little pride in himself to know that he was planning his own course. He felt, suddenly, above the wheedling, anxious tone of his former leader, who, he decided, didn’t have enough brains to keep his personal concern out of his argument. Exasperated at last, Lou swore openly at all “young milk-fed Rubes who would keep a man hanging around for weeks, not knowing their own minds, and then fail to come across at the last.”
And Billy laughed—laughed right into the threatening face with its hardened cunning, laughed for pure joy at the new spirit that had just awakened in him, laughed also because he had measured carefully the distance to the last car of the moving train. He caught it just in time to leave Lou clutching foolishly at the place where he had been.
Miles away the Representative had again relapsed into speculation as to whether his work was worth while.
It was only a few hours from the time Billy left the Swamp Farm until he walked up the lane again, but it seemed as though he had been in a new, bigger country for a long time. He saw the limits of his environment in a new perspective and they looked less binding. The feel of the familiar, worn little door-latch under his hand carried a distinct sense of being back in the right place. Mary, with a way women have
of watching the road while they work, had seen him coming. It wasn’t in her nature to cry out, or to take him in her arms. She just stood immovable, her breath coming fast, but in the glad welcome illuminating the drawn lines of her patient face the boy saw all the wonder of a mother’s unquestioning love, and he knew it would have been the same, however, or whenever he had come back—if she were still there. She didn’t ask him where he had been; she didn’t mention the note he had left; she only said:
“You haven’t had your breakfast.”
And Billy, because he was sixteen years old and practised in curbing his emotions, could not go to her. He just looked back as eloquently as he could, and asked:
“Where’s Jean?”
Jean was crumbled up on the bed in her little cold room upstairs, crying her heart out. Billy could manage with her more easily. He gathered her up and patted her back and smoothed her hair so awkwardly that it tangled about his fingers. He said he shouldn’t have done it, and then told her quite firmly to stop now right away; that he was back and he was going to stay. He was fast becoming a man.
Even Dan realized this when Billy met him in the stable for an interview. The plans he had been designing began to lose shape in the fearlessness of the new individual whom he had always