“I am going to war when I get big, before I ever go to the purple notches. I know I am.”
Thaine had been listening intently and now he broke in with face aglow and eyes full of eagerness.
“God forbid!” Carey said. “The lure of the drum beat might be hard for older men to resist even now.”
“Your hand will fit a plow handle better than a gun-stock, Thaine,” his father assured him, looking down at 146 the boy’s square, sun-browned hand with a dimple in each knuckle.
Thaine shut his lips tightly and said no more. But his father, who knew the heart of a boy, wondered what thoughts might lie back of that silence.
“I have known Jim all my life,” Asher Aydelot took up the conversation where Thaine had interrupted it. “That is why I have wondered at the tenacity of his holding on out here. A man of his temperament is prone to let go quickly. Besides, Jim is far from being a strong man physically.”
“When he was down with pneumonia in the early seventies he was ready to give up. Didn’t want to get well and was bound not to do it,” Dr. Carey said, “but somehow a letter I had brought him seemed to change him with one reading. ‘I will do anything to get back to strength and work,’ he declared, and he has worked ever since like a man who knew his business, even if his business judgment is sometimes faulty.”
They rode awhile in silence, drinking in the delicious air of early autumn. Presently Dr. Carey said:
“Aydelot, I am taking a letter down to Jim this morning. It is in the same handwriting as the one I took when he had the pneumonia so severely. I learned a little something of Jim’s affairs through friends when I was East studying some years ago.”
He paused for a moment. Then, as if to change the subject, he continued: