Windy McPherson\'s Son
CHAPTER I At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson, a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked cautiously, lifting his bare feet and putting them down with extreme deliberateness on the hot, dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried a bundle of newspapers. A long black cigar was in his hand. In front of the station he stopped; and Jerry Donlin, the baggage-man, seeing the cigar in his hand, laughed, and slowly drew the side of his face up into a laboured wink. "What is the game to-night, Sam?" he asked. Sam stepped to the baggage-room door, handed him the cigar, and began giving directions, pointing into the baggage-room, intent and business- like in the face of the Irishman's laughter. Then, turning, he walked
[15] Though, in Europe, this insidious appeal might lack
force, it is otherwise in India: whose millions doubt their
former birth no more than they doubt their own existence.
It is not long since a woman in Cutch burned herself with
her own dead son, because, she averred, he had been her
husband in her former birth.
And Aja looked at her again, and felt abashed, and half ashamed, he knew
not why. And he murmured to himself: She does not lie: for beautiful she
is indeed, and need not fear comparison with any woman in the world. And
it may be, she is partly right, and if I had met her yesterday, before
my heart was full, she would have had little difficulty in entering in
and capturing it, almost without resistance. And he stood looking at her
silently, uncertain what to say or do, and half inclined to pity her,
and half afraid of her and of himself, admiring her against his will,
and as it were confessing by his very silence the power of her appeal.
For notwithstanding the preoccupation of his heart, his youth and his
sex became as it were allies with her against his resolution, compelling
him to acknowledge the supremacy of the cunning god, and the spell of
feminine attraction incarnate in her form.
And she stood there before him, for a little, with beauty as it were
heightened by resentful reproach of the slighting of itself, and the
disregard of its tried affection. And then all at once she sank down
upon the ground, as if she were tired, and remained sitting among the
poppies, with her chin resting on her left knee, which she embraced with
CHAPTER I At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson, a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked cautiously, lifting his bare feet and putting them down with extreme deliberateness on the hot, dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried a bundle of newspapers. A long black cigar was in his hand. In front of the station he stopped; and Jerry Donlin, the baggage-man, seeing the cigar in his hand, laughed, and slowly drew the side of his face up into a laboured wink. "What is the game to-night, Sam?" he asked. Sam stepped to the baggage-room door, handed him the cigar, and began giving directions, pointing into the baggage-room, intent and business- like in the face of the Irishman's laughter. Then, turning, he walked