"She has fed me and now I will begin to feed her," he
told himself.
The five dollars came back. "Keep it. I don't want your money," the
mother wrote. "If you have money left after your expenses are paid
begin to fix yourself up. Better get a new pair of shoes or a hat.
Don't try to take care of me. I won't have it. I want you to look out
for yourself. Dress well and hold up your head, that's all I ask. In
the city clothes mean a good deal. In the long run it will mean more
to me to see you be a real man than to be a good son."
Sitting in her rooms over the vacant bake-shop in Coal Creek Nance
began to get new satisfaction out of the contemplation of herself as a
woman with a son in the city. In the evening she thought of him moving
along the crowded thoroughfares among men and women and her bent
little old figure straightened with pride. When a letter came telling
of his work in the night school her heart jumped and she wrote a long
letter filled with talk of Garfield and Grant and of Lincoln lying by
the burning pine knot reading his books. It seemed to her unbelievably
romantic that her son should some day be a lawyer and stand up in a
crowded court room speaking thoughts out of his brain to other men.
She thought that if this great red-haired boy, who at home had been so
unmanageable and so quick with his fists, was to end by being a man of
books and of brains then she and her man, Cracked McGregor, had not
lived in vain.
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