"Yes, I could do that, but----Oh, rats! Forrest, I've been knocking
around so long I feel shy about my table manners and everything. I'd
probably eat pie with my fingers."

"You make me so darn tired, Hawk. You talk about my having to learn to
chum with people in overalls. You've got to learn not to let people in
evening clothes put anything over on you. That's your difficulty from
having lived in the back-country these last two or three years. You
have an instinct for manners. But I did notice that as soon as you
found out I was in the army you spent half the time disliking me as a
militarist, and the other half expecting me to be haughty--Lord knows
what over. It took you two weeks to think of me as Forrest Haviland.
I'm ashamed of you! If you're a socialist you ought to think that
anything you like belongs to you."

"That's a new kind of socialism."

"So much the better. Me and Karl Marx, the economic inventors.... But
I was saying: if you act as though things belong to you people will
apologize to you for having borrowed them from you. And you've _got_
to do that, Hawk. You're going to be one of the best-known fliers in
the country, and you'll have to meet all sorts of big guns--generals
and Senators and female climbers that work the peace societies for
social position, and so on, and you've got to know how to meet
them.... Anyway, I want you to come to San Spirito."

To San Spirito they went. During the three days preceding, Carl was
agonized at the thought of having to be polite in the presence of
ladies. No matter how brusquely he told himself, "I'm as good as
anybody," he was uneasy about forks and slang and finger-nails, and
looked forward to the ordeal with as much pleasure as a man about to
be hanged, hanged in a good cause, but thoroughly.

Yet when Colonel Haviland met them at San Spirito station, and Carl
heard the kindly salutation of the gracious, fat, old Indian-fighter,
he knew that he had at last come home to his own people--an impression
that was the stronger because the house of Oscar Ericson had been so
much house and so little home. The colonel was a widower, and for his
only son he showed a proud affection which included Carl. The three of
them sat in state, after dinner, on the porch of Quarters No. 1,
smoking cigars and looking down to a spur of the Santa Lucia
Mountains, where it plunged into the foam of the Pacific. They talked
of aviation and eugenics and the Benet-Mercier gun, of t