"Шервуд Андерсен. Сын Винди МакФерсон (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

the robes of a judge, the felt hat of a statesman, or even with the night
stick of a village marshal life might have retained something of its
sweetness, but to have ended by becoming an obscure housepainter in a
village that lived by raising corn and by feeding that corn to red steers
--ugh!--the thought made him shudder. He looked with envy at the blue coat
and the brass buttons of the railroad agent; he tried vainly to get into
the Caxton Cornet Band; he got drunk to forget his humiliation and in the
end he fell to loud boasting and to the nursing of a belief within himself
that in truth not Lincoln nor Grant but he himself had thrown the winning
die in the great struggle. In his cups he said as much and the Caxton corn
grower, punching his neighbour in the ribs, shook with delight over the
statement.

When Sam was a twelve year old, barefooted boy upon the streets a kind of
backwash of the wave of glory that had swept over Windy McPherson in the
days of '61 lapped upon the shores of the Iowa village. That strange
manifestation called the A. P. A. movement brought the old soldier to a
position of prominence in the community. He founded a local branch of the
organisation; he marched at the head of a procession through the streets;
he stood on a corner and pointing a trembling forefinger to where the flag
on the schoolhouse waved beside the cross of Rome, shouted hoarsely, "See,
the cross rears itself above the flag! We shall end by being murdered in
our beds!"

But although some of the hard-headed, money-making men of Caxton joined
the movement started by the boasting old soldier and although for the
moment they vied with him in stealthy creepings through the streets to
secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands the movement
subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its leader more
desolate.

In the little house at the end of the street by the shores of Squirrel
Creek, Sam and his sister Kate regarded their father's warlike pretensions
with scorn. "The butter is low, father's army leg will ache to-night,"
they whispered to each other across the kitchen table.

Following her mother's example, Kate, a tall slender girl of sixteen and
already a bread winner with a clerkship in Winney's drygoods store,
remained silent under Windy's boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate them,
did not always succeed. There was now and then a rebellious muttering that
should have warned Windy. It had once burst into an open quarrel in which
the victor of a hundred battles withdrew defeated from the field. Windy,
half-drunk, had taken an old account book from a shelf in the kitchen, a
relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when he had first come to
Caxton, and had begun reading to the little family a list of names of men
who, he claimed, had been the cause of his ruin.

"There is Tom Newman, now," he exclaimed excitedly. "Owns a hundred acres
of good corn-growing land and won't pay for the harness on the backs of
his horses or for the ploughs in his barn. The receipt he has from me is