“Oh, so-so,” answered the returned private.

“You tell it well.  Seems to me if I’d been off skyhootin’ round in foreign lands—­say, how about them French women?  Pretty bold lot, I guess, if you can believe all you—­”

The parrot in its cage at the end of the porch climbed to a perch with beak and claw.

“Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle!” it screeched.  The judge glared murderously at it.

“Wilbur Cowan, you bad, bad, bad child—­not to let us know!” Mrs. Penniman threw back the screen door and rushed to embrace him.  “You regular fighting so-and-so!” she sobbed.

“Where’d you get that talk?” he demanded.

Mrs. Penniman wiped her eyes with a dish towel suspended from one arm.

“Oh, we heard all about you!”

She was warm, and shed gracious aromas.  The returned one sniffed these.

“It’s chops,” he said—­“and—­and hot biscuits.”

“And radishes from the garden, and buttermilk and clover honey and raspberries, and—­let me see—­”

“Let’s go!” said the soldier.

“Then you can tell us all about that war,” said the invalid as with groans he raised his bulk from the wicker chair.

“What war?” asked Wilbur.

* * * * *

He spent the afternoon in the little room, where he would glance up to find the small, barefoot boy staring at him in wonder; and out in the Penniman front yard, where the summer flowers bloomed.  These surroundings presented every assurance of safety, yet his restless, wide-sweeping gaze was full of caution, especially after the aeroplane went over.  At the first ominous note of its droning he had broken for cover.  After that, in spite of himself, he would be glancing uneasily at the Plummer place across the road.  This was fronted by a hedge of cypress—­ideal machine-gun cover.  But not once during the long afternoon was he shot at.  He brought out and repaired the lawn mower, oiled its rusted parts and ran it gayly over the grass.  At suppertime, when Dave Cowan came, he was wetting the shorn sward with spray from a hose.

“Back?” said Dave, peering as at a bit of the far cosmos flung in his way.

“Back,” said his son.

They shook hands.

“You haven’t changed any,” said Wilbur, scanning Dave’s placid face under the straw hat and following the lines of his spare figure down to the vestiges of a once noble pair of shoes.

“You only been away two years,” said Dave.  “I wouldn’t change much in that time.  That’s the way of the mind, though.  We always forget how slowly evolution works its wonders.  Anyhow, you know what they say in our trade—­when a printer dies he turns into a white mule.  I’m no white mule yet.  You’ve changed, though.”

“I didn’t know it.”

“Face harder—­about ten years older.  Kind of set and sour looking.  Ever laugh any more?”

“Of course I laugh.”