k.

Thus came Kenyon Adams, recorded in the family Bible as the third son of
Mary and Amos Adams, into the wilderness of this world.

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH MARGARET MUeLLER DWELLS IN MARBLE HALLS AND HENRY FENN AND
KENYON ADAMS WIN NOTABLE VICTORIES

The world into which Kenyon Adams came was a busy and noisy and ruthless
world. The prairie grass was leaving Harvey when Grant Adams came, and
the meadow lark left in the year that Jasper came. When Kenyon entered,
even the blue sky that bent over it was threatened. For Dr. Nesbit
returning from the Adamses the evening that Kenyon came to Harvey found
around the well-drill at Jamey McPherson's a great excited crowd. Men
were elbowing each other and craning their necks, and wagging their
heads as they looked at the core of the drill. For it contained
unmistakably a long worm of coal. And that night saw rising over Harvey
such dreams as made the angels sick; for the dreams were all of money,
and its vain display and power. And when men rose after dreaming those
dreams, they swept little Jamey McPherson away in short order. For he
had not the high talents of the money maker. He had only persistence,
industry and a hopeful spirit and a vague vision that he was discovering
coal for the common good. So when Daniel Sands put his mind to bear upon
the worm of coal that came wriggling up from the drilled hole on Jamey's
lot, the worm crawled away from Jamey and Jamey went to work in the
shaft that Daniel sank on his vacant lot near the McPherson home. The
coal smoke from Daniel Sands's mines began to splotch the blue sky above
the town, and Kenyon Adams missed the large leisure and joyous
comraderie that Grant had seen; indeed the only leisurely person whom
Kenyon saw in his life until he was--Heaven knows how old--was Rhoda
Kollander. The hum and bustle of Harvey did not ruffle the calm waters
of her soul. She of all the women in Harvey held to the early custom of
the town of going out to spend the day.

"So that Margaret's gone," she was saying to Mary Adams sometime during
a morning in the spring after Kenyon was born. "Law me--I wouldn't have
a boarder. I tell John, the sanctity of the home is invaded by boarders
these days; and her going out to the dances in town the way she does, I
sh'd think you'd be glad to be alone again, and to have your own little
flock to do for. And so Grant's going to be a carpenter--well, well! He
didn't take to the printing trade, did he?