As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish. Sam had a feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton. Like Mike, he lifted up his voice in the night. “Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man, and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt and destroy?” CHAPTER VI One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out of his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia, looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his bill at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely abandoned the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about the country and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in villages, and had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his income. He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood. The spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain spring mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in his experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when the call of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind, filling him with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain, yet at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was, after all, a man of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water Street and LaSalle Street had all left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket into a corner of the room in the West Virginia hotel, he returned to the haunts of his kind. In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and into the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named Jackson. Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again the quiet elegance of the surroundings. “Hello, Moneymaker,” said Jackson, heartily. “Heard you had gone to a nunnery.” Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson’s eyes open with astonishment. “You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man’s spending month after month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this,” he observed. Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.