The trees on the poplar bluff where he had made his toilet the evening before were beginning to show the approach of autumn, although there had been no frost.  Pale yellow and rust coloured against the green of their hardier neighbours, they rippled their coin-like leaves in glad good-will as he drove past them on his way to the hayfield.

The sun had risen red and angry, giving to every cloud in the sky a facing of gold, and long streamers shot up into the blue of the mid-heaven.

There is no hour of the day so hushed and beautiful as the early morning, when the day is young, fresh from the hand of God.  It is a new page, clean and white and pure, and the angel is saying unto us “Write!” and none there be who may refuse to obey.  It may be gracious deeds and kindly words that we write upon it in letters of gold, or it may be that we blot and blur it with evil thoughts and stain it with unworthy actions, but write we must!

The demon of discontent laid hold on Tom that morning as he worked in the hayfield.  New forces were at work in the boy’s heart, forces mighty for good or evil.

A great disgust for his surrounding filled him.  He could see from where he worked the big stone house, bare and gray.  It was a place to eat in, a place to sleep in, the same as a prison.  He had never known any real enjoyment there.  He knew it would all be his some day, and he tried to feel the pride of possession, but he could not—­he hated it.

He saw around him everywhere the abundance of harvest—­the grain that meant money.  Money!  It was the greatest thing in the world.  He had been taught to chase after it—­to grasp it—­then hide it, and chase again after more.  His father put money in the bank every year, and never saw it again.  When money was banked it had fulfilled its highest mission.  Then they drew that wonderful thing called interest, money without work—­and banked it—­Oh, it was a great game!

It was the first glimmerings of manhood that was stirring in Tom’s heart that morning, the new independence, the new individualism.

Before this he had accepted everything his father and mother had said or done without question.  Only once before had he doubted them.  It was several years before.  A man named Skinner had bought from Tom’s father the quarter section that Jim Russell now farmed, paying down a considerable sum of money, but evil days fell upon the man and his wife; sickness, discouragement, and then, the man began to drink.  He was unable to keep up his payments and Tom’s father had foreclosed the mortgage.  Tom remembered the day the Skinners had left their farm, the woman was packing their goods into a box.  She was a faded woman in a faded wrapper, and her tears were falling as she worked.  Tom saw her tears falling, and he had told her with the awful cruelty of a child that it was their own fault that they had lost the farm.  The woman had shrunk back as if he had struck her and cried “Oh,