the men who direct and control the affairs in which they are concerned
because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He recalled with
pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped calling him a bright
boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.

At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these
things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old man
he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his mother's life
had been as barren as that of the man who depended for companionship upon
a dog and a thermometer.

"Indeed," he said to himself, pursuing the thought, "it has been worse.
She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the
remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the last
days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old man
watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house chasing
playthings." The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the wind
singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional drop of
rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with his mother.
During the last two or three years he had been trying to make things up to
her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the beginning of his
success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub and since the
beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after evening with her
instead of going to Wildman's to sit with the four friends and hear the
talk that went on among them. No more did he walk with Telfer or Mary
Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the bedside of the sick
woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an arm chair upon the
grass plot at the front of the house.

The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an