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 into which they so lightly disappeared by whim; a gaunt, silent man, almost wholly deaf, who stood in Dave Cowan's place and set type with machine-like accuracy or distributed it with loose-fingered nimbleness, seizing many types at a time and scattering them to their boxes with the apparent abandon of a sower strewing seed.
He, too, was but a transient, wherever he might be found, but he had no talk of the outland where gypsies were, and to Wilbur he proved to be of no human interest, so that the boy neglected the dusty office for the more attractive out-of-doors, though still inking the forms for the Wednesday edition, because a quarter is a good thing to have.
When Terry Stamper brought the pail of beer now the new printer drank abundantly of the frothy stuff, and for a time glowed gently with a suggestive radiance, as if he, too, were almost moved to tell of strange cities; but he never did.

Nor did he talk instructively about the beginnings of life and how humans were but slightly advanced simians.

He would continue to set type, silent and detached, until an evening when he would want to go somewhere on a train--and go.

He did not smoke, but he chewed tobacco; and Wilbur, the apprentice, desiring to do all things that printers did, strove to emulate him in this interesting vice; but it proved to offer only the weakest of appeals, so he presently abandoned the effort--especially after Winona had detected him with the stuff in his mouth, striving to spit like an elderly printer.

Winona was horrified.