Will grew a little angry about something he couldn’t exactly understand. His father stopped in front of Jake Mann’s meat market. “You kids go along home. Tell Kate I am bringing a steak. I’ll be right on your heels,” he said. He would get the steak and then he would go into Alf Geiger’s saloon and get a good, stiff drink of whisky. There would be no one now to bother about smelling it on his breath when he got home later. Not that his wife had ever said anything when he wanted a drink—but you know how a man feels when there’s a woman in the house. “Why, hello, Bildad Smith—how’s the old game leg? Come on, have a little nip with me. Were you on Main Street last band meeting night and did you hear us do that new gallop? It’s a humdinger. Turkey White did that trombone solo simply grand.” Will and Fred had got beyond Main Street now, and Will took a small pipe with a curved stem out of his overcoat pocket and lighted it. “I’ll bet I could hang a ceiling without father there at all, if only some one would give me a chance,” he said. Now that his father was no longer present to embarrass him with his lack of dignity, he felt comfortable and happy. Also, it was something to be able to smoke a pipe without discomfiture. When mother was alive she was always kissing a fellow when he came home at night, and then one had to be mighty careful about smoking. Now it was different. One had become a man and one accepted manhood with its responsibilities. “Don’t it make you sick at all?” Fred asked. “Huh, naw!” Will answered contemptuously. The new disaster to the family came late in August, just when the fall work was all ahead, and the prospects good too. A. P. Wrigley, the jeweler, had just built a big, new house and barn on a farm he had bought the year before. It was a mile out of town on the Turner pike. That would be a job to set the Appletons up for the winter. The house was to have three coats outside, with all the work inside, and the barn was to have two coats—and the two boys were to work with their father and were to have regular wages. And just to think of the work to be done inside that house made Tom Appleton’s mouth water. He talked of it all the time, and in the evenings liked to sit in a chair in the Appleton’s front yard, get some neighbor over, and then go on about it. How he slung house-painter’s lingo about! The doors and cupboards were to be grained in imitation of weathered oak, the front door was to be curly maple, and there was to be black walnut, too. Well, there wasn’t another painter in the town could imitate all the various kinds of wood as Tom could. Just show him the wood, or tell him—you didn’t have to show him anything. Name what you wanted—that was enough. To be sure a man had to have the right tools, but give him the tools and then just go off and leave everything to him. What the devil! When A. P. Wrigley gave him this new house to do, he showed he was a man who knew what he was doing.