Maybe life in town wasn't so perfect after all. Perhaps after he had taken a crack at this trailer job.... But no. He would never go back to the farm. Not even if he could be thrashing boss every year with twenty men under him. He would stick it out greasing trailers until the day he died. Bud Spillman or anyone else couldn't whip Peter Brailsford. He stopped before the Bentley Brothers' Hardware store, irrepressibly drawn by the beautiful stag and pearl-handled jack-knives in the window, and remembered the jack-knife he had stolen from a boy at country school and how he had known that God had seen him steal the knife, and how for days he went in constant dread that God would strike him dead for his sin. He still had an overwhelming desire for pearl-handled jack-knives. He remembered how he had thought that eternal damnation was not too great a price to pay for that shining knife, which was as cool and smooth as slippery elm between his fingers. Looking in at the hardware store window cluttered with milk pails, muskrat traps, fish poles, pitchforks and spades he suddenly caught sight of his own offensive image in the glass: ears that stuck out on either side of his head like sails, a thatch of dark, unruly curls which would never stay combed, big brown calf's eyes which might have graced a Jersey heifer, and pouting lips. He wondered how anyone could look so ugly. "What you need," he said irrelevantly, "is a good swift kick in the pants." Undoubtedly, with a face like that, he was getting more than he deserved from a most generous world. He began to count his blessings, unconvinced but hopeful. He was away from the farm at last, had freedom, a job, and a room in town. His third weekly paycheck of twenty-two dollars and fifty cents was in his pocket. He had a girl who some day might give him a kiss, and a dapper little employer, Mike O'Casey, whom he admired beyond all power of expression. Still he was miserable. The very eminence of O'Casey was deflating to Peter. How could a country lout with big feet and clumsy red hands ever hope to reach such pinnacles of success? The president of O'Casey Trailers was not only a man of the world, a fine mechanic, an inventor of proven genius, a baritone soloist, and a buck and wing dancer. He was also the most popular and best dressed man in town. Peter bet that nobody in New York's Four Hundred was better looking or a classier dresser. The boy leaned against the hitching rail and sighed as his hero went roaring past in his big red car with cutout open. Peter wished that Mr. O'Casey would turn and nod, but no such miracle occurred.