Dave Cowan reached the Penniman gate, pausing a moment to watch the car leave. Juliana shot him one swift glance while the parrot laughed.

"Who was that live-looking old girl?" he demanded as he came up the steps. "Oh!" he said when Winona told him.

He glanced sympathetically after the car. A block away it had slowed to turn a corner. The parrot's ironic laughter came back to them.

"Yes, I remember her," said Dave, musingly. He was glad to recall that he had once shown the woman a little attention.

CHAPTER XXII

Of all humans c.u.mbering the earth Dave Cowan thought farmers the most pitiable. To this tireless-winged bird of pa.s.sage farming was not a loose trade, and the news that his son was pledged to agrarian pursuits shocked him. To be mewed up for life on a few acres of land!

"It was the land tricked us first," admonished Dave. "There we were, footloose and free, and some fool went and planted a patch of ground.

Then he stayed like a fool to see what would happen. Pretty soon he fenced the patch to keep out prehistoric animals. First thing he knew he was fond of it. Of course he had to stay there--he couldn't take if off with him. That's how man was tricked. Most he could ever hope after that was to be a small-towner. You may think you can own land and still be free, but you can't. Before you know it you have that home feeling.

Never owned a foot of it! That's all that saved me."

Dave frowned at his son hopefully, as one saved might regard one who still might be.

"I'm not owning any land," suggested his son.

"No; but it's tricky stuff. You get round it, working at it, nursing it--pretty soon you'll want to own some, then you're dished. It's the first step that counts. After that you may crave to get out and see places, but you can't; you have to plant the hay and the corn. You to fool round those Whipple farms--I don't care if it is a big job with big money--it's playing with fire. Pretty soon you'll be as tight-fixed to a patch of soil as any yap that ever blew out the gas in a city hotel.

You'll stick there and raise hogs _en ma.s.se_ for free people that can take a trip when they happen to feel like it." Dave had but lately learned _en ma.s.se_ and was glad to find a use for it. He spoke with the untroubled detachment of one saved, who could return at will to the glad life of nomady. "You, with the good loose trades you know! Do you want to take root in this hole like a willow branch that someone shoves into the ground? Don't you ever want to move--on and on and on?"

His son at the time had denied stoutly that he felt this urge. Now, after a week of his new work, he would have been less positive. It was a Sunday afternoon, and he sprawled face down on the farther shaded slope of West Hill, confessing a lively fear that he might take root like the willow. Late in that first week the old cry had begun to ring in his ears--Where do we go from here?--bringing the cold perception that he would not go anywhere from here.

Through all his early years in Newbern he had not once felt the wander-bidding; never, as Dave Cowan put it, had he been itchy-footed for the road. Then, with the war, he had crept up to look over the top of the world, and now, unaccountably, in the midst of work he had looked forward to with real pleasure, his whole body was tingling for new horizons.

It seemed to be so with a dozen of the boys he had come back with. Some of these were writing to him, wanting him to come here, to come there; to go on and on with them to inviting places they knew--and on again from there! Mining in South America, lumbering in the Northwest, ranching in the Southwest; one of his mates would be a sailor, and one would be with a circus. Something within him beyond reason goaded him to be up and off. He felt his hold slipping; his mind floated in an ecstasy of relaxation.

His first days at the Home Farm had been good-enough days. Sharon Whipple had told him a modern farmer must first be a mechanic, and he was already that--and no one had shot at him. But the novelty of approaching good machine-gun cover without apprehension had worn off.

"Ain't getting cold feet, are you?" asked Sharon one day, observing him hang idly above an abused tractor with the far-off look in his eyes.

"Nothing like that," he had protested almost too warmly. "No, sir; I'll slog on right here."

Now for the first time in all their years of a.s.sociation he saw an immense gulf between himself and Sharon Whipple. Sharon was an old man, turning to look back as he went down a narrow way into a hidden valley.

But he--Wilbur Cowan--was climbing a long slope into new light. How could they touch? How could this old man hold him to become another old man on the same soil--when he could be up and off, a happy world romper like his father before him?

"Funny, funny, funny!" he said aloud, and lazily rolled over to stare into blue s.p.a.ce.

Probably it was quite as funny out there. The people like himself on those other worlds would be the sport of confusing impulses, in the long run obeying some deeper instinct whose source was in the parent star dust, wandering or taking root in their own strange soils. But why not wander when the object of it all was so obscure, so apparently trivial?

Enough others would submit to rule from the hidden source, take root like the willow--mate! That was another chain upon them. Women held them back from wandering. That was how they were tricked into the deadly home feeling his father warned him of.

"Funny, funny, funny!" he said again.

From an inner pocket he drew a sheet of note paper worn almost through at the fold, stained with the ooze of trenches and his own sweat. It had come deviously to him in the front line a month after his meeting with Patricia Whipple. In that time the strange verse had still run in his mind--a crown of stars, and under her feet the moon! The tumult of fighting had seemed to fix it there. He had rested on the memory of her and become fearless of death. But the time had changed so tremendously.

He could hardly recall the verse, hardly recall that he had faced death or the strange girl.

"Wilbur, dear," he read, "I am still holding you. Are you me? What do you guess? Do you guess we were a couple of homesick ninnies, tired and weak and too combustible? Or do you guess it meant something about us finding each other out all in one second, like a flash of something? Do you guess we were frazzled up to the limit and not braced to hold back or anything, the way civilized people do? I mean, will we be the same back home? If we will be, how funny! We shall have to find out, shan't we? But let's be sporty, and give the thing a chance to be true if it can. That's fair enough, isn't it? What I mean, let's not shatter its morale by some poky chance meeting with a lot of people round, whom it is none of their business what you and I do or don't do. That would be fierce, would it not? So much might depend.

"Anyway, here's what: The first night I am home--your intelligence department must find out the day, because I'm not going to write to you again if I never see you, I feel so unmaidenly--I shall be at our stile leading out to West Hill. You remember it--above the place where those splendid gypsies camped when we were such a funny little boy and girl.

The first night as soon as I can sneak out from my proud family. You come there. We'll know!"

"Funny, funny, funny--the whole game!" he said.

He lost himself in a lazy wonder if it could be true. He didn't know.

Once she had persisted terribly in his eyes; now she had faded. Her figure before the broken church was blurred.

Sharon Whipple found him the next afternoon teaching two new men the use and abuse of a tractor, and plainly bored by his task. Sharon seized the moment to talk pungently about the good old times when a farm hand didn't have to know how to disable a tractor, or anything much, and would work fourteen hours a day for thirty dollars a month and his keep.

He named the wage of the two pupils in a tone of disgruntled awe that piqued them pleasantly but did not otherwise impress. When they had gone their expensive ways he turned to Wilbur.

"Did you get over to that dry-fork place to-day?"

"No; too busy here with these highbinders."

He spoke wearily, above a ripening suspicion that he would not much longer be annoyed in this manner. A new letter had that morning come from the intending adventurer into South America.

"I'll bet you've had a time with this new help," said Sharon.

"I've put three men at work over on that clearing, though."

"I'll get over there myself with you to-morrow; no, not tomorrow--next day after. That girl of ours gets in to-morrow noon. Have to be there, of course."

"Of course."

"She trotted a smart mile over there. Everybody says so. Family tickled to death about her. Me, too, of course."

"Of course."

"Rattlepate, though."

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

When the old man had gone he looked out over the yellowing fields with a frank distaste for the level immensity. Suddenly there rang in his ears the harsh singing of many men: "Where do we go from here, boys, where do we go from here?" Old Sharon was rooted in the soil; dying there. But he was still free. He could wire Leach Belding he was starting--and start.

About eight o'clock the following night he parked the Can beside the ridge road, and for the first time in his proud career of ownership cursed its infirmities. It was competent, but no car for a tryst one might not wish to advertise. When its clamour had been stilled he waited some moments, feeling that a startled countryside must rush to the spot.

Yet no one came, so at last he went furtively through the thinned grove and about clumps of hazel brush, feeling his way, stepping softly, crouching low, until he could make out the stile where it broke the lines of the fence. The night was clear and the stile was cleanly outlined by starlight. Beyond the fence was a shadowed ma.s.s, first a clump of trees, the outbuildings of the Whipple New Place, the house itself. There were lights at the back, and once voices came to him, then the thin shatter of gla.s.s on stone, followed by laughs from two dissonant throats. He stood under a tall pine, listening, but no other sound came. After a while he sat at the foot of the tree. Crickets chirped and a bat circled through the night. The scent of the pine from its day-long baking was sharp in his nostrils. His back tired against the tree, and he eased himself to the cooled gra.s.s, face down, his hands crossed under his chin. He could look up now and see the stile against stars.

He waited. He had expected to wait. The little night sounds that composed the night's silence, his own stillness, his intent watching, put him back to nights when silence was ominous. Once he found he had stopped breathing to listen to the breathing of the men on each side of him. He was waiting for the word, and felt for a rifle. He had to rise to shake off this oppression. On his feet he laughed softly, being again in Newbern on a fool's mission. He lay down hands under his chin, but again the silent watching beset him with the old oppression. He must be still and strain his eyes ahead. Presently the word would come, or he would feel the touch of a groping foe. He half dozed at last from the memory of that other endless fatigue. He came to himself with a start and raised his head to scan the stile. The darkness had thickened but the two posts at the ends of the fence were still outlined. He watched and waited.

After a long time the east began to lighten; a deepening glow rimmed West Hill, picking out in silver the trees along its edge. If she meant to come she must come soon, he thought, but the rising moon distinctly showed the bare stile. She had written a long time ago. She was notoriously a rattlepate. Of course she would have forgotten. Then for a moment his straining eyes were puzzled. His gaze had not shifted even for an instant, yet the post at the left of the stile had unaccountably thickened. He considered it a trick of the advancing moonshine, and looked more intently. It was motionless, like the other post, yet it had thickened. Then he saw it was taller, but still it did not move. It could be no one. Mildly curious, he crept forward to make the post seem right in this confusing new glamour. But it broadened as he neared it, and still was taller than its neighbour, its lines not so sharp.