Of all humans cumbering the earth Dave Cowan thought farmers the most pitiable. To this tireless-winged bird of passage 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 masse for free people that can take a trip when they happen to feel like it." Dave had but lately learned en masse 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 association 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 space.

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 mass, 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 glass 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 grass, 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.

He rose to his feet, with a dry laugh at his own credulity, taking some slow steps forward, expecting each stride to resolve the post to its true dimensions. He was within a dozen feet of it before he saw it could not be a post—anyway, not the same post. His scalp crept into minute wrinkles at the back of his head. He knew the feeling—fear! But, as in other times, he could not make his feet go back. Two other steps and he saw she must be there. She had not stirred, but the rising light caught her wan face and a pale glint of eyes.

All at once his fear was greater—greater than any he had known in battle. His feet dragged protestingly, but he forced them on. He wanted her to speak or move to break that tension of fear. But not until he reached out stiffening fingers to touch her did she stir. Then she gave a little whispered cry and all at once it was no longer moonlight for him, but full day. A girl in nurse's cap and a faded, much laundered dress of light blue stood before a battered church, beside a timbered breach in its gray stone wall. He was holding her.

The song was coming to him, harsh and full throated from many men: "Where do we go from here, boys, where do we go from here?"

"We don't go anywhere from here," he heard himself say in anger. They were the only words he had spoken.

The girl was shaking as she had shaken back at that church; uttering little shapeless cries from a throat that by turns fluttered and tightened. One clenched hand was fiercely thumping his shoulder. They were on strange land, as if they had the crust of the moon itself beneath their feet. They seemed to know it had been true.

They were sitting on a log in shadow. He rose and stepped into the light, facing his watch to the moon, now gone so high it had paled from gold to silver. He went to her again.

"Do you know it's nearly one?"

"It must be that—I suppose so."

"Shouldn't you be going?"

She leaned forward, shoulders drooping, a huddled bit of black in the loose cloak she wore. He waited. At length she drew her shoulders up with a quick intake of breath. She held this a moment, her chin lifted.

"There, now I've decided," she said.

"What?"

"I'm not going back."

"No?"

"Not going through any more fuss. I'm too tired. It seemed as if I'd never get here, never get out of that dreadful place, never get out of Paris, never get out of Brest, never get off the boat, never get home! I'm too tired for any more never gets. I'm not going to have talking and planning and arguments and tearful relatives forever and a day more. See if I do! I'm here, and I'm not going to break it again. I'm not going back!"

He reached down to pat her hand with a humouring air.

"Where will you go?"

"That's up to you."

"But what can I——"

"I'm going where you go. I tell you I'm too tired to have any talk."

He sat down beside her.

"Yes, you're a tired child," he told her.

She detected the humoring inflection.

"None of that! I'm tired, but I'm stubborn. I'm not going back. I'm supposed to be sleeping soundly in my little bed. In the morning, before I'm supposed to be up, I'll issue a communique from—any old place; or tell 'em face to face. I won't mind that a little bit after everything's over. It's telling what's going to be and listening to talk about it that I won't have. I'm not up to it. Now you talk!"

"You're tired. Are you too tired to know your own mind?"

"No; just too tired to argue with it, fight it; and I'm free, white, and twenty-one; and I've read about the self-determination of small peoples."

"Say, aren't you afraid?"

"Don't be silly! Of course I'm afraid! What is that about perfect love casting out fear?—don't believe it! I'm scared to death—truly!"

"Go back till to-morrow."

"I won't! I've gone over all that."

"All right! Shove off!"

He led her to the ambushed Can, whose blemishes became all too apparent in the merciless light of the moon.

"What a lot of wound chevrons it has!" she exclaimed.

"Well, I didn't expect anything like this. I could have got——"

"It looks like a permanent casualty. Will it go?"

"It goes for me. You're sure you don't think it's better to——"

"On your way!" she gayly ordered, but her voice caught, and she clung to him a moment before entering the car. "No; I'm not weakening—don't you think it! But let me rest a second."

She was in the car, again wearily gay. The Can hideously broke the quiet.

"Home, James!" she commanded.

Dawn found the car at rest on the verge of a hill with a wide-sweeping view over and beyond the county seat of Newbern County. Patricia slept within the fold of his arm. At least half of the slow forty miles she had slept against his shoulder in spite of the car's resounding progress over a country road. Once in the darkness she had wakened long enough to tell him not to go away.

The rising sun lighted the town of Halton below them, and sent level rays across a wide expanse of farmland beyond it, flat meadows and rolling upland. White mist shrouded the winding trail of a creek. It was the kind of landscape he had viewed yesterday with a rising distaste; land that had tricked people from their right to wander; to go places on a train when they would.

He brought his eyes back from the treacherous vista and turned them down to the face of the sleeping girl. A pale scarf was wound about her head, and he could see but little beyond it but the tip of her nose, a few scattered, minute freckles on one cheek. She was limp, one bare hand falling inertly over the edge of the seat between them. He looked out again at the checkerboard of farms. He, too, had been tricked.

"But what a fine trick!" he said aloud. "No wonder it works!"

He dozed himself presently, nodding till his forward-pitching head would waken him. Afterward he heard Spike saying: "So dark you can't see your hand before your face." He came awake. His head was on Patricia's shoulder, her arm supporting him.

"You must have gone to sleep and let the car stop," she told him. He stared sleepily, believing it. "But I want my breakfast," she reminded him. He sat up, winking the sleep from his eyes, shaking it from his head.

"Of course," he said.

He looked again out over the land to which an old device had inveigled him. A breeze had come with the dawn, stirring the grain fields into long ripples. At the roadside was the tossing silver of birch leaves.

"This is one whale of a day for us two, isn't it?" he demanded.

"You said it!" she told him.

"Breakfast and a license and—"

"You know it!" she declared.

"Still afraid?"

"More than ever! It's a wonder and a wild desire, but it scares me stiff—you're so strange."

"You know, it isn't too late."

She began to thump him with a clenched fist up between his shoulders.

"Carry on!" she ordered. "There isn't a slacker in the whole car!"

A few hours later, in the dining room of the Whipple New Place, Gideon, Harvey D., and Merle Whipple were breakfasting. To them entered Sharon Whipple from his earlier breakfast, ruddy, fresh-shaven, bubbling.

"On my way to the Home Farm," he explained, "but I had to drop in for a look at the girl by daylight. She seemed too peaked last night."

"Pat's still sleeping," said her father over his egg cup.

"That's good! I guess a rest was all she needed. Beats all, girls nowadays seem to be made of wire rope. You take that one—"

A telephone bell rang in the hall beyond, and Merle Whipple went to it.

"Hello, hello! Whipple New Place—Merle Whipple speaking." He listened, standing in the doorway to turn a puzzled face to the group about the table. "Hello! Who—who?" His bewilderment was apparent. "But it's Pat talking," he said, "over long distance."

"Calling from her room upstairs to fool you," warned Sharon. "Don't I know her flummididdles?"

But the look of bewilderment on Merle's face had become a look of pure fright. He raised a hand sternly to Sharon.

"Once more," he called, hoarsely, and again listened with widening eyes. He lifted his face to the group, the receiver still at his ear. "She says—good heaven! She says, 'I've gone A.W.O.L., and now I'm safe and married—I'm married to Wilbur Cowan.'" He uttered his brother's name in the tone of a shocked true Whipple.

"Good heaven!" echoed Harvey D.

"I'm blest!" said Gideon.

"I snum to goodness!" said the dazed Sharon. "The darned skeesicks!"

Merle still listened. Again he raised a now potent hand.

"She says she doesn't know how she came to do it, except that he put a comether on her."

He hung up the receiver and fell into a chair before the table that held the telephone.

"Scissors and white aprons!" said Sharon. "Of all things you wouldn't expect!"

Merle stood before the group with a tragic face.

"It's hard, Father, but she says it's done. I suppose—I suppose we'll have to make the best of it."

Hereupon Sharon Whipple's eyes began to blink rapidly, his jaw dropped, and he slid forward in his chair to writhe in a spasm of what might be weirdly silent laughter. His face was purple, convulsed, but no sound came from his moving lips. The others regarded him with alarm.

"Not a stroke?" cried Harvey D., and ran to his side. As he sought to loosen Sharon's collar the old man waved him off and became happily vocal.

"Oh, oh!" he gasped. "That Merle boy has brightened my whole day!"

Merle frowned.

"Perhaps you may see something to laugh at," he said, icily.

Sharon controlled his seizure. Pointing his eyebrows severely, he cocked a presumably loaded thumb at Merle.

"Let me tell you, young man, the best this family can make of that marriage will be a darned good best. Could you think of a better best—say, now?" Merle turned impatiently from the mocker.

"Blest if I can—on the spur of the moment!" said Gideon.

Harvey D. looked almost sharply at the exigent Merle.

"Pat's twenty-five and knows her own mind better than we do," he said.

"I never knew it at all!" said Gideon.

"It's almost a distinct relief," resumed Harvey D. "As I think of it I like it." He went to straighten the painting of an opened watermelon beside a copper kettle, that hung above the sideboard. "He's a fine young chap." He looked again at Merle, fixing knife and fork in a juster alignment on his plate. "I dare say we needed him in the family."

Late the following afternoon Sharon triumphantly brought his car to a stop before the gateway leading up to the red farmhouse. The front door proving unresponsive, he puffed about to the rear. He found a perturbed Patricia Cowan, in cap and apron, tidying the big kitchen. Her he greeted rapturously.

"This kitchen—" began the new mistress.

"So he put a comether on you!"

"Absolutely—when I wasn't looking!"

"Put one on me, too," said Sharon; "years ago."

"This kitchen," began Patricia again, "is an unsanitary outrage. It needs a thousand things done to it. We'd never have put up with this in the Army. That sink there"—she pointed it out—"must have something of a carbolic nature straight off."

"I know, I know!" Sharon was placating. "I'm going to put everything right for you."

"New paint for all the woodwork—white."

"Sure thing—as white as you want it."

"And blue velours curtains for the big room. I always dreamed I'd have a house with blue velours curtains."

"Sure, sure! Anything you want you order."

"And that fireplace in the big room—I burned some trash there this morning, and it simply won't inhale."

"Never did," said Sharon. "We'll run the chimney up higher. Anything else?"

"Oh, lots! I've a long list somewhere."

"I bet you have! But it's a good old house; don't build 'em like this any more; not a nail in it; sound as a nut. Say, miss, did you know there was high old times in this house about seventy-three years ago? Fact! They thought I wasn't going to pull through. I was over two days old before it looked like I'd come round. Say, I learned to walk out in that side yard. That reminds me—" Sharon hesitated in mild embarrassment—"there's a place between them two wings—make a bully place for a sun room; spoil the architecture, mebbe, but who cares? Sun room—big place to play round in—play room, or anything like that."

Patricia had been searching among a stack of newspapers, but she had caught "sun room."

"Stunning!" she said. "We need another big place right now, or when my things get here."

Sharon coughed.

"Need it more later, I guess."

But Patricia had found her paper.

"Oh, here's something I put aside to ask you about! I want you to understand I'm going to be all the help I can here. This advertisement says 'Raise Belgian hares,' because meat is so high. Do you know—do people really make millions at it, and could I do the work?"

Sharon was shaking his head.

"You could if you didn't have something else to do. And I suppose they sell for money, though I never did hear tell of a Belgian-hare millionaire. Heard of all other kinds, but not him. But you look here, young woman, I hope there'll be other things not sold by the pound that'll keep you from rabbit raising. This family's depending a lot on you. Didn't you hear my speech about that fine sun room?"

"Will you please not bother me at a time like this?" scolded Patricia. "Now out with you—he's outside somewhere! And can't you ever in the world for five minutes get mere Whipples out of your mind?" She actively waved him on from the open door.

Sharon passed through a grape arbour, turning beyond it to study the site of the sun room. All in a moment he built and peopled it. How he hoped they would be coming along to play in there; at least three before he was too old to play with them. He saw them now; saw them, moreover, upon the flimsiest of promises, all superbly gifted with the Whipple nose. Then he went hopefully off toward the stables. He came upon Wilbur Cowan inspecting a new reaper under one of the sheds. This time the old man feigned no pounding of the boy's back—made no pretense that he did not hug him.

"I'm so glad, so glad, so almighty glad!" he said as they stood apart.

He did not speak with his wonted exuberance, saying the words very quietly. But Sharon had not to be noisy to sound sincere.

"Thanks," said Wilbur. "Of course I couldn't be sure how her people would——"

"Stuff!" said Sharon. "All tickled to death but one near-Whipple and he's only annoyed. But you've been my boy—in my fool mind I always had you for my boy, when you was little and when you went to war. You could of known that, and that was enough for you to know. Of course I never did think of you and Pat. That was too gosh-all perfect. Of course I called her a rattlepate, but she was my girl as much as you was my boy."

The old eyes shone mistily upon Wilbur, then roved to the site of his dream before he continued.

"Me? I'm getting on—and on. Right fast, too. But you—you and that fine girl—why, you two are a new morning in a new world, so fresh and young and proud of each other, the way you are!" He hesitated, his eyes coming back. "Only thing I hope for now—before I get bedfast or something—say, take a look at the space between them south wings—stand over this way a mite." Sharon now built there, with the warmest implications, a perfect sun room. "That'll be one grand place," he affirmed of his work when all was done.

"Yes, it sounds good," replied Wilbur.

"Oh, a grand place, big as outdoors, getting any sun there is—great for winter, great for rainy days!" Wistfully he searched the other's face. "You know, Buck, a grand place to—play in, or anything like that."

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

THE END