“I have been figuring that out,” Sam told her. “I know a woman in the East who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I should like to do something to help you. I might take them to her.”

“In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away,” she laughed, and took another drink from the bottle.

Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown attorney.

“Get a neighbour in here to witness this,” he said. “The woman will want things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and puts it on her.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “What’s the graft? Who gets stuck for the fares down east?”

Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.

“Sign here,” he said, putting the paper before her. “Here is your neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent.”

The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle lay down again on the couch.

“If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed,” she declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but at the moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take an advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in life, for purpose to come into his own life.

Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at the brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came out.

He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride of them.

At two o’clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of the boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York flyer—bound for Sue.

CHAPTER II

Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money, that he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does not mean much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy Americans than is commonly believed. Something has happened to him that has happened to the others also, to how many of the others? Men of courage, with strong bodies and quick brains, men who have come of a strong race, have taken up what they had thought to be the banner of life and carried it forward. Growing weary they have stopped in a road that climbs a long hill and have leaned the banner against a tree. Tight brains have loosened a little. Strong convictions have become weak. Old gods are dying.

“It is only when you are torn from your mooring and drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come near to you.”

The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with determination.

What is inscribed on it?

It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been unknown among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life and courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads had to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What in Europe has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the generations we must build now, in a lifetime.

In our father’s day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in our fathers and mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land. When the land was conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in our American souls the wolves still howl.

There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws of failure.

But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still there. It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New England roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it looked down at him from the stars.

Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept. Perhaps his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it began then.

The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was a house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam’s breast there was a feeling of something alive, growing.

Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night, coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children—a little inclined toward tears and homesickness—she was flustered and nervous.

Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate to the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe and Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come out at the front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little frightened. Her hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam thought her figure almost boyish in its slenderness.

With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question she did ask.

“Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?” she asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the children.

Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a help.

“They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep,” he said, as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with him three strange children were an everyday affair.

Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other and little Mary put her arms about Sam’s neck and hid her face on his shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue’s arms. “She will be your mother now,” he said defiantly, not looking at Sue.

The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and very nobly by Sue.

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