their trays gleaming with
straw-colored cocktails, bright with fruit, pleasantly odorous with
freshly cooked meats and vegetables, on out into the street. The older
men continued to explain the road to success in kindly speech, their
tone and bearing at variance with the harsh gospel which they preached.
Dick listened eagerly, as eagerly as he had once listened to the gospel
of the evangelist at home. And as he shook hands and left them, he
walked up Broadway feeling a strange elation. His hand went to his
pocket for the cigar he usually smoked at this time, but, recalling
himself, he put it resolutely back. He would live meagerly to-day that
he might have a plethora in a golden to-morrow.

The soft May air blowing on his face recalled to him his southern home.
He had been poor down there, and yet not poor in comparison with his
neighbors. His father had owned hundreds of acres of miserable soil on
which his tenants had planted cotton and reaped scanty crops. He
recalled those tenants--sallow, ill-fed whites, shiftless blacks. Their
cabins reeked with dirt and were always cluttered with children. The men
were continually in debt, and while his father got from them all he
could, being accounted a hard master by his neighbors, Dick knew that
there was little enough that any one made. It had been a good thing when
his mother had sold some of the property. Had it not been for their
timber they would have known real poverty. He felt a sudden revulsion
for his old home, its sordidness, its slow piling of penny upon penny
with no greater outlook upon life than a new rifle or a Victrola in the
best room. There was no game worthy the name to be played down there,
only a monotonous round of stupid covetousness. Here the play was
difficult and the stakes big.

He held his head very high that afternoon, and fairly touched the clouds
when, before he went home, he was informed that he would again be sent
for a short time upon the road. His first trip had brought in good
results and he was to be entrusted with a better circuit and to receive
a slight increase in salary. He felt grateful for the advancement, and
then, recalling the advice of noontime, put this thought from him. If he
were getting more money it was because the firm thought he was worth it,
and that they must pay more or lose him. Therefore it was to his own
interest, while serving them, to be looking for advancement. In the
autumn he might seek a job with Mr. Talbert.