“Now that he’s been invalided home, and his year of service is up anyhow, I guess he’ll call it a day and go back to the store. I’m only grateful he didn’t make you go with him. It’s where you ought to be. I know that. But I’d be awful lonely, Jimmie, lad, without you.”
“Why ought I go back home?” demanded Jimmie. “Anybody can go to school. School will always be there. So will home. But maybe the war won’t. And I am of use here. You said so, yourself. So did the men. Lot’s of ’em.”
“It isn’t what folks say that counts,” said Dad, though his face glowed a little. “Anybody can get a cheer by spectacular work. I’d rather have you back in Ideala, learning the rule of three, than fighting because you like to have the boys trundle you around on their shoulders the way they did that day when we got back to the corps after that charge.
“It’s nice to be praised. No one but a hypocrite will say he doesn’t like it. But it isn’t the real thing to work for.
“The real thing is this country of ours. I keep dinning that into your ears because I don’t want you to forget it for a second. We’re here to work for it, you and I. I had a hard time to make your father understand. But at last he did. That’s why he let you stay. He’s changed a good deal, your father has, this past year. A year ago he would have proven wisely to me that I was quite wrong.”
“A year ago you would maybe have believed him,” suggested Jimmie. “Isn’t that part of the change?”
“Perhaps,” mused Dad. “Perhaps so. Jimmie, there are times when you have almost too much sense. How about the fearful and ghastly wound? Is it getting all right?”
The boy chuckled. The hurts which he and his grandfather had sustained during the little flurry of attack on the cottage had both been quick of healing.
There had been no occasion to go to hospital; and a few days of semi-invalidism had left the two tough bodies well-nigh as good as new. Yet each was daily in the habit of inquiry, with new superlative adjectives and expressions of sympathy, after the other’s injury. And to each the joke held a pristine freshness.
“Emp was the slowest of us three to get on his legs again,” said Jimmie. “And even he’s all right now. Say, I wonder will he ever catch that flea? He’s been hunting for it and biting at it ever since the day I found him.”