Dave frowned at his son hopefully, as one saved might regard one who still might be.
"I'm not owning any land," suggested his son.
"No; but it's tricky stuff. You get round it, working at it, nursing it—pretty soon you'll want to own some, then you're dished. It's the first step that counts. After that you may crave to get out and see places, but you can't; you have to plant the hay and the corn. You to fool round those Whipple farms—I don't care if it is a big job with big money—it's playing with fire. Pretty soon you'll be as tight-fixed to a patch of soil as any yap that ever blew out the gas in a city hotel. You'll stick there and raise hogs en masse for free people that can take a trip when they happen to feel like it." Dave had but lately learned en masse and was glad to find a use for it. He spoke with the untroubled detachment of one saved, who could return at will to the glad life of nomady. "You, with the good loose trades you know! Do you want to take root in this hole like a willow branch that someone shoves into the ground? Don't you ever want to move—on and on and on?"
His son at the time had denied stoutly that he felt this urge. Now, after a week of his new work, he would have been less positive. It was a Sunday afternoon, and he sprawled face down on the farther shaded slope of West Hill, confessing a lively fear that he might take root like the willow. Late in that first week the old cry had begun to ring in his ears—Where do we go from here?—bringing the cold perception that he would not go anywhere from here.
Through all his early years in Newbern he had not once felt the wander-bidding; never, as Dave Cowan put it, had he been itchy-footed for the road. Then, with the war, he had crept up to look over the top of the world, and now, unaccountably, in the midst of work he had looked forward to with real pleasure, his whole body was tingling for new horizons.
It seemed to be so with a dozen of the boys he had come back with. Some of these were writing to him, wanting him to come here, to come there; to go on and on with them to inviting places they knew—and on again from there! Mining in South America, lumbering in the Northwest, ranching in the Southwest; one of his mates would be a sailor, and one would be with a circus. Something within him beyond reason goaded him to be up and off. He felt his hold slipping; his mind floated in an ecstasy of relaxation.
His first days at the Home Farm had been good-enough days. Sharon Whipple had told him a modern farmer must first be a mechanic, and he was already that—and no one had shot at him. But the novelty of approaching good machine-gun cover without apprehension had worn off.
"Ain't getting cold feet, are you?" asked Sharon one day, observing him hang idly above an abused tractor with the far-off look in his eyes.
"Nothing like that," he had protested almost too warmly. "No, sir; I'll slog on right here."
Now for the first time in all their years of association he saw an immense gulf between himself and Sharon Whipple. Sharon was an old man, turning to look back as he went down a narrow way into a hidden valley. But he—Wilbur Cowan—was climbing a long slope into new light. How could they touch? How could this old man hold him to become another old man on the same soil—when he could be up and off, a happy world romper like his father before him?