d Sam Pickering. Sam had
been folding the printed papers, while Terry Stamper operated a machine
that left upon each the name of a subscriber, dropping them into a
clothes basket, which he later conveyed to the post office. Wilbur
enjoyed this work, running the long roller across the forms after each
impression, spotting himself and his clothes with ink. After he had
learned some more he would be a printer's devil like Terry, and fetch
the beer and run the job press and do other interesting things. There
was a little thrill for him in knowing you could say devil in this
connection without having people think you were using a bad word.

But Dave's time had come. He "yearned over the skyline, where the
strange roads go down," though he put it more sharply to Sam Pickering
one late afternoon:

"Well, Sam, I feel itchy-footed."

"I knew it," said Sam. "When are you leaving?"

"No train out till the six-fifty-eight."

And Sam knew he would be meaning the six-fifty-eight of that same day.
He never meant the day after, or the day after that.

That evening Dave sauntered down to the depot, accompanied by his son.
There was no strained air of expectancy about him, and no tedious
management of bags. He might have been seeking merely the refreshment of
watching the six-fifty-eight come in and go out, as did a dozen or so of
the more leisured class of Newbern. When the train came he greeted the
conductor by his Christian name, and chatted with his son until it
started. Then he stepped casually aboard and surrendered himself to its
will. He had wanted suddenly to go somewhere on a train, and now he was
going. "Got to see a man in San Diego," he had told the boy. "I'll drop
back some of these days."

"Maybe you'll see the gypsies again," said Wilbur a bit wistfully.

But he was not cast down by his father's going; that was a thing that
happened or not, like bad weather. He had learned this about his father.
And pretty soon, after he went to school a little more and learned to
spell better, to use punctuation marks the way the copy said, and
capital letters even if you did have to reach for them, he, too, could
swing onto the smoking car of the six-fifty-eight--after she had really
started--and go off where gypsies went, and people that had learned good
loose trades.

There was a new printer at the case in the _Advance_ office the
following morning, one of those who constantly drifted in and out of
that exciting nowhere int