"Thanks for the tribute," Madeline smiled as he disappeared down the
drive. "Dick, I wish you'd always be on hand when he comes. He makes my
brain feel like a woolly dog."
"Rummy chap," said Norris.
The older people came in to greet the boy they had known all his life,
to ask the innumerable usual questions, to say the inevitable things
through dinner.
Afterwards, when the last fragments of sunset burned through and across
the water, they gathered on the piazza. It was that dreamy hour when
women find it easy to be silent and men to talk. Madeline and her mother
sat close, with hands restfully clasped in their joy at being together.
Mr. Elton eyed the two young men from his vantage of years of shrewd
wisdom. Both the boys were clean-shaven, after the manner of the day, a
fashion that seems to become clean manliness, vigorous and
self-controlled. Both were good to look at; but here the resemblance
ended, for Dick's long slender face and body lithe with its athletic
training, was alive and restless, as though he found it difficult to
keep back his passion for activity; Ellery, big but loosely joined, had
the dogged look of one that held some of his energy in reserve. A good
pair, Mr. Elton concluded, and felt a sudden spasm of longing for a
son--not that he would have exchanged Madeline for any trousered biped
that walked, but it would be a great thing to own one such well of young
masculine vigor as these.
"It's going to be great fun for us old fellows to sit back and watch you
young ones," the elder man ejaculated. "There are several good-sized
jobs waiting for you."
"That's a good thing," said Dick. "When there's nothing to do, nobody'll
do it."
"And it will be a tame sort of a world, eh? Well, thank the Lord, it's
none of our responsibility any longer. You've got to tackle it. The new
phases of things are too much for me, with a brain solidified by years."
"You might at least help us by stating the problem," said Norris.
"You see, it's like this. Until a few years ago every census map of the
United States was seamed by a long line marked 'frontier.' That line is
gone. That's the situation in a nutshell. Our work, the subjugation of
the land, is about done, and the question is now up to you; what are you
going to do with it? You know the old story of the man who said he had a
horse who could run a mile in two-forty. And the other fellow asked,
'What are you going to do when you get there?' We've done the running
and our children are there. Now what? You must develop a whole set of
new talents--not trotting talents, but staying talents."