He spent the afternoon in the little room, where he would glance up to find the small, barefoot boy staring at him in wonder; and out in the Penniman front yard, where the summer flowers bloomed. These surroundings presented every a.s.surance of safety, yet his restless, wide-sweeping gaze was full of caution, especially after the aeroplane went over. At the first ominous note of its droning he had broken for cover. After that, in spite of himself, he would be glancing uneasily at the Plummer place across the road. This was fronted by a hedge of cypress--ideal machine-gun cover. But not once during the long afternoon was he shot at. He brought out and repaired the lawn mower, oiled its rusted parts and ran it gayly over the gra.s.s. At suppertime, when Dave Cowan came, he was wetting the shorn sward with spray from a hose.

"Back?" said Dave, peering as at a bit of the far cosmos flung in his way.

"Back," said his son.

They shook hands.

"You haven't changed any," said Wilbur, scanning Dave's placid face under the straw hat and following the lines of his spare figure down to the vestiges of a once n.o.ble pair of shoes.

"You only been away two years," said Dave. "I wouldn't change much in that time. That's the way of the mind, though. We always forget how slowly evolution works its wonders. Anyhow, you know what they say in our trade--when a printer dies he turns into a white mule. I'm no white mule yet. You've changed, though."

"I didn't know it."

"Face harder--about ten years older. Kind of set and sour looking. Ever laugh any more?"

"Of course I laugh."

"You don't look it. Never forget how to laugh. It's a life-saver. Laugh even at wars and killings. Human life in each of us isn't much. It's like that stream you're spreading over the ground. The drops fall back to earth, but the main stream is constant. That's all the life force cares about--the main stream. Doesn't care about the drops; a few more or less here and there make no difference."

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

Dave Cowan scanned the front of the house. The judge was not in sight.

He went softly to lean above the parrot's cage and in low, wheedling tones, uttered words to it.

"Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle!" screeched the parrot in return, and laughed harshly. The bird was a master of sarcastic inflection.

Dave came back looking pleased and proud.

"Almost human," he declared. "Kept back a few million years by accident--our little feathered brother." He gestured toward the house.

"Old Flapdoodle, in there, he's a rabid red these days. Got tired of being a patriot. Worked hard for a year trying to prove that Vielhaber was a German spy, flapping his curtain at night to the German Foreign Office. But no one paid any attention to him except a few other flapdoodles, so then he began to read your brother's precious words, and now he's a violent comrade. Fact! expecting any day that the workers will take things over and he'll come into money--money the interests have kept him out of. He kind of licks his chops when he talks about it.

Never heard him talk about his wife's share, though. Say, that brother of yours is making a plumb fool of himself!"

"He didn't understand."

"No--and he doesn't yet."

"Where is he now?"

"Oh"--Dave circled a weary hand to the zenith--"off somewhere holy-rolling. Gets his name in the papers--young poet radical that abandoned life of luxury to starve with toiling comrades. Say, do you know what a toiling comrade gets per day now? No matter. Your brother hasn't toiled any. Makes red-hot speeches. That Whipple bunch reared at last and shut off his magazine money, so he said he couldn't take another cent wrung from the anguished sweat of serfs. But it ain't his hands he toils with, and he ain't a real one, either. Plenty of real ones in his bunch that would stand the gaff, but not him. He's a shine.

Of course they're useful, these reds. Keep things stirred up--human yeast cakes, only they get to thinking they're the dough, too. That brother of yours knows all the lines; says 'em hot, too, but that's only so he'll get more notice. Say, tell us about the war.

"It was an awful big one," said his son.

Soon after a novel breakfast the following morning--in that it was late and leisurely and he ate from a chair at a table--he heard the squealing brakes of a motor car and saw one brought to a difficult stop at the Penniman gate. Sharon Whipple, the driver, turned to look back at the machine indignantly, as if it had misbehaved. Wilbur Cowan met him at the gate.

It became Sharon's pretense that he was not hugging the boy, merely feeling the muscles in his shoulders and back to see if he were as good a lightweight as ever. He pounded and thumped and punched and even made as if to wrestle with the returned soldier, laughing awkwardly through it; but his florid face had paled with the excitement.

"I knew you'd come back! Old Sammy Dodwell happened to mention he'd seen you; said he hadn't noticed you before for most a month, he thought. But I knew you was coming, all right! Time and time again I told people you would. Told every one that. I bet you had some narrow escapes, didn't you now?"

Wilbur Cowan considered.

"Well, I had a pretty bad cold in the Argonne."

"I want to know!" said Sharon, much concerned. He pranced heavy-footedly before the other, thumping his chest. "Well, I bet you threw it off! A hard cold ain't any joke. But look here, come on for a ride!"

They entered the car and Sharon drove. But he continued to bubble with questions, to turn his head and gesture with one hand or the other. The pa.s.senger applied imaginary brakes as they missed a motor truck.

"Better let me take that," he suggested, and they changed seats.

"Out to the Home Farm," directed Sharon. "You ain't altered a mite," he went on. "Little more peaked, mebbe--kind of more mature or judgmatical or whatever you call it. Well, go on--tell about the war."

But there proved to be little to tell, and Sharon gradually wearied from the effort of evoking this little. Yes, there had been fights. Big ones, lots of noise, you bet! The food was all right. The Germans were good fighters. No; he had not been wounded; yes, that was strange. The French were good fighters. The British were good fighters. They were all good fighters.

"But didn't you have any close mix-ups at all?" persisted Sharon.

"Oh, now and then; sometimes you couldn't get out of it."

"Well, my shining stars! Can't you tell a fellow?"

"Oh, it wasn't much! You'd be out at night, maybe, and you'd meet one, and you'd trade a few punches, and then you'd tangle."

"And you'd leave him there, eh?"

"Oh, sometimes!"

"Who did win the war, anyway?" Sharon was a little irritated by this reticence.

The other grinned.

"The British say they won it, and the last I heard the French said it was G.o.d Almighty. Take your choice. Of course you did hear other gossip going round--you know how things get started."

Sharon grunted.

"I should think as much. Great prunes and apricots! I should think there would of been talk going round! Anyway, it was you boys that stopped the fight. I guess they'd admit that much--small-towners like you that was ready to fight for their country. Dear me, Suz! I should think as much!"

On the crest of a hill overlooking a wide sweep of valley farmland the driver stopped the car in shade and scanned the fields of grain where the green was already fading.

"There's the Home Farm," said Sharon. "High mighty! Some change since my grandad came in here and fit the Injins and catamounts off it. I wonder what he'd say if he could hear what I'm paying for farm help right now--and hard to get at that. I don't know how I've managed. See that mower going down there in the south forty? Well, the best man I've had for two years is cutting that patch of timothy. Who do you guess? It's my girl, Juliana. She not only took charge for me, but she jumped in herself and did two men's work.

"Funny girl, that one. So quiet all these years, never saying much, never letting out. But she let out when the men went. I guess lots have been like her. You can see a woman doing anything nowadays. Why, they got a woman burglar over to the county seat the other night! And I just read the speech of a silly-softy of a congressman telling why they shouldn't have the vote. h.e.l.l! Excuse me for cursing so."

Unconsciously Wilbur had been following with his eyes the course of the willow-bordered creek. He half expected to hear the crisp little tacking of machine guns from its shelter, and he uneasily scanned the wood at his left. It was the valley of the Surmelin, and yonder was the Marne.

"I keep thinking I'll be shot at," he explained.

"You won't be. Safe as a church here--just like being in G.o.d's pocket.

Say, don't that house look good to you?" He c.o.c.ked a thumb toward the dwelling of the Home Farm in a flat s.p.a.ce beyond the creek. It was the house of dull red brick, broad, low, square fronted, with many windows, the house in a green setting to which they had gone so many years before. Heat waves made it shimmer.