ng the cold perception that he
would not go anywhere from here.

Through all his early years in Newbern he had not once felt the
wander-bidding; never, as Dave Cowan put it, had he been itchy-footed
for the road. Then, with the war, he had crept up to look over the top
of the world, and now, unaccountably, in the midst of work he had looked
forward to with real pleasure, his whole body was tingling for new
horizons.

It seemed to be so with a dozen of the boys he had come back with. Some
of these were writing to him, wanting him to come here, to come there;
to go on and on with them to inviting places they knew--and on again
from there! Mining in South America, lumbering in the Northwest,
ranching in the Southwest; one of his mates would be a sailor, and one
would be with a circus. Something within him beyond reason goaded him to
be up and off. He felt his hold slipping; his mind floated in an ecstasy
of relaxation.

His first days at the Home Farm had been good-enough days. Sharon
Whipple had told him a modern farmer must first be a mechanic, and he
was already that--and no one had shot at him. But the novelty of
approaching good machine-gun cover without apprehension had worn off.

"Ain't getting cold feet, are you?" asked Sharon one day, observing him
hang idly above an abused tractor with the far-off look in his eyes.

"Nothing like that," he had protested almost too warmly. "No, sir; I'll
slog on right here."

Now for the first time in all their years of association he saw an
immense gulf between himself and Sharon Whipple. Sharon was an old man,
turning to look back as he went down a narrow way into a hidden valley.
But he--Wilbur Cowan--was climbing a long slope into new light. How
could they touch? How could this old man hold him to become another old
man on the same soil--when he could be up and off, a happy world romper
like his father before him?

"Funny, funny, funny!" he said aloud, and lazily rolled over to stare
into blue space.

Probably it was quite as funny out there. The people like himself on
those other worlds would be the sport of confusing impulses, in the long
run obeying some deeper instinct whose source was in the parent star
dust, wandering or taking root in their own strange soils. But why not
wander when the object of it all was so obscure, so apparently trivial?
Enough others would submit to rule from the hidden source, take root
like the willow--mate! That was another chain upon