"All right. I'm goin' to be a soldier—and you'll see. I'm going into the militia as soon as I'm old enough."
"So'm I."
Flora laughed. "Who will you fight with you when you are in the militia?" she asked.
The boys exchanged embarrassed glances.
"I guess the militia could fight all right if it had to," said Dick.
"Of course it could," said Frank.
For four years after the conversation that took place on the bank of Frying Pan River Flora and Dick and the rest of the Starkley family except Henry lived on in the quiet way of the folk at Beaver Dam. The younger children continued to go daily to school at the Crossroads, to take part in the lighter tasks of farm and house, to play and fish and argue and dream great things of the future.
Peter spent each winter in the lumber woods. In his nineteenth year he invested his savings in a deserted farm near Beaver Dam and passed the greater part of the summer of 1913 in repairing the old barn on his new possession, cutting bushes out of the old meadows, mending fences and clearing land.
That was only a beginning he said. He would own a thousand acres before long and show the people of Beaver Dam—including his own father—how to farm on a big scale and in an up-to-date manner.