The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible. It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent, so completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose. “And yet,” thought Sam, “he has found strength to whip me, the man of ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight I put upon the little play world in which he had been king.” In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed beard sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead, and into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance of a thought he had got from a book of Janet’s or from some talk he had heard, perhaps at his own dinner table. “It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying dead.” At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that issued from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam, hurrying and seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to the old commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his forces to withstand an attack. “I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth,” he said. Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction from the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed feet on the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon his body and subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind, chilled by the winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun. In the spring he swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the cattle grazing in the fields and the white clouds floating across the sky, and constantly his legs became harder and his body more flat and sinewy. Once he slept for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a woods and in the morning was awakened by a farmer’s dog licking his face.