On a day late in June of 1919 Wilbur Cowan dropped off the noon train that paused at Newbern Center. He carried the wicker suitcase he had taken away, and wore the same clothes. He had the casual, incurious look of one who had been for a little trip down the line. No one about the station heeded him, nor did he notice any one he knew. There was a new assemblage of station loafers, and none of these recognized him. Suitcase in hand, his soft hat pulled well down, he walked quickly round the crowd and took a roundabout way through quiet streets to the Penniman place.

The town to his eye had shrunk; buildings were not so high as he remembered them, wide spaces narrower, streets shorter, less thronged. On his way he met old Mr. Dodwell, muffled about the throat, though the day was hot, walking feebly, planting a stout cane before him. Mr. Dodwell passed blinking eyes over him, went on, then turned to call back.

"Ain't that Wilbur Cowan? How de do, Wilbur? Ain't you been away?"

"For a little while," answered Wilbur. "Thought I hadn't seen you for some time. Hot as blazes, ain't it?"

He came to the Penniman place at the rear. The vegetable garden, lying between the red barn and the white house, was as he had known it, uncared for, sad, discouraged. The judge's health could be no better. On bare earth at the corner of the woodshed Frank, the dog, slumbered fitfully in the shade. He merely grumbled, rising to change his posture, when greeted. Feebly he sniffed the newcomer. It could be seen that his memory was stirred, but his eyes told him nothing; he had a complaining air of saying one met so many people. It was beyond one to place them all. He whimpered when his ears were rubbed, seeming to recall a familiar touch. Then with a deep sigh he fell asleep once more. His master took up the suitcase and gained, without further encounters, the little room in the side-yard house. Yet he did not linger here. He kept seeing a small, barefoot boy who rummaged in a treasure box labelled "Cake." This boy made him uncomfortable. He went round to the front of the other house. On the porch, behind the morning-glory vine, Judge Penniman in his wicker chair languidly fanned himself, studying a thermometer held in his other hand. He glanced up sharply.

"Well, come back, did you?"

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur, and sat on the top step to fan himself with his hat. "Warm, isn't it?"

The judge brightened.

"Warm? Warm ain't any name for it! We been having a hot spell nobody remembers the like of, man nor boy, for twenty years. Why, day before yesterday—say, I wish you'd been here! Talk about suffering! I was having one of my bad days, and the least little thing I'd do I'd be panting like a tuckered hound. Say, how was the war?"

"Oh, so-so," answered the returned private.

"You tell it well. Seems to me if I'd been off skyhootin' round in foreign lands—say, how about them French women? Pretty bold lot, I guess, if you can believe all you—"

The parrot in its cage at the end of the porch climbed to a perch with beak and claw.

"Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle!" it screeched. The judge glared murderously at it.

"Wilbur Cowan, you bad, bad, bad child—not to let us know!" Mrs. Penniman threw back the screen door and rushed to embrace him. "You regular fighting so-and-so!" she sobbed.

"Where'd you get that talk?" he demanded.

Mrs. Penniman wiped her eyes with a dish towel suspended from one arm.

"Oh, we heard all about you!"

She was warm, and shed gracious aromas. The returned one sniffed these.

"It's chops," he said—"and—and hot biscuits."

"And radishes from the garden, and buttermilk and clover honey and raspberries, and—let me see—"

"Let's go!" said the soldier.

"Then you can tell us all about that war," said the invalid as with groans he raised his bulk from the wicker chair.

"What war?" asked Wilbur.

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 assurance of safety, yet his restless, wide-sweeping gaze was full of caution, especially after the aËroplane 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 grass. 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 noble 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 passenger 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 God 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. Hell! 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 God's pocket. Say, don't that house look good to you?" He cocked a thumb toward the dwelling of the Home Farm in a flat space 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.

"Yes, it looks good," conceded Wilbur.

"Then listen, young man! You're to live there. It'll be your headquarters. You're going to manage the four other farms from there, and give me a chance to be seventy-three years old next Tuesday without a thing on my mind. You ain't a farmer, but you're educated; you can learn anything after you've seen it done; and farming is mostly commonsense and machinery nowadays. So that's where you'll be, understand? No more dubbing round doing this and that, printing office one day, garage the next, and nothing much the next. You're going to settle down and take up your future, see?"

"Well, if you think I can."

"I do! You're an enlightened young man. What I can't tell you Juliana can. I got a dozen tractors out of commission right now. Couldn't get any one to put 'em in shape. None of them dissipated noblemen round the Mansion garage would look at a common tractor. You'll start on them. You're fixed—don't tell me no!"

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

"You done your bit in a fighting war; now you'll serve in a peaceful one. I don't know what the good Lord intends to come out of all this rumpus, but I do know the world's going to need food. We'll raise it."

"Yes, sir."

Sharon glanced shrewdly at him sidewise.

"You're a better Whipple than any one else of your name ever got to be."

"He didn't understand; he was misled or something."

"Or something," echoed Sharon. "Listen! There's one little job you got to do before you hole up out here. You heard about him, of course—the worry he's been to poor Harvey and the rest. Well, he's down there in New York still acting squeamishy. I want you should go down and put the fear of God into him."

"I understand he's mixed up with a lot of reds down there."

"Red! Him? Humph!" Sharon here named an equally well-known primary colour—not red. Wilbur protested.

"You don't get him," persisted the old man. "Listen, now! He cast off the family like your father said he would. Couldn't accept another cent of Whipple money. Going to work with his bare hands. Dressed up for it like a hunter in one of these powder advertisements. All he needed was a shotgun and a setter dog with his tail up. And everybody in the house worried he'd starve to death. Of course no one thought he'd work—that was one of his threats they didn't take seriously. But they promised to sit tight, each and all, and bring him to time the sooner.

"Well, he didn't come to time. We learned he was getting money from some place. He still had it. So I begun to get my suspicions up. Last night I got the bunch together, Gid and Harvey D. and Ella and Juliana, and I taxed 'em with duplicity, and every last one of 'em was guilty as paint—every goshed last one! Every one sending him fat checks unbeknownst to the others. Even Juliana! I never did suspect her. 'I did it because it's all a romance to him,' says she. 'I wanted him to go his way, whatever it was, and find it bright.'

"Wha'd you think of that from a girl of forty-eight or so that can tinker a mowing machine as good as you can? I ask you! Of course I'd suspected the rest. A set of mushheads. Maybe they didn't look shamed when I exposed 'em! Each one had pictured the poor boy down there alone, undergoing hardship with his toiling workers or whatever you call 'em, and, of course, I thought so myself."

"How much did you send him?" demanded Wilbur, suddenly.

"Not half as much as the others," returned Sharon in indignant triumph. "If they'd just set tight like they promised and let me do the little I done——"

"You were going to sit tight, too, weren't you?"

"Well, of course, that was different. Of course I was willing to shell out a few dollars now and then if he was going to be up against it for a square meal. After all, he was Whipple by name. Of course he ain't got Whipple stuff in him. That young man's talk always did have kind of a nutty flavour. You come right down to it, he ain't a Whipple in hide nor hair. Why, say, he ain't even two and seventy-five-hundredths per cent. Whipple!"

Sharon had cunningly gone away from his own failure to sit tight. He was proving flexible-minded here, as on the links.

They were silent, looking out over the spread of Home Farm. The red house still shimmered in the heat waves. The tall trees about it hung motionless. The click of the reaper in the south forty sounded like a distant locust.

"Put the fear of God into him," said Sharon at last. "Let him know them checks have gosh all truly stopped."

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

"Now drive on and we'll look the house over. The last tenant let it run down. But I'll fix it right for you. Why, like as not you'll be having a missis and young ones of your own there some day."

"I might; you can't tell."

"Well, I wish they was going to be Whipple stock. Ours is running down. I don't look for any prize-winners from your brother; he'll likely marry that widow, or something, that wants to save America like Russia has been. And Juliana, I guess she wasn't ever frivolous enough for marriage. And that Pat—she'll pick out one of them boys with a head like a seal, that knows all the new dances and what fork to use. Trust her! Not that she didn't show Whipple stuff over there. But she's a rattlepate in peacetime."

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

He left a train at the Grand Central Station in New York early the following evening. He had the address of Merle's apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, and made his way there on foot through streets crowded with the war's backwash. Men in uniform were plentiful, and he was many times hailed by them. Though out of uniform himself, they seemed to identify him with ease. Something in his walk, the slant of his shoulders, and the lean, browned, watchful face—the eyes set for wider horizons than a mere street—served to mark him as one of them.

The apartment of Merle proved to be in the first block above Washington Square. While he scanned doors for the number he was seized and turned about by a playful creature in uniform.

"Well, Buck Cowan, you old son of a gun!"

"Gee, gosh, Stevie! How's the boy?"

They shook hands, moving to the curb where they could talk.

"What's the idea?" demanded ex-Private Cowan. "Why this dead part of town for so many of the boys?"

Service men were constantly sauntering by them or chatting in little groups at the curb.

"She's dead, right now," Steve told him, "but she'll wake up pronto. Listen, Buck, we got the tip! A lot of them fur-faced boys that hurl the merry bombs are goin' to pull off a red-flag sashay up the Avenoo. Get it? Goin' to set America free!"

"I get it!" said Wilbur.

"Dirty work at the crossroads," added Steve.

"Say, Steve, hold it for twenty minutes, can't you? I got to see a man down here. Be good; don't hurt any one till I get back."

"Do my best," said Steve, "but they're down there in the Square now stackin' up drive impedimenta and such, red banners, and so forth, tuning up to warble the hymn to free Russia. Hurry if you want to join out with us!"

"I'll do that little thing, Steve. See you again." He passed on, making a way through the jostling throng of soldiers and civilians. "Just my luck," he muttered. "I hope the kid isn't in." Never before had he thought of his brother as "the kid."

He passed presently through swinging glass doors, and in a hallway was told by a profusely buttoned youth in spectacles that Mr. Whipple was out. It was not known when he would be in. His movements were uncertain.

"He might be in or he might be out," said the boy.

He was back in the street, edging through the crowd, his head up, searching for the eager face of Steve Kennedy, late his sergeant. Halfway up the next block he found him pausing to roll a cigarette. Steve was a scant five feet, and he was telling a private who was a scant six feet that there would be dirty work at the crossroads—when the fur-faces started.

"We're too far away," suggested Wilbur. "If they start from the Square they'll be mussed up before they get here. You can't expect people farther down to save 'em just for you. Where's your tactics, Steve?"

They worked slowly back down the Avenue. It was nine o'clock now, and the street was fairly free of vehicles. The night was clear and the street lights brought alert, lean profiles into sharp relief, faces of men in uniform sauntering carelessly or chatting in little groups at the curb. A few unseeing policemen, also sauntering carelessly, were to be observed.

"Heard a fur-face speak last night," said Steve. "It's a long story, mates, but it seems this is one rotten Government and everybody knows it but a few cops. If someone would only call off the cops and let the fur-faces run it we might have a regular country."

From the Square singing was now heard.

"Oh, boy!" murmured the tall private, dreamily; "am I glad I'm here?" Stretching a long neck to peer toward the Square, he called in warm, urgent tones: "Oh, come on, you reds—come on, red!"

They came on. Out from the Square issued a valiant double line of marchers, men and women, their voices raised in the Internationale. At their head, bearing aloft a scarlet banner of protest, strode a commanding figure in corduroys, head up, his feet stepping a martial pace.

"I choose that general," said the tall private, and licked his lips.

"Not if I get him first," shouted Steve, and sprang from the walk into the roadway.

But ex-Private Cowan was ahead of them both. He had not waited for speech. A crowd from each side of the Avenue had surged into the roadway to greet the procession. The banner bearer was seen to hesitate, to lose step, but was urged from the rear by other banner bearers. He came on again. Once more he stepped martially. The Internationale swelled in volume. The crowd, instead of opening a way, condensed more solidly about the advance. There were jeers and shoving. The head of the line again wavered. Wilbur Cowan had jostled a way toward this leader. He lost no time in going into action. But the pushing crowd impaired his aim, and it was only a glancing blow that met the jaw of the corduroyed standard bearer.

The standard toppled forward from his grasp, and its late bearer turned quickly aside. As he turned Wilbur Cowan reached forward to close a hand about the corduroy collar. Then he pulled. The standard bearer came back easily to a sitting posture on the asphalt. The crowd was close in, noisily depriving other bearers of their standards. The Internationale had become blurred and discordant, like a bad phonograph record. The parade still came to break and flow about the obstruction.

Wilbur Cowan jerked his prize up and whirled him about. He contemplated further atrocities. But the pallid face of his brother was now revealed to him.

"Look out there!" he warned the crowd, and a way was opened.

He drew back on the corduroy collar, then sent it forward with a mighty shove. His captive shot through the opening, fell again to the pavement, but was up and off before those nearest him could devise further entertainment. Among other accomplishments Merle had been noted in college for his swiftness of foot. He ran well, heading for the north, skillfully avoiding those on the outskirts of the crowd who would have tackled him. Wilbur Cowan watched him out of sight, beyond the area of combat. Then he worked his own way from it and stood to watch the further disintegration of the now leaderless parade.

The tumult died, the crowd melted away. Policemen became officious. From areaways up and down the Avenue forms emerged furtively, walked discreetly to corners and skurried down side streets. Here and there a crimson banner flecked the asphalt. Steve and the tall private issued from the last scrimmage, breathing hard.

"Nothing to it!" said the tall private. "Only I skun my knuckles."

"I was aimin' a wallop at that general," complained Steve, "but something blew him right out of my hand. Come on up to Madison Avenoo. I heard they was goin' to save America up there, too."

"Can't," said Wilbur. "Got to see a man."

"Well, so long, Buck!"

He waved to them as they joined the northward moving crowd.

"Gee, gosh!" he said.

"No, sir; Mr. Whipple hasn't come in yet. He just sent word he wouldn't be back at all to-night," said the spectacled hall boy. But his manner was so little ingenuous that once again the hand of Wilbur Cowan closed itself eloquently about the collar of a jacket.

"Get into that elevator and let me out at his floor."

"You let me alone!" said the hall boy. "I was going to."

He knocked a third time before he could hear a faint call. He opened the door. Beyond a dim entrance hall the light fell upon his brother seated at a desk, frowning intently at work before him. The visible half of him was no longer in corduroy. It was incased in a smoking jacket of velvet, and his neck was conventionally clad in collar and cravat. The latter had been hastily tied.

"Why, Wilbur, old man!" cried Merle in pleased surprise. He half rose from the desk, revealing that below the waist he was still corduroy or proletarian. Along his left jaw was a contusion as from a glancing blow. He was still breathing harder than most men do who spend quiet evenings at desks.

Wilbur advanced into the room, but paused before reaching the desk. It was an invitingly furnished room of cushioned couches, paintings, tapestries, soft chairs, warmly toned rugs. The desk at which Merle toiled was ornate and shining. Ex-Private Cowan felt a sudden revulsion. He was back, knee-deep in trench bilge, tortured in all his being, looking at death from behind a sandbag. Vividly he recalled why he had endured that torture.

"You're all out of condition," he announced in even tones to Merle. "A little sprint like that shouldn't get your wind."

Merle's look of sunny welcome faded to one of chagrin. He fell back in his chair. He was annoyed.

"You saw that disgraceful outbreak, then?"

"I was in luck to-night."

"Did you see that drunken rowdy strike at me, and then try to get me down where he and those other brutes could kick me?"

Wilbur's stare was cool. He was feeling the icy muck about his numbed legs.

"I was the one that struck at you. Too many elbows in the way and I flubbed it." He noted his brother start and stiffen in his chair. "And I didn't try to get you down. When I saw it was you I got you up and shot you out where you could run—if you wanted to. And I wasn't drunk, and I'm not a rowdy."

Merle gazed with horror upon the apparently uncontrite fratricide. Twice he essayed to speak before he found the words.

"Do you think that was a brave thing to do?"

"No—but useful. I've been brave a lot of times where it didn't do as much good as that."

"Useful!" breathed Merle, scathingly. "Useful to brutalize a lot of brave souls who merely sought—" he broke off with a new sense of outrage. "And not a policeman there to do his duty!" he finished resentfully.

Wilbur Cowan sat in a carven chair near a corner of the beautiful desk, hitching it forward to rest his arms on the desk's top. He was newly appraising this white-faced brother.

"Whining!" he suddenly snapped. "Get up and boast that you're outlaws, going to keel the Government off its pins. Then you get the gaff, and the first thing you do is whine for help from that same Government! You say it's rotten, but you expect it to watch over you while you knock it down. If you're going to be an outlaw, take an outlaw's chance. Don't squeal when you get caught. You say the rules are rotten, then you fall back on them. What kind of sportsmanship is that?"

Wearily but with a tolerant smile Merle pushed back the fallen lock with one white hand.

"What could you understand of all this?" he asked, gently. "We merely claim the right of free speech."

"And use it to tell other people to upset the Government! That crowd to-night did what you tell your people to do—went against the rules. But you can't take your own medicine. A fine bunch of spoiled children you are! Been spoiled by too easy a Government at that!" He broke off to study Merle again. "You're pasty, out of condition," he repeated, inconsequently.

Again his brother's intolerant smile.

"You have all the cant of the reactionary," he retorted, again gently. "It's the spirit of intolerance one finds everywhere. You can't expect one of my—" he hesitated, showing a slight impatience. "I've been too long where they are thinking," he said.

"Aren't you people intolerant? You want to break all the rules, and those same rules have made us a pretty good big country."

"Ah, yes, a big country—big! We can always boast of our size, can't we? I dare say you believe its bigness is a sign of our merit." Merle had recovered his poise. He was at home in satire. "Besides, I've broken no rules, as you call them."

"Oh, I'll bet you haven't! You'd be careful not to. I see that much. But you try to get smaller children to. I'd have more patience with you if you'd taken a chance yourself."

"Patience with me—you?" Merle relished this. His laugh was sincere. "You—would have more patience with—me!" But his irony went for little with a man still at the front.

"Sure! If only you'd smashed a few rules yourself. Take that girl and her partner they arrested the other day. They don't whine. They're behind the bars, but still cussing the Government. You've got to respect fighters like that Liebknecht the Germans killed, and that Rosa What's-Her-Name. They were game. But you people, you try to put on all their airs without taking their chances. That's why you make me so tired—always keeping your martyr's halo polished and handy where you can slip it out of a pocket when you get just what you've been asking for."

"You're not too subtle, are you? But then one could hardly expect subtlety—"

Merle was again almost annoyed.

"Subtle be jiggered! Do you think you people are subtle? About as subtle as a ton of bricks. All your talk in that magazine about this being a land of the dollar, no ideals, no spirituality, a land of money-grubbers—all that other stuff! Say, I want to tell you this is the least money-grubbing land there is! You people would know that if you had any subtlety. Maybe you did know it. We went into that scrap for an ideal, and we're the only country that did. France might have gone for an ideal, but France had to fight, anyway.

"England? Do you think England went in only to save poor little Belgium? She herself was the next dish on the bill of fare. But we went in out of general damfoolishness—for an ideal—this country you said didn't have any. We don't care about money—less than any of those people. Watch a Frenchman count his coppers, or an Englishman that carries his in a change purse and talks about pounds but really thinks in shillings. We carry our money loose and throw it away.

"If this country had been what your sniveling little magazine called it we'd never have gone into that fight. You're not even subtle enough to know that much. We knew it would cost like hell, but we knew it was a great thing to do. Not another nation on earth would have gone in for that reason. That's the trouble with you poor little shut-ins; you decide the country hasn't any ideals because someone runs a stockyard out in Chicago or a foundry in Pittsburgh. God help you people if you'd had your way about the war! The Germans would be taking that nonsense out of you by this time. And to think you had me kind of ashamed when I went over! I thought you knew something then." He concluded on a note almost plaintive.

Merle had grown visibly impatient.

"My dear fellow, really! Your point of view is interesting enough, even if all too common. You are true to type, but so crude a type—so crude!"

"Sure, I'm crude! The country itself is crude, I guess. But it takes a crude country to have ideals—ideals with guts. Your type isn't crude, I suppose, but it hasn't any ideals, either."

"No ideals! No ideals! Ah, but that's the best thing you've said!"

He laughed masterfully, waving aside the monstrous accusation.

"Well, maybe it is the best thing I've said. You haven't any ideals that would get any action out of you. You might tear down a house, but you'd never build one. No two of you could agree on a plan. Every one of you is too conceited about himself. If you had the guts to upset the Government to-morrow you'd be fighting among yourselves before night, and you'd have a chief or a king over you the next day, just as surely as they got one in Russia. It'll take them a hundred years over there to get back to as good a government as we have right now.

"You folks haven't any ideals except to show yourselves off. That's my private opinion. The way you used to tell me I didn't have any form in golf. You people are all gesture; you can get up on a platform and take perfect practice swings at a government, but you can't hit the ball. You used to take bully practice swings at golf, but you couldn't hit the ball because you didn't have any ideal. You were a good shadow golfer, like a shadow boxer that can hit dandy blows when he's hitting at nothing. Shadow stuff, shadow ideals, shadow thinkers—that's what you people are—spoiled children pretending you're deep thinkers."

Merle turned wearily to a sheaf of papers at his hand.

"You'll see one day," he said, quietly, "and it won't be a far day. Nothing now, not even the brute force of your type, can retard the sweep of the revolution. The wave is shaping, the crest is formed. Six months from now—a year at most——"

He gestured with a hand ominously.

Wilbur briefly considered this prophecy.

"Oh, I know things look exciting here, but why wouldn't they after the turnover they've had? And I know there's grafting and profiteering and high prices and rotten spots in the Government, but why not? That's another trouble with you people: you seem to think that some form of government will be perfect. You seem to expect a perfect government from imperfect human beings."

"Ah," broke in Merle, "I recognize that! That's some of the dear old Dave Cowan talk."

"Well, don't turn it down just on that account. Sometimes he isn't so crazy. He sees through you people. He knows you would take all you could get in this world just as quick as the rest of us. He knows that much."

Merle waved it aside.

"Six months from now—a year at the most! A thrill of freedom has run through the people!"

Wilbur had relaxed in his chair. He spoke more lightly, scanning the face of his brother with veiled curiosity.

"By the way, speaking of revolutions, there's been kind of a one at Newbern; kind of a family revolution. A little one, but plenty of kick in it. They want you to come back and be a good boy. That's really what I came down here to say for them. Will you come back with me?"

Merle drew himself up—injured.

"Go back! Back to what? When my work is here, my heart, my life? I've let you talk because you're my brother. And you're so naÏvely honest in your talk about our wonderful country and its idealism and the contemptible defects of a few of us who have the long vision! But I've let you talk, and now I must tell you that I am with this cause to the end. I can't expect your sympathy, or the sympathy of my people back there, but I must go my own way without it, fight my own battle—"

He was interrupted in a tone he did not like.

"Sympathy from the folks back there? Say, what do you mean—sympathy? Did I tell you what this revolution back there was all about? Did I tell you they've shut down on you?"

"You didn't! I still don't get your meaning."

"You cast them off, didn't you?"

"Oh!" A white hand deprecated this. "That's Sharon Whipple talk—his famous brand of horse humour. Surely, you won't say he's too subtle!"

"Well, anyway, you said you couldn't accept anything more from them when you left; you were going to work with your hands, and so forth. You weren't going to take any more of their tainted money."

"I've no doubt dear old Sharon would put it as delicately as that."

"Well, did you work with your hands? Have you had to be a toiler?"

"Oh, naturally I had resources! But might I ask"—Merle said it with chill dignity—"may I inquire just what relation this might have——"

"You won't have resources any longer."

"Eh?" Merle this time did not wave. He stared stonily at his informant.

"That was the revolution. They called each other down and found that every last one of them had been sending you money, each thinking he was the only one and no one wanting you to starve. Even your dear old Sharon Whipple kicked in every month. No wonder I didn't find you in a tenement."

"Preposterous!" expostulated Merle.

"Wasn't it? Anyway, they all got mad at each other, and then they all got mad at you; then they swore an oath or something." He paused impressively. "No more checks!"

"Preposterous!" Merle again murmured.

"But kind of plausible, wasn't it? Sharon wasn't any madder than the others when they found each other out. Mrs. Harvey D. is the only one they think they can't trust now. They're going to watch that woman's funds. Say, anything she gets through the lines to you—won't keep you from toiling!"

"Poor Mother Ella!" murmured Merle, his gaze remotely upon the woman. "She has always been so fond of me."

"They're all fond of you, for that matter, I think they're fonder of you than if you'd been born there. But still they're rank Bolsheviks right now. They confiscated your estates."

"I didn't need you to tell me they're fond of me," retorted Merle with recovered spirit. He sighed. "They must have missed me horribly this last year." There was contrition in his tone. "I suppose I should have taken time to think of that, but you'll never know how my work here has engrossed me. I suppose one always does sacrifice to ideals. Still, I owed them something—I should have remembered that." He closed on a note of regret.

"Well, you better go back with me. They'll be mighty glad to see you."

"We can make that eleven-forty-eight if we hurry," he said. "I'll have to change a few things."

He bustled cheerily into a bedroom. As he moved about there he whistled the "Marseillaise."

Ten minutes later he emerged with bag, hat, and stick. The last item of corduroy had vanished from his apparel. He was quietly dressed, as an exploiter of the masses or a mechanic. He set the bag on the desk, and going to a window peered from behind the curtain into the street.

"Some of those rowdies are still prowling about," he said, "but there are cabs directly across the street."

He pulled the soft hat well down over his brow.

Wilbur had sat motionless in his chair while the dressing went on. He got up now.

"Listen!" he said. "If you hear back home of my telling people you're a dangerous radical, don't be worried. Even the Cowans have some family pride. And don't worry about the prowling rowdies out there. I'll get you across the street to a cab. Give me the bag."

As they crossed the street, Merle—at his brother's elbow—somewhat jauntily whistled, with fair accuracy, not the "Marseillaise," but an innocent popular ballad. Nor did he step aside for a torn strip of red cloth lying in their way.