"You mustn't expect the sun and the moon to stand still before me."
"Oh, well, I dare say I'm as foolish as other mothers." Mrs. Percival
laughed as though she must do that or cry. "But you were certainly born
to something, Dick. You've shown it ever since you organized your first
militia company and whipped the five-year-olds in the next street."
"And he's kept right on bossing his particular gang ever since. Richard
Dux," smiled Ellery.
The boy grinned up at them, and his mind traveled to those later days
when that leadership of his was so easily acknowledged as to be
axiomatic. He saw in panorama the stormy joys of college life with the
victories of the field. He beheld again the quieter hours when the young
men saw visions together and felt themselves called to put shoulder to
the car of righteousness, while they discussed with the sublime
self-sufficiency of inexperience the politics and sociology of the
world. The fellows all believed in him as one of those who are destined
to be prime pushers at the wheel. Perhaps he would be among those
conquerors who climb aboard and ride, forgetful of the plodding crowd
which toils at the drudgery of progress but does not taste its glory. So
many oblivions go to make one reputation.
Dick knew that power was in him. To others it showed in his unconscious
self-confidence of carriage, in his eyes that glowed, in the electric
something that compelled attraction.
But now college visions were fading into "the light of common day". The
boys had gone home to be men. Success began to look not like an aurora,
but like a solid structure built of bricks that must be carried in hods.
Hods are uninspiring objects.
Dick stared at the pile of unlit logs in the fireplace and felt the
rhythmic strokes of his mother's hand upon his well-thatched head as she
watched him in sympathetic silence; but he saw the eyes of his fellow
classmen and felt their good-by hand-clasps. Again the train thumped
with monotonous rolling as it brought him ever westward and homeward.
Farm after farm, village and town, city upon city, long level prairies
that cried out of fertility, the rush and roar and chaos of Chicago, and
then more cities and rivers and hills and lakes, and now the blessed
restfulness of home and twilight. He had seen it all many times
before--two thousand miles of space to be covered between New Haven and
St. Etienne. On this last journey it had taken on a new significance to
his eyes,--a significance which matched his dreams. It was instinct
with meaning of which he was a part.
This was his country, huge, half-formed, needing men. Its bigness was
not an accident of geography, but a pregnant fact in the consciousness
of a people as wide as itself. Thousands of redmen once covered it, and
it was then only a big place, not a great country. It must be a mighty
race who would master those miles of inert earth.