“Listen, guardians! Do you know what it is to hit your man, to hit him in hot blood—square to the jaw—and drop him cold? I want that. And I want to love, and kiss, and risk, and play the lusty, husky fool. I want to take my chance. I want my careening riot, and I want it while I am young, but not while I am too young. And I’m going to have it. And in the meantime I play the game at college, I hold myself, I equip myself, so that when I turn loose I am going to have the best chance of my best. Oh, believe me, I do not always sleep well of nights.”
“You mean?” queried Mr. Crockett.
“Sure. That’s just what I mean. I haven’t gone wild yet, but just watch me when I start.”
“And you will start when you graduate?”
The remarkable youngster shook his head.
“After I graduate I’m going to take at least a year of post-graduate courses in the College of Agriculture. You see, I’m developing a hobby—farming. I want to do something ... something constructive. My father wasn’t constructive to amount to anything. Neither were you fellows. You struck a new land in pioneer days, and you picked up money like a lot of sailors shaking out nuggets from the grass roots in a virgin placer—”
“My lad, I’ve some little experience in Californian farming,” Mr. Crockett interrupted in a hurt way.
“Sure you have, but you weren’t constructive. You were—well, facts are facts—you were destructive. You were a bonanza farmer. What did you do? You took forty thousand acres of the finest Sacramento Valley soil and you grew wheat on it year after year. You never dreamed of rotation. You burned your straw. You exhausted your humus. You plowed four inches and put a plow-sole like a cement sidewalk just four inches under the surface. You exhausted that film of four inches and now you can’t get your seed back.
“You’ve destroyed. That’s what my father did. They all did it. Well, I’m going to take my father’s money and construct. I’m going to take worked-out wheat-land that I can buy as at a fire-sale, rip out the plow-sole, and make it produce more in the end than it did when you fellows first farmed it.”
It was at the end of his Junior year that Mr. Crockett again mentioned Dick’s threatened period of wildness.