He said he’d give us fifty dollars toward our moving if we’d settle at once.”

Her son looked at her startled.

“Fifty dollars!” he said with a puzzled look. “He must want it a lot to let go even that much! He must have a purchaser for it, or else he knows his game is crooked and he wants to get away with it quickly before he gets found out. You didn’t give him an answer, did you, Mother?”

“No, I told him I would have to talk it over with you. But he wants his answer before twelve o’clock tomorrow.”

“Well, I’ll look into it first thing in the morning, but, Mother, I think we’ll keep him guessing. If anybody wants to buy the house, we are going to do the selling, see? It’s worth more to us than to anybody else, and we have nine days yet to pay the demand.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said his mother with a sigh. “We might lose even the fifty dollars, you know.” But she turned away satisfied that she had given her son something else to think about besides the girl who sailed away from him.

Thurlow went to bed at once, but he did not go to sleep. Neither did he spend all the time thinking about beautiful Barbara Sherwood. Instead, he was racking his brain for ways and means to save as much from the wreckage of the family fortune as he possibly could, and about the middle of the night he arose, turned on his light, and searched through the newspaper he had tried to read on the train until he found a paragraph that he had scarcely noticed when he first read it but that had come back to him with strange significance as he lie thinking. He read it twice through.

“It has been definitely decided to build a new schoolhouse in the Seventeenth Ward. The present school is overcrowded, and the capacity of the new school will have to be doubled.”

His eyes had skimmed over the page as he read it and it had meant nothing to him, but now it suddenly took on new meaning. Their home was in the Seventeenth Ward, a sort of a suburb yet counted as in the city. Perhaps there was a way out of this maze of trouble after all!

Chapter 2

Thurlow went early the next morning to the president of the board of education and presented his suggestion that the site of the Reed home would make a central location for the new school that was proposed.

But he found to his dismay that while his suggestions were received with a degree of interest, they were put on file to be laid before the board at its regular meeting, which did not occur until five days later, too near to disaster to be counted upon. And though Thurlow urged haste and a special meeting to consider his proposition, with a ridiculously low price if the cash could be had within the requisite eight days, he found that nothing he could do or say would move that august body, the board of education, to come together before their regularly appointed time.

He went on his way sadly disappointed, yet he felt that this incident had given him an idea. There was to be a new post office in the near future. Why not try the government authorities? The Reed lot would be a splendid place. Not centrally located in the business part of the suburb yet near enough for business to grow that way. He would try.

He spent another busy day hunting up officials, gaining interviews, being sent from this one to that one, making longdistance telephone calls, and anxiously watching his small supply of cash dwindle thereby. The wasted day stretched into three at last before he gave up the post office idea, convinced that the closely woven meshes of politics were too much for his inexperience. Perhaps there might have been ways of accomplishing his aim if he had only known how and had a little more experience and influence and a little less pride. Mr. Sherwood would have known how to do it, would have had influence enough to bring it about. But Thurlow Reed felt a thrill of almost fierce satisfaction that Guerdon Sherwood was on the high seas, and that there was no way possible for even a morbid conscience to persuade him that perhaps after all for his mother’s sake he ought to consult the father of Barbara Sherwood.

He was on a suburban train, coming back from his last fruitless effort to persuade a political boss to take interest in buying the house for the new post office site. He was dog weary and discouraged. He had that same stinging sensation in his eyes and throat that he had experienced the time he had fumbled a ball and lost a game for his college, that first time he had been put on the varsity team. Of course he hadn’t been put off after all, but he had been covered with shame and humiliation and felt desperate at the time. He had wanted to hide. He had wanted to crawl away and never be seen again.

Just so he felt now, utterly beaten! He had perhaps even been wrong in preventing his mother from signing over the property at once and getting that fifty dollars. But he had been so sure that he could find a purchaser, so sure, even that morning when he had gone out, that he was on the right track and was going to win. As he settled back in the dusty plush seat and pulled his hat down over his smarting eyes, he had a feeling that the whole world was against him.

“Oh, God!” his heart cried out, “I’m up against it! I ought to be able to protect my family! They are all I’ve got, and I can’t do it.“

Thurlow Reed believed in God. He had always gone through the outward forms of prayer, though he had never seemed to be in any particular position of need before, either spiritual or physical.