mushheads. Maybe they didn't look shamed
when I exposed 'em! Each one had pictured the poor boy down there alone,
undergoing hardship with his toiling workers or whatever you call 'em,
and, of course, I thought so myself."

"How much did you send him?" demanded Wilbur, suddenly.

"Not half as much as the others," returned Sharon in indignant triumph.
"If they'd just set tight like they promised and let me do the little I
done----"

"You were going to sit tight, too, weren't you?"

"Well, of course, that was different. Of course I was willing to shell
out a few dollars now and then if he was going to be up against it for a
square meal. After all, he was Whipple by name. Of course he ain't got
Whipple stuff in him. That young man's talk always did have kind of a
nutty flavour. You come right down to it, he ain't a Whipple in hide nor
hair. Why, say, he ain't even two and seventy-five-hundredths per cent.
Whipple!"

Sharon had cunningly gone away from his own failure to sit tight. He was
proving flexible-minded here, as on the links.

They were silent, looking out over the spread of Home Farm. The red
house still shimmered in the heat waves. The tall trees about it hung
motionless. The click of the reaper in the south forty sounded like a
distant locust.

"Put the fear of God into him," said Sharon at last. "Let him know them
checks have gosh all truly stopped."

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

"Now drive on and we'll look the house over. The last tenant let it run
down. But I'll fix it right for you. Why, like as not you'll be having a
missis and young ones of your own there some day."

"I might; you can't tell."

"Well, I wish they was going to be Whipple stock. Ours is running down.
I don't look for any prize-winners from your brother; he'll likely marry
that widow, or something, that wants to save America like Russia has
been. And Juliana, I guess she wasn't ever frivolous enough for
marriage. And that Pat--she'll pick out one of them boys with a head
like a seal, that knows all the new dances and what fork to use. Trust
her! Not that she didn't show Whipple stuff over there. But she's a
rattlepate in peacetime."

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

He left a train at the Grand Central Station in New York early the
following evening. He had the address of Merle's apartment on lower
Fifth Avenue, and made his way there on foot through streets crowded
with the war's backwash. Men in uniform were plentiful, and he was m