Sam wondered. She took a roll of bills from a pocket in her dress and gave it to him. “I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars,” she said. They stood looking at each other. She put out a hand and laid it on his arm. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with eager light looked into his. Her round breasts rose and fell. “Anywhere you say. I’ll be your servant if you ask it of me.” A wave of hot desire ran through Sam followed by a quick reaction. He thought of his months of weary seeking and his universal failure. “You are going back to town if I have to drive you there with stones,” he told her, and turning ran down the valley leaving her standing by the board fence, her head buried in her arms. CHAPTER V One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying or loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed to be a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women who met at the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away together. Sam found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings. In the year since he had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had grown more and more reflective. Little things--a smile on the lips of an ill-clad old man mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the flutter of a child’s hand from the doorway of a farmhouse--had furnished him food for hours of thought. Now he watched with interest the little incidents; the nods, the hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances around of the men and women who met for a moment at the corner. On the sidewalk near his doorway several middle-aged men, evidently from a large hotel around the corner, were eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry, furtive eyes the women in the crowd. A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. “Waiting for some one?” she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with the harried, uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the middle-aged men upon the sidewalk. “What are you doing here with your husband at work?” he ventured. She looked startled and then laughed. “Why don’t you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?” she demanded, adding, “I don’t know who you are, but whoever you are I want to tell you that I’ve quit my husband.” “Why?” asked Sam. She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely. “I guess you’re bluffing,” she said. “I don’t believe you know Alf at all. And I’m glad you don’t. I’ve quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just the same, if he saw me out here hustling.” Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered, “Hello, Sport!”