It is doubtful whether boys ever love their fathers as most of them love their mothers at one time, or all their lives.  The sort of attachment there often is between father and son is very different from that, and both feel that it is; there is more of alliance and friendship in it than of anything like affection, even when it is at its best, with a strong instinct to help one another and to stand by each other in a fight.

Newton Overholt did not feel any sympathetic thrill of pain for his father’s sufferings; not in the least; he would perhaps have said that he was “sorry for him” without quite knowing what that meant.  But he was very strongly moved to help him in some way, seeing that he was evidently getting the worst of it in a big fight.  Newton soon became entirely possessed by the idea that “something ought to be done,” but what it was he did not know.

The lid of Pandora’s box had flown open and had come off suddenly after smashing the hinges, and Hope had flown out of the window.  The boy thought it was clearly his duty to catch her and get her into prison again, and then to nail down the lid.  He had not the smallest doubt that this was what he ought to do, but the trouble lay in finding out how to do it, a little difficulty that humanity has faced for a good many thousand years.  On the other hand, if he failed, as seemed probable, he was almost sure that his father would fall ill and die, or go quite mad in a few hours.  He wished his mother were there; she would have known how to cheer the desperate man, and could probably have made him smile in a few minutes without really doing anything at all.  Those were the things women could do very well, the boy thought, and they ought always to be at hand to do them when wanted.  He himself could only sit there and pretend to be busy, as children mostly do when they see their elders in trouble.  But that made him wild.

“I say, father,” he broke out suddenly, “can’t I do anything?  Try and think!”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” answered Overholt, sitting down at last on the stool before the work-bench and staring at the wall, with his back turned to his son.  “But I can’t!  There’s something wrong with my head.”

“You want to see a doctor,” said the boy.  “I’ll go and see if I can get one of them to come out here.”  He rose as if to go at once.

“No!  Don’t!” cried Overholt, much distressed by the mere suggestion.  “He could only tell me to rest, and take exercise and sleep at night and not worry!” He laughed rather wildly.  “He would tell me not to worry!  They always say that!  A doctor would tell a man ‘not to worry’ if he was to be hanged the next morning!”

“Well,” said Newton philosophically, “I suppose a man who’s going to be hung needn’t worry much, anyway.  He’s got the front seat at the show and nothing particular to do!”

This was sound, so far as it went, but insufficient as consolation.  Overholt either did not hear, or paid no heed to the boy.  He left the room a moment later without shutting the door, and threw himself down on the old black horsehair sofa in the parlour.  Presently the lad rose again and covered up the City of Hope with the big brown paper case he had made to fit down over the board and keep the dust off.