ny other boy? I'm sayin' it now because there isn't any use in
lyin'. I _know_ just as well as if I'd already done it, that I can look
down on other successful men as far as a mountain-top looks down on a
little hill. I've done my work here on this farm, an' I haven't ever
shirked. Now I want my chance--an' I don't want my family to go to seed.
I want the blood of the Standishes and the Hamiltons to climb up and not
to run down hill and die out in a rotting puddle at the bottom. I want
these things and I'm goin' to have 'em--This farm an' you have fought
for a lifetime an' the farm's whipped you. I tell you there is just one
thing in God Almighty's world that can whip me--just one thing that I'm
afraid of--an' it's this farm. If you stay here I reckon I can't hardly
desert you, but I'd rather you'd kill me outright. That's all I've got
to say."

Tom Burton rose from his chair and took two or three turns across the
frayed strips of carpet. His eyes were no longer the eyes of a father
irritated by the insubordinate fret of a fledgling son begging
permission to test his wings. His bearded face bore the seamed
uncertainty of his deeply vexed spirit. Perhaps in that moment there
came to him some sense of conversion to the prophet-like assurance of
his son. Perhaps he felt the dread of transplanting and a vague wonder
whether the gifts of wealth, if they came, might not bring disaster in
their wake. At last he turned, cramming his hands into his trousers'
pockets, and swept the little family circle with eyes in which flashed
something of patriarchal fire.

"Mother," he demanded, "you have heard what the boy says. Does it sound
like reason to you, or is it just a stripling's restlessness?"

Elizabeth Burton looked from her husband's face to that of her eldest
child. It seemed to her that the father's eyes were wistful and sorely
distressed, and that the son's face was tightly drawn with a feverish
burning of the eyes. Suddenly she felt like an arbiter called to judge
between them. Her boy with his Caesar's ambition was breaking his heart
to go. Her husband, with much of life behind, could only yield with
something like a break in his own. Her eyes moistened.

"If he feels called into the world, Tom--" she began, then halted. The
husband waited, and she went on again. "If he feels it so strong, maybe
it must mean something. It's mighty hard to say. But, Tom, I know Ham
better than anybody else does. He's not the kind of boy