“On the night of my mother’s death,” ran the statement, “I sat in the kitchen of our house eating my supper when my father came in and began shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother who was asleep. I put my hand at his throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, and carried him around the house and threw him into the road. Then I ran to the house of Mary Underwood, who was once my schoolteacher, and told her what I had done. She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went to look for the body of my father, who was not dead after all. John McPherson knows this is true, if he can be made to tell the truth.” Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous woman with red cheeks, who set up type in the shop, did her own housework, and gathered most of the news and advertising for _The Argus_. “Ain’t that a slasher?” he asked, handing her the statement Sam had written. “Well, it ought to stop the mean things they are saying about Mary Underwood,” she snapped. Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and looking at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her much help with _The Argus_, was the best checker player in Caxton and had once been to a state tournament of experts in that sport, she added, “Poor Jane McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better father for him than that liar Windy. Choked him, eh? Well, if the men of this town had any spunk they would finish the job.” BOOK II CHAPTER I For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like Freedom Smith, bought the farmers’ products. On Sundays he sat in chairs before country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or, getting back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown streets and among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on the road. From time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with the men in Wildman’s, stealing away later for an evening with Mary Underwood.