Three months later, when the logs, lopped of their branches, drifted
down the streams, the woodman, a human log lopped of his strength,
drifted to a great city. A change, the doctor said, might prolong
his life. The lumbermen made up a purse, and he started out, not very
definitely knowing his destination. He had a sister, much younger than
himself, who at the age of sixteen had married and gone, he believed, to
Chicago. That was years ago, but he had an idea that he might find her.
He was not troubled by his lack of resources: he did not believe that
any man would want for a meal unless he were "shiftless." He had always
been able to turn his hand to something.
He felt too ill from the jostling of the cars to notice much of anything
on the journey. The dizzy scenes whirling past made him faint, and he
was glad to lie with closed eyes. He imagined that his little sister in
her pink calico frock and bare feet (as he remembered her) would be
at the station to meet him. "Oh, Lu!" she would call from some
hiding-place, and he would go and find her.
The conductor stopped by Luther's seat and said that they were in the
city at last; but it seemed to the sick man as if they went miles after
that, with a multitude of twinkling lights on one side and a blank
darkness that they told him was the lake on the other. The conductor
again stopped by his seat.
"Well, my man," said he, "how are you feel-ing?"
Luther, the possessor of the toughest muscles in the gang, felt a sick
man's irritation at the tone of pity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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