in him.
He has grit and energy.

He is going down into the markets where men pay the price for these
things that he has. He is going to fight men for that price which he
knows his things are worth.

Jeffrey's mother came out carrying a canvas satchel which she put on
the sled under Cassius Bascom's feet.

"Don't kick that, Catty," she warned, "Jeff's lunch is in it. And,
Jeff, don't you go and check it with the trunk." There was just a
little catch in the laugh with which she said this. She was
remembering a day more than twenty years before when she had started,
a bride, with big, lumbering, slow-witted, adoring Dan Whiting,
Jeffrey's father, on her wedding trip to Niagara Falls, with their
lunch in that same satchel. Dan Whiting checked the satchel through
from Lowville to Buffalo, and they had nearly starved on the way. It
was easy to forgive Dan Whiting his stupidity. But she never quite
forgave him for telling it on himself when they got back. It had been
a standing joke in the hills all these years.

She was just a typical mother of the hills. She loved her boy. She
needed him. She knew that she would never have him again. The boys do
not come back from the market place. She knew that she would cry for
him through many a lonely night, as she had cried all last night. But
she was not crying now.

Her deep grey eyes smiled steadily up into his as she stretched her
arms up around the neck of her tall boy and drew his head down to kiss
her.

He was not a dull boy. He was quick of heart. He knew his mother very
well. So he began with the old, old lie; the lie that we all tried to
tell when we were leaving.

"It'll only be a little while, Mother. You won't find the time
slipping by, and I'll be back."

She knew it was a lie. All the mothers of boys always knew it was a
lie. But she backed him up sturdily:

"Why, of course, Jeff. Don't worry about me. You'll be back in no
time."

Miss Letitia Bascom came hurrying out of the house with a dark, oblong
object in her hands.

"There now, Jeff Whiting, I know you just tried to forget this on
purpose. It's too late to put it in the trunk now; so you'll just have
to put it in your overcoat pocket."

Jeffrey groaned in spirit. It was a full-grown brick covered with
felt, a foot warmer. Aunt Letty had made him take one with him when he
went down to the Academy at Lowville last winter, and he and his brick
had furnished much of the winter's amusement there. The me