"Almost human," he declared. "Kept back a few million years by accident—our little feathered brother." He gestured toward the house. "Old Flapdoodle, in there, he's a rabid red these days. Got tired of being a patriot. Worked hard for a year trying to prove that Vielhaber was a German spy, flapping his curtain at night to the German Foreign Office. But no one paid any attention to him except a few other flapdoodles, so then he began to read your brother's precious words, and now he's a violent comrade. Fact! expecting any day that the workers will take things over and he'll come into money—money the interests have kept him out of. He kind of licks his chops when he talks about it. Never heard him talk about his wife's share, though. Say, that brother of yours is making a plumb fool of himself!"
"He didn't understand."
"No—and he doesn't yet."
"Where is he now?"
"Oh"—Dave circled a weary hand to the zenith—"off somewhere holy-rolling. Gets his name in the papers—young poet radical that abandoned life of luxury to starve with toiling comrades. Say, do you know what a toiling comrade gets per day now? No matter. Your brother hasn't toiled any. Makes red-hot speeches. That Whipple bunch reared at last and shut off his magazine money, so he said he couldn't take another cent wrung from the anguished sweat of serfs. But it ain't his hands he toils with, and he ain't a real one, either. Plenty of real ones in his bunch that would stand the gaff, but not him. He's a shine. Of course they're useful, these reds. Keep things stirred up—human yeast cakes, only they get to thinking they're the dough, too. That brother of yours knows all the lines; says 'em hot, too, but that's only so he'll get more notice. Say, tell us about the war.
"It was an awful big one," said his son.
Soon after a novel breakfast the following morning—in that it was late and leisurely and he ate from a chair at a table—he heard the squealing brakes of a motor car and saw one brought to a difficult stop at the Penniman gate. Sharon Whipple, the driver, turned to look back at the machine indignantly, as if it had misbehaved. Wilbur Cowan met him at the gate.
It became Sharon's pretense that he was not hugging the boy, merely feeling the muscles in his shoulders and back to see if he were as good a lightweight as ever. He pounded and thumped and punched and even made as if to wrestle with the returned soldier, laughing awkwardly through it; but his florid face had paled with the excitement.
"I knew you'd come back! Old Sammy Dodwell happened to mention he'd seen you; said he hadn't noticed you before for most a month, he thought. But I knew you was coming, all right! Time and time again I told people you would. Told every one that. I bet you had some narrow escapes, didn't you now?"