Early in October Will Appleton sat in the smoking car of a day train that runs between Cleveland and Buffalo. His destination was Erie, Pennsylvania, and he had got on the passenger train at Ashtabula, Ohio. Just why his destination was Erie he couldn’t very easily have explained. He was going there anyway, going to get a job in a factory or on the docks there. Perhaps it was just a quirk of the mind that had made him decide upon Erie. It wasn’t as big as Cleveland or Buffalo or Toledo or Chicago, or any one of a lot of other cities to which he might have gone, looking for work. At Ashtabula he came into the car and slid into a seat beside a little old man. His own clothes were wet and wrinkled, and his hair, eyebrows and ears were black with coal dust. At the moment, there was in him a kind of bitter dislike of his native town, Bidwell. “Sakes alive, a man couldn’t get any work there—not in the winter.” After the accident to his father, and the spoiling of all the family plans, he had managed to find employment during September on the farms. He worked for a time with a threshing crew, and then got work cutting corn. It was all right. “A man made a dollar a day and board, and as he wore overalls all the time, he didn’t wear out no clothes. Still and all, the time when a fellow could make any money in Bidwell was past now, and the burns on his father’s body had gone pretty deep, and he might be laid up for months.” Will had just made up his mind one day, after he had tramped about all morning from farm to farm without finding work, and then he had gone home and told Kate. “Dang it all,” he hadn’t intended lighting out right away—had thought he would stay about for a week or two, maybe. Well, he would go up town in the evening, dressed up in his best clothes, and stand around. “Hello, Harry, what you going to do this winter? I thought I would run over to Erie, Pennsylvania. I got an offer in a factory over there. Well, so long—if I don’t see you again.” Kate hadn’t seemed to understand, had seemed in an almighty hurry about getting him off. It was a shame she couldn’t have a little more heart. Still, Kate was all right—worried a good deal no doubt. After their talk she had just said, “Yes, I think that’s best, you had better go,” and had gone to change the bandages on Tom’s legs and back. The father was sitting among pillows in a rocking chair in the front room.