decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the lot were a half dozen
buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction engine, a mowing machine,
several farm wagons and other farm tools gone beyond naming. Every few
days he came home bringing a new prize. They overflowed the yard and crept
onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell any of this stuff. He had at
one time sixteen sets of harness all broken and unrepaired in the barn and
in a shed back of the house. A great flock of chickens and two or three
pigs wandered about among this junk and all the children of the
neighbourhood joined Freedom's four and ran howling and shouting over and
under the mass.

Freedom's wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house. She
had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally stood
at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at evening as he
stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both she and Freedom
treated him with great respect.

As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling. He was
a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very systematically