noon
He began to be a little afraid of the man . He could not understand why the money , nearly twenty-five hundred dollars he had put in the bank during the two years Jim had been with him , seemed so unimportant and the twelve hundred dollars he had earned slowly after twenty years of work seemed so important . As there was much repair work always waiting to be done in the shop , he did not go home to lunch , but every day carried a few sandwiches to the shop in his pocket . At the noon hour , when Jim had gone to his boarding-house , he was alone , and if no one came in , he was happy . It seemed to him the best time of the day . Every few minutes he went to the front door to look out . The quiet Main Street , on which his shop had faced since he was a young man just come home from his trade adventures , and which had always been such a sleepy place at the noon hour in the summer , was now like a battle-field from which an army had retreated .