“I’m willing to wait,” said his grandson.

“Learn your lesson, Harlan—­the one I’m trying to teach you now.  I never knew but one man who could keep his mouth shut under all circumstances when he felt it was his duty to do so.  That was old Ben Holt.  He’s dead now.  He fell off a bridge on his way to church and didn’t holler ‘Help!’ for fear of breaking the Sabbath.  You don’t find any more of that kind in these days—­not in political matters.  I’m not distrusting you, I say, but I’m teaching you the lesson.  Keep your mouth shut till it’s time to open it.  I’m drawing this thing here strong on you, so as to impress it.  As for the other fellows—­if I had got off the train at Burnside to-day the news would have been in every afternoon paper in the State.  They’d only need that one fact to build fifty stories on—­all different. Most of those stories would have hurt; there’d have been one guess, at least, that would kill the scheme.  Sit down here, and let’s take it easy.”

He sat at the foot of a tree, his broad straw hat beside him.  He leaned his head against the trunk, and gazed upward and away from his grandson.  When the question came it was so irrelevant, so astonishing, that the young man gasped without replying.

“Harlan, how do you stand with the Kavanagh girl?”

The old man smoked on in the silence without removing his gaze from the leaves above his head.

“I want to confess to you, my boy, that your old grandfather made rather a disgraceful exhibition of himself the other day.  But as I said then, a man will thrash and swear at a hornet and make an ass of himself, generally, in the operation.  The impudent little fool didn’t realize what a big matter she was trifling with.”

“Grandfather,” protested Harlan, manfully, “that’s no way to speak of a young lady.  You ask me how I stand?  I stand this way—­I’ll not have the child mentioned in any such manner—­not in my hearing; and that’s with all respect to you, sir.”

“Young lady—­child?  Well, which is she?”

“I don’t know,” confessed Harlan, ingenuously.  “And it doesn’t make much difference.”

“Sort of ashamed of me, aren’t you?” inquired his grandfather.  “A man that you’ve seen all the politicians catering to the last day or so, and small enough to bandy insults with a snippet of a girl!  Well, bub, there’s a lot of childishness in human nature.  It breaks out once in a while.  Cuss a tack, and grin and bear an amputation!  We’ll let the girl alone.  I don’t seem to get in right when she is mentioned.  But I wanted to have you tell me that you don’t intend to marry Dennis Kavanagh’s daughter.  You can’t afford to do that, boy!  Not with your prospects.  And now I’m not saying anything against the girl.  We’ll leave her out, I say.  It’s just that she isn’t the kind of a woman—­when she gets to be a woman—­that I want to see mated with you.”  He burst out:  “Dammit, Harlan, I can see where you’re going to land in this State if you’ll let your old gramp have free rein!  And the right kind of a wife is half the battle in what you’re going into.”