"Ain"t you got your health?" demanded the observant Sharon, capably engulfing half a sandwich.
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
"Eat like it then."
So the boy became less conscious of his manners, and ate like it, to Sharon"s apparent satisfaction. Midway in the destruction of the sandwiches the old man drew from the churn a tin cup of what proved to be b.u.t.termilk. His guest had not learned to like this, so for him he procured another cup, and brought it br.i.m.m.i.n.g with sweet milk which he had daringly taken from one of the many pans, quite as if he were at home in the place.
"Milk"s good for you," said Sharon.
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
"A regular food, as much as anything you want to name."
"Yes, sir." The boy agreed wholly, without wishing to name anything in disparagement of milk.
They ate the sandwiches and cheese, and upon the guest was conferred the cake. There were three pieces, and he managed the first swiftly, but was compelled to linger on the second, even with the lubricating help of another cup of milk.
"Bring it along," directed the host. So it was brought along to the buggy, one piece in course of consumption and one carried to be eaten at superb leisure as the fed roan carried them down the hot road to still another farm.
They drove back to Newbern in the late afternoon, still largely silent, though there was a little talk at the close on stretches of hill where the roan would consent to slacken his pace.
"What you think of him?" Sharon demanded, nodding obliquely at the roan.
"He"s got good hocks and feet--good head and shoulders, too," said the boy.
"He has that," affirmed Sharon. "Know horses?"
"Well, I--"
He faltered, but suddenly warmed to talk and betrayed an intimate knowledge of every prominent horse in Newbern. He knew Charley and d.i.c.k, the big dray horses; and Dexter, who drew the express wagon; he knew Bob and George, who hauled the ice wagon; he knew the driving horses in the Mansion stables by name and point, and especially the two dapple grays that drew the bus. Not for nothing had he listened to the wise talk in the stable office, or sat at the feet of Starling Tucker, who knew horses so well he called them hawses. It was the first time he had talked to Sharon forgetfully. Sharon nodded his head from time to time, and the boy presently became shy at the consciousness that he had talked a great deal.
Then Sharon spoke of rumours that the new horseless carriage would soon do away with horses. He didn"t believe the rumours, and he spoke scornfully of the new machines as contraptions. Still he had seen some specimens in Buffalo, and they might have something in them. They might be used in time in place of horse-drawn busses and ice wagons and drays.
Wilbur was chilled by this prediction. He had more than half meant to drive horses to one of these useful affairs, but what if they were to be run by machinery? Linotypes to spoil typesetting by hand, and now horseless carriages to stop driving horses! He wondered if it would be any use to learn any trade. He would have liked to ask Sharon, but hardly dared.
"Well, it"s an age of progress," said Sharon at last. "We got to expect changes."
Wilbur was at home on this topic. He became what Winona would have called informative.
"We can"t stop change," he said in his father"s manner. "First, there was star dust, and electricity or something made it into the earth; and some water and chemicals made life out of this electricity or something----"
"Hey?" said the startled Sharon, but the story of creation continued.
"And there was just little animals first, but they got to be bigger, because they had to change; and pretty soon they become monkeys, and then they changed some more, and stood up on their hind feet, and so they got to be human beings like us--because--because they had to change," he concluded, lucidly.
"My shining stars!" breathed Sharon.
"And they lost their tails and got so they would wear neckties and have post offices and depots and religions," added the historian in a final flash of memory.
"Well, I"ll be switched!" said Sharon.
"It"s electricity or something," explained the lecturer. "My father said so."
"Oh!" said Sharon.
"But he says there"s a catch in it somewhere."
"I should think there was," said Sharon. "By gracious goodness, I should think there was a catch in it somewhere! But you understand the whole thing as easy as crack a nut, don"t you?"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
"Giddap there!" said Sharon.
Wilbur did not tell Winona of this day"s encounter with an authentic Whipple. He would have done so but for the dollar that Sharon absently bestowed upon him from a crumple of bills when he left the buggy at the entrance to Whipple Old Place. Winona, he instantly knew, would counsel him to save the dollar, and he did not wish to save it. As fast as his bare feet--with a stone bruise on one heel--would carry him he sped to Solly Gumble"s. Yet not with wholly selfish intent. A section of plug tobacco, charmingly named Peach and Honey, was purchased for a quarter as a gift to Bill Bardin of the ice wagon. Another quarter secured three pale-brown cigars, with gay bands about their middles, to be lavished upon the hero, Starling Tucker.
CHAPTER IX
The colourful years sped. At fifteen Wilbur Cowan, suddenly alive to this quick way of time, was looking back to the days of his heedless youth. That long aisle of years seemed unending, but it narrowed in perspective until earlier experiences were but queerly dissolving shapes, wavering of outline, dimly discerned, piquant or sad in the mind, but elusive when he would try to fix them.
On a shining, full-starred night he stood before the little house in the Penniman side yard and bade farewell to this youth. A long time he gazed into the arched splendour above. He had never noticed that the stars were so many and so bright; and they were always there, by day as well as by night, so his father said. Many of them, on the same veracious authority, were peopled; some with people who were yet but monkeys like the Vielhaber"s Emil; some with people now come to be human like himself; others with ineffable beings who had progressed in measureless periods of time beyond any human development that even Dave Cowan could surmise.
The aging boy felt suddenly friendly with all those distant worlds, glad they were there, so almost sociably near. On more than one of them, perhaps far off in that white streak they called the Milky Way, there must be boys like himself, learning useful things about life, to read good books and all about machinery, and have good habits, and so forth.
Surely on one of those far worlds there was at least one boy like himself, who was being a boy for the last time and would to-morrow be a man. For Wilbur Cowan, beneath this starry welter of creation--of worlds to be or in being, or lifeless hulks that had been worlds and were outworn--was on this June night uplifted to face the parting of the ways. His last day had been lived as a boy with publicly bare feet.
No more would he feel the soft run of new gra.s.s beneath his soles, or longer need beware the chance nail or sharp stone in the way. On the morrow, presumably to be a day inviting to bare feet as had all the other days of his summers, remembered and forgotten, he would, when he rose, put on stockings and stout shoes; and he would put them on world without end through all the new mornings of his life, howsoever urgently with their clement airs they might solicit the older mode. It was a solemn thing to reflect upon, under a glittering heaven that held, or not, those who might feel with him the bigness of the moment. He suffered a vision of the new shoes, stiffly formidable, side by side at the foot of his bed in the little house. It left him feeling all his years.
And he would wear long trousers! With tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt he saw himself as of old, barefoot, bare-legged, the knee pants b.u.t.toned to the calico blouse. It was all over. He scanned the stars a last time, dimly feeling that the least curious of their inhabitants would be aware of this crisis.
Perhaps on one of those blinking orbs people with a proper concern for other world events would be saying to one another: "Yes, he"s grown up now. Didn"t you hear the big news? Why, to-morrow he"s going to begin driving a truck for Trimble Cushman--got a job for the whole summer."
If the announcement startled less than great news should, the speaker could surely produce a sensation by adding: "The first automobile truck in Newbern Center."
And how had this immature being, capable out-of-doors boy though he was, come to be so exalted above his fellows? Sam Pickering"s linotype had first revealed his gift for machinery. For Sam had installed a linotype, and Wilbur Cowan had patiently mastered its distracting intricacies.
Dave Cowan had informally reappeared one day, still attired with decreasing elegance below the waist--his cloth-topped shoes but little more than distressing memories--and announced that he was now an able operator of this wondrous machine; and the harried editor of the _Advance_, stung to enterprise by flitting wastrels who tarried at his case only long enough to learn the name of the next town, had sought relief in machinery, even if it did take bread from the mouths of honest typesetters. Their lack of preference as to where they earned there bread, their insouciant flights from town to town without notice, had made Sam brutal. He had ceased to care whether they had bread or not. So Dave for a summer had brought him surcease from help worries.
The cynical journeyman printer of the moment, on a day when Dave tried out the new machine, had stood by and said she might set type but she certainly couldn"t justify it, because it took a human to do that, and how would a paper look with unevenly ending lines? When Dave, seated before the thing, proved that she uncannily could justify the lines of type before casting them in metal, the dismayed printer had shuddered at the mystery of it.
Dave Cowan seized the moment to point out to his admiring son and other bystanders that it was all the working of evolution. If you couldn"t change when your environment demanded it Nature sc.r.a.pped you. Hand compositors would have to learn to set type by machinery or go down in the struggle for existence. Survival of the fittest--that was it. The doubting printer was not there to profit by this lecture. Though it was but five o"clock, he was down on the depot platform moodily waiting for the six-fifty-eight.
The next number of the _Advance_ was set by linotype, a circ.u.mstance of which one of its columns spoke feelingly, and set, moreover, in the presence of as many curious persons as could crowd about the operator.
Among these none was so fascinated as Wilbur Cowan. He hung lovingly about the machine, his fingers itching to be at its parts. When work for the day was over he stayed by it until the light grew dim in the low-ceilinged, dusty office. He took liberties with its delicate structure that would have alarmed its proud owner, playing upon it with wrench and screw driver, detaching parts from the whole for the pure pleasure of putting them back. He thus came to an intimate knowledge of the contrivance. He knew what made it go. He early mastered its mere operation. Sam Pickering felt fortified against the future.
Then it developed that though Dave Cowan could perform ably upon the instrument while it retained its health he was at a loss when it developed ailments; and to these it was p.r.o.ne, being a machine of temperament and airs, inclined to lose spirit, to sulk, even irritably to refuse all response to Dave"s fingering of the keyboard. Dave was sincerely startled when his son one day skillfully restored tone to the thing after it had disconcertingly rebelled. Sam Pickering, on the point of wiring for the mechanic who had installed his treasure, looked upon the boy with awe as his sure hands wrought knowingly among the weirdest of its vitals. Dave was impressed to utter lack of speech, and resumed work upon the again compliant affair without comment. Perhaps he reflected that the stern processes of his favourite evolution demanded more knowledge of this machine than even he had acquired.