By this time his sister had quite finished smoothing out the work on her knee. “Of course, I knew all along you’d go somewhere,” she said. “You’d find a war, or anything like that, too tame! Will you never settle down, Richard!”
“I hope not.”
“But you’ll take the boys out of school.”
“Not at all. To the contrary, I’ll put them in school, and a good one. Besides, we’ll not start till after school is anyhow almost out for the spring term. We’ll just be about as early as Lewis and Clark up the Missouri in the spring.”
“You’ll be going by rail?”
“Certainly not! We’ll be going by boat, small boat, little boat, maybe not all boat.”
“A year! Two years!”
Uncle Dick smiled. “Well, no. We’ve only got this summer to go up the Missouri and back, so, maybe as Rob did when he enlisted for eighteen, we’ll have to smouch a little!”
“I’ll warrant you’ve talked it all over with those boys already.”
Uncle Dick smiled guiltily. “I shouldn’t wonder!” he admitted.