Mrs. Moore believed that she was going to die. One day when her mind was
clear, despite her deathly weakness, she made them leave the little boy
alone with her while she told him of her consuming anxiety over his
temper. And she talked to him too about a motherless young manhood and
how he must try to keep clean and straight. She made him promise that if
any of the facts of life puzzled him, he would go to his father and not
let naughty minded little boys tell him bad stories. Then while Roger
sobbed, she fell asleep and when she woke she was definitely better. But
Roger never felt like a child again. He felt that he knew all that men
knew about life, and death as well.

Mrs. Moore never was really strong again. Their keeping a servant dated
from that summer and so did a little electric car, the first one in
Eagle's Wing. Yes, perhaps this was as memorable a summer as Roger's
seventh. Yet it lacked the magic and the beauty that made imperishable
the joy of the swimming pool summer.

And then came his fourteenth summer.

Roger was a strapping big lad at fourteen. He was as tall as his father,
who was five feet ten, and was still growing rapidly. He was thin but
hard-muscled, with good shoulders that were not as awkward as they
looked. After a year of pleading, his father agreed to let him spend his
vacation in the plow factory; and Roger in overalls, his dinner pail in
hand, was his father's pride and his mother's despair. She did like to
see her only child well dressed.

Ernest's father wanted Ernie to come into the store that summer. But
after his years under Roger's tutelage, Ernie was all for mechanics, so
he too acquired overalls and a dinner pail and went into the plow
factory. Elschen was broken hearted because there was no way in which
she also could become a wage earner.

The university lay at the south end of the little town. The plow
factory, now employing two hundred men, lay at the north end. Jim Hale,
the chief engineer, blew the whistle every morning at seven o'clock and
again at five o'clock. There was an hour off for dinner pails at twelve.
A nine hour day, a few years ago, was not considered a long day, that
is, not by employers of labor. That the employees were beginning to feel
differently, Roger was to learn that summer in a manner that was to
shape his whole life.

The workmen were of a type little known now in our big industrial
centers. Without exception they were North Europeans: German