aking up the explanation and going over it again and again, and
marvelling, and asking questions.

"He come in to--what's that place, Dike?--Hoboken--yesterday only. An'
he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can't you read our letters, Dike, that
you didn't know we was here now? And then he's only got an hour more
here. They got to go to Camp Grant to be, now, demobilized. He come out
to Minnie's on a chance. Ain't he big!"

But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. Then Dike
spoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had a new clipped
way of uttering his words:

"Say, pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! They got about
an acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. If they's a little
dirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they plant a crop in there. I
never see nothin' like it. Say, we waste enough stuff over here to keep
that whole country in food for a hundred years. Yessir. And tools! Outta
the ark, believe me. If they ever saw our tractor, they'd think it was
the Germans comin' back. But they're smart at that. I picked up a lot of
new ideas over there. And you ought to see the old birds--womenfolks and
men about eighty years old--runnin' everything on the farm. They had to.
I learned somethin' off of them about farmin'."

"Forget the farm," said Minnie.

"Yeh," echoed Gus, "forget the farm stuff. I can get you a job here out
at the works for four a day, and six when you learn it right."

Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on his face. "What
d'you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What you all--"

Bella laughed, jovially. "F'r Heaven's sakes, Dike, wake up! We're
livin' here. This is our place. We ain't rubes no more."

Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into his face. A
stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it that suddenly made
old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been slapped by her quick-tempered
mother.

"But I been countin' on the farm," he said, miserably. "I just been
livin' on the idea of comin' back to it. Why, I--The streets here,
they're all narrow and choked up. I been countin' on the farm. I want to
go back and be a farmer. I want--"

And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld--no, not a new, but
the old Ben Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six
hundred acres of bounteous bottomland.

"That's all right, Dike," he said. "You're going back. So'm I. I've got
another twenty year