It was Mrs. Moore's turn to grunt, which she did, in the manner of a wifely sniff. And the two sat in silence, hands clasped in the lovely summer night.
After all, Roger did not get beyond a first attempt at the railroad building. He began the tunnel the next day, he and the two little Wolfs digging vigorously until a hole as large as a bath tub was completed. While resting from this toil, Roger conceived the idea of making a wading pool, with the aid of the hose. Some vague lesson won from previous experience made him ask permission of his mother and this given, the three children spent an ecstatic, though muddy, day in the improvised pond.
Roger's father suggested that evening that the pool be gradually enlarged to make a swimming pool. He enlisted Mr. Wolf's aid for the summer evenings and in a couple of weeks a very creditable pool, brick and concrete lined, made a summer heaven of the back yard for the little friends.
It was the pool that made this summer perhaps the most memorable one of Roger's childhood. It was the one, anyway, to which in after years his mind harked back with the most pleasure and with the greatest frequency.
Even little Charley learned to swim. Roger never was to forget her slender beauty, as she stood ready for her dive on the pool edge. This was his last memory of the little girl, for the Prebles gave up farming that fall and moved away. Somebody said that Mr. Preble drank up his farm, which at the time seemed mere nonsense to Roger.
Roger's tenth summer was memorable too. But he ceased to think of himself as a child then, because that was the summer his mother had typhoid fever and all summer long he was practically his own man. His father could give him no time, for there was a strike in the factory that lasted during the six weeks that Mrs. Moore was the sickest. The night that his mother was passing through her crisis, men threw stones in the kitchen windows.
Mrs. Moore believed that she was going to die. One day when her mind was clear, despite her deathly weakness, she made them leave the little boy alone with her while she told him of her consuming anxiety over his temper. And she talked to him too about a motherless young manhood and how he must try to keep clean and straight. She made him promise that if any of the facts of life puzzled him, he would go to his father and not let naughty minded little boys tell him bad stories. Then while Roger sobbed, she fell asleep and when she woke she was definitely better. But Roger never felt like a child again. He felt that he knew all that men knew about life, and death as well.
Mrs. Moore never was really strong again. Their keeping a servant dated from that summer and so did a little electric car, the first one in Eagle's Wing. Yes, perhaps this was as memorable a summer as Roger's seventh. Yet it lacked the magic and the beauty that made imperishable the joy of the swimming pool summer.
And then came his fourteenth summer.
Roger was a strapping big lad at fourteen. He was as tall as his father, who was five feet ten, and was still growing rapidly. He was thin but hard-muscled, with good shoulders that were not as awkward as they looked. After a year of pleading, his father agreed to let him spend his vacation in the plow factory; and Roger in overalls, his dinner pail in hand, was his father's pride and his mother's despair. She did like to see her only child well dressed.