In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the farmer’s widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In the store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose--the same John Telfer had watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging cane and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer had not got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad station and make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the loss of that opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and thinking of many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour to the speech he had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam, while the gift had touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind the essential solid goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he lost much of the bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood, had been able to make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his room in Chicago he had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting in and taking out flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of thanks. Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in the wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore’s shop as the blacksmith walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes. “What has happened to Sam--he has changed so much?” he asked, dropping a foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel. “Already the city has changed him,” he added regretfully. Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe. “He bites off his words,” continued Valmore; “he sits for an hour in the store and then goes away, and doesn’t come back to say good-bye when he leaves town. What has got into him?” Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust of the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had been hurled at him. “If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all right,” he exploded. “He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like it.” * * * * *