“No, he don’t,” Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in a machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake been the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that he looked upon Sam as an intruder. “John told me last summer when I was home that he intended to sell the blacks and buy mules,” he would add, looking at the youth challengingly. The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar and bustle of Chicago’s vast west side, it still turned with hungry heart toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for Jake, its mainstay, could be found in that paradise. Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey moustache, and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so that they stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn, worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night, going to bed at nine o’clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling, from room to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers, or sitting in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the habits formed in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home with his pay in his pocket, settled with the two sisters for the week’s living, sat down to dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then disappeared upon the troubled waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening he re-appeared, with empty pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and a noisy attempt at self-possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl into bed in preparation for another week of toil and respectability. The man had a certain Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new ladies met on his weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall. He once took Sam upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half around the room. Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of thirty-five who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and blessed with a remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical student in the front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired woman stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer from a wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little Southern wife.