long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It was
extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could
remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her
youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy's mind.
She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of a thin-
lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a farm, and
of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved to buy
books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a school
teacher, and of her marriage to Windy--then John McPherson.

Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in the
town's life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man who
walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and who
taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.

When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him
eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should
have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.

"And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour and
unhappiness for me," the sick woman had told her son.

After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton where
he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the store into
the sheriff's hands and his wife into the position of town laundress.

In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted
across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy and
another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the state
giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs and had