“Sown his wild oats, in fact,� remarked Crane.
“Well,� replied the other. “In a sense they were very quiet oats. Almost what you might call Quaker Oats. He was a Puritan and a Prohibitionist and a Pacifist and an Internationalist; in short, everything that is in darkness and the shadow of death. But what you said about him was quite right. His heart’s in the right place. It’s on his sleeve. That’s why I preached the gospel to the noble savage and made him a convert.�
“But what did you convert him to?� inquired the other.
“Private property,� replied Pierce promptly. “Being a millionaire he had never heard of it. But when I explained the first elementary idea of it in a simple form, he was quite taken with the notion. I pointed out that he might abandon robbery on a large scale and create property on a small scale. He felt it was very revolutionary, but he admitted it was right. Well, you know he’d bought this big English estate out here. He was going to play the philanthropist, and have a model estate with all the regular trimmings; heads hygienically shaved by machinery every morning; and the cottagers admitted once a month into their own front gardens and told to keep off the grass. But I said to him: ‘If you’re going to give things to people, why not give ’em? If you give your friend a plant in a pot, you don’t send him an inspector from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vegetables to see he waters it properly. If you give your friend a box of cigars, you don’t make him write a monthly report of how many he smokes a day. Can’t you be a little generous with your generosity? Why don’t you use your money to make free men instead of to make slaves? Why don’t you give your tenants their land and have done with it, or let ’em have it very cheap?’ And he’s done it; he’s really done it. He’s created hundreds of small proprietors, and changed the whole of this countryside. That’s why I want you to come up and see one of the small farms.�
“Yes,� said Colonel Crane, “I should like to see the farm.�
“There’s a lot of fuss about it, too; there’s the devil of a row,� went on the young man, in very high spirits. “Lots of big combines and things are trying to crush the small farmers with all sorts of tricks; they even complain of interference by an American. You can imagine how much Rosenbaum Low and Goldstein and Guggenheimer must be distressed by the notion of a foreigner interfering in England. I want to know how a foreigner could interfere less than by giving back their land to the English people and clearing out. They all put it on to me; and right they are. I regard Oates as my property; my convert; captive of my bow and spear.�
“Captive of your Long Bow, I imagine,� said the Colonel. “I bet you told him a good many things that nobody but a shrewd business man would have been innocent enough to believe.�
“If I use the Long Bow,� replied Pierce with dignity, “it is a weapon with heroic memories proper to a yeoman of England. With what more fitting weapon could we try to establish a yeomanry?�
“There is something over there,� said Crane quietly, “that looks to me rather like another sort of weapon.�
They had by this time come in full sight of the farm buildings which crowned the long slope; and beyond a kitchen-garden and an orchard rose a thatched roof with a row of old-fashioned lattice windows under it; the window at the end standing open. And out of this window at the edge of the block of building protruded a big black object, rigid and apparently cylindrical, thrust out above the garden and dark against the morning daylight.