The distraught young man stood in the middle of the road and glared back at the town.  He did not know the reporter George Willard and had no special feeling concerning the tall boy who ran about town gathering the town news.  The reporter had merely come, by his presence in the office and in the printshop of the Winesburg Eagle, to stand for something in the young merchant’s mind.  He thought the boy who passed and repassed Cowley & Son’s store and who stopped to talk to people in the street must be thinking of him and perhaps laughing at him.  George Willard, he felt, belonged to the town, typified the town, represented in his person the spirit of the town.  Elmer Cowley could not have believed that George Willard had also his days of unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also his mind.  Did he not represent public opinion and had not the public opinion of Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness?  Did he not walk whistling and laughing through Main Street?  Might not one by striking his person strike also the greater enemy—­the thing that smiled and went its own way—­the judgment of Winesburg?

Elmer Cowley was extraordinarily tall and his arms were long and powerful.  His hair, his eyebrows, and the downy beard that had begun to grow upon his chin, were pale almost to whiteness.  His teeth protruded from between his lips and his eyes were blue with the colorless blueness of the marbles called “aggies” that the boys of Winesburg carried in their pockets.  Elmer had lived in Winesburg for a year and had made no friends.  He was, he felt, one condemned to go through life without friends and he hated the thought.

Sullenly the tall young man tramped along the road with his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets.  The day was cold with a raw wind, but presently the sun began to shine and the road became soft and muddy.  The tops of the ridges of frozen mud that formed the road began to melt and the mud clung to Elmer’s shoes.  His feet became cold.  When he had gone several miles he turned off the road, crossed a field and entered a wood.  In the wood he gathered sticks to build a fire, by which he sat trying to warm himself, miserable in body and in mind.

For two hours he sat on the log by the fire and then, arising and creeping cautiously through a mass of underbrush, he went to a fence and looked across fields to a small farmhouse surrounded by low sheds.  A smile came to his lips and he began making motions with his long arms to a man who was husking corn in one of the fields.

In his hour of misery the young merchant had returned to the farm where he had lived through boyhood and where there was another human being to whom he felt he could explain himself.  The man on the farm was a half-witted old fellow named Mook.  He had once been employed by Ebenezer Cowley and had stayed on the farm when it was sold.  The old man lived in one of the unpainted sheds back of the farmhouse and puttered about all day in the fields.