The threshing outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe, who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the men all day, drove about the country half the night making deals with farmers for other days of threshing. Sam thought that he looked constantly on the point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one of the men, who had been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that at the end of the season their employer did not have enough money left from his season of work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines and that he continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them. “One has to keep going,” said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him on the matter. When told to keep Sam’s wage until the end of the season he looked relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried and said that he had no money. “I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a little time,” he said. Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him from the shadows at the back of the barn. “Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one else?” he asked. Joe looked indignant. “A man wants independence,” he said. When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a stream, and tearing up Joe’s note watched the torn pieces of it float away upon the brown water. CHAPTER III Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The days on which something happened or on which something outside himself interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in a kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get at people who came into his way and to discover something of their way of life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed, staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the sidewalks of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an idea came into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once the practicability of living by following the idea, and although the practice brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the difficulties of the problem he was striving to work out, it brought him many strange experiences.