“I will do my part here,” shouted McGregor. “I will find the way.” His body shook and his voice roared along the footpath of the bridge. Men stopped to look back at the big shouting figure. Two women walking past screamed and ran into the roadway. McGregor walked rapidly away toward his own room and his books. He did not know how he would be able to use the new impulse that had come to him but as he swung along through dark streets and past rows of dark buildings he thought again of the great machine running crazily and without purpose and was glad he was not a part of it. “I will keep myself to myself and be ready for what happens,” he said, burning with new courage. BOOK III CHAPTER I When McGregor had secured the place in the apple-warehouse and went home to the house in Wycliff Place with his first week's pay, twelve dollars, in his pocket he thought of his mother, Nance McGregor, working in the mine offices in the Pennsylvania town and folding a five dollar bill sent it to her in a letter. “I will begin to take care of her now,” he thought and with the rough sense of equity in such matters, common to labouring people, had no intention of giving himself airs. “She has fed me and now I will begin to feed her,” he told himself. The five dollars came back. “Keep it. I don't want your money,” the mother wrote. “If you have money left after your expenses are paid begin to fix yourself up. Better get a new pair of shoes or a hat. Don't try to take care of me. I won't have it. I want you to look out for yourself. Dress well and hold up your head, that's all I ask. In the city clothes mean a good deal. In the long run it will mean more to me to see you be a real man than to be a good son.” Sitting in her rooms over the vacant bake-shop in Coal Creek Nance began to get new satisfaction out of the contemplation of herself as a woman with a son in the city. In the evening she thought of him moving along the crowded thoroughfares among men and women and her bent little old figure straightened with pride. When a letter came telling of his work in the night school her heart jumped and she wrote a long letter filled with talk of Garfield and Grant and of Lincoln lying by the burning pine knot reading his books. It seemed to her unbelievably romantic that her son should some day be a lawyer and stand up in a crowded court room speaking thoughts out of his brain to other men. She thought that if this great red-haired boy, who at home had been so unmanageable and so quick with his fists, was to end by being a man of books and of brains then she and her man, Cracked McGregor, had not lived in vain. A sweet new sense of peace came to her. She forgot her own years of toil and gradually her mind went back to the silent boy sitting on the steps with her before her house in the year after her husband's death while she talked to him of the world, and thus she thought of him, a quiet eager boy, going about bravely there in the distant city.