“’Tis too many high notions the school’s been putting into your head, Larry, boy,” he deprecated. “You’d be forgetting that your father was an engineer before you—till the old ’69 went into the ditch and gave me this”—moving the stump in the empty sleeve.
“No, I’m not forgetting, Dad; not for a single minute,” Larry broke in quickly. “You’ve made the best of your chance—and of everything. And I want to do the same. Maybe I am doing it in the round-house; I can’t think it out yet. But I mean to think it out. There are Kathie and Jimmie and Bessie and little Jack; they’ve got to have their chance at the schools, too, the same as I’ve had mine.”
“And you’ll give it to them, Larry, if I can’t. With even a fireman’s pay you could help.”
“I know,” said Larry; and at this point the little heart-to-heart talk slipped back into the comradely silence and stayed there.
Larry ate supper with the family that evening as usual, but he said so little, and was so evidently preoccupied, that his mother asked him if he wasn’t feeling well. The talk with his father on the way home had been his first attempt to put the vague stirrings inside of him into spoken words, and the natural consequence was that he was trying to make the stirrings take some sort of definite and tangible shape. Of course they refused utterly to do anything so reasonable as that—which is the way that all ambitious stirrings have in their early stages—and the result was to make him thoughtful and tongue-tied.
So the table chatter went on through the meal without any help from him, and he found himself listening with only half an ear when his father told of a perfectly hair-raising escape an automobile full of people had had on his crossing during the day. Kathryn, who was fifteen, was the only one besides the mother to notice Larry’s preoccupation, and when he came down-stairs after supper to go out, she was waiting at the front door for him.
“What is it, Larry?” she asked. “Did something go twisty with you to-day?”
“Not a thing in the wide world, Kathie,” he denied, calling up the good-natured grin and laying an arm in brotherly fashion across her shoulders.