“I’d hate to, but once I was going to.  I stayed because you needed me.”

“I guess I could keep a watch on you, if I had to,” announced the father shortly.

“You couldn’t keep a ball an’ chain on me,” retorted the son.  “I wouldn’t be much use that way about the farm.”

The elder Burton very deliberately lighted his pipe.  Like many men who fly suddenly into passions at nothing, he had the surprising faculty of remaining calm when anger might be expected.  Now he said only, “Let’s hear your notion, son.  What’s been keepin’ you awake of nights?”

“It hasn’t been just thinkin’ about myself that’s done it,” began Ham, steadying his voice, though it still held a throb of fervor which neither his father nor mother had ever heard before.  “I’ve been thinkin’ about all of you.  You an’ mother are workin’ your fingers to the bone an’ your hearts to the breakin’ point—­for what?  Just now you sent Mary away cryin’ to bed because she wanted to be pretty.  Why shouldn’t she want to be?  Isn’t it part of a woman’s mission?  You call a thing vanity that’s just havin’ some life an’ ambition in her heart.  What’s life got in store here for Mary or for Paul or for me?  We’re startin’—­not endin’ up.  We have our ambitions.  If we stay here Mary will be drudgin’ till she dies.  Paul’s got the soul of a great musician, an’ he might as well be dead right now as to stay here, an’ as for me I’d a heap rather be dead.”

“Oh, I see,” commented Tom Burton very drily.  “You figure that it’ll be pleasanter for us to move into a palace somewhere, an’ have a dozen or two servants waitin’ on us.  All right, where’s the palace comin’ from?”

Ham spoke in absolute confidence.  “I’ll get it for you—­as many palaces as you want,” he declared with steady-eyed effrontery; “if only you give me the chance.  All I ask is this.  For God’s sake, take the chain off me—­let me get into the fight.”

Ham Burton was a tall and well-thewed lad for his age.  His muscle fiber had drawn strength from the ax and the log-pole, but as yet it had not become heavy with decades of hard labor.  He still stood slender and gracefully tapering from shoulders to waist and just now there was something trance-like in his earnestness which made wild prophecies seem almost inspired.  The hard-headed father eyed him with good-humored irony.

“And how do you figure to get us all these things, son?” he inquired.

“I’ll show you,” came the quick and undoubting response.  “All I want you to do is to leave this place and educate me.  Every year you stay here you’re spending part of what you’ve laid by, an’ none of it ever comes back.  Gamble it on me, an’ I’ll attend to all the rest.”

At that the bearded farmer broke into a loud laugh.

“I reckon you’re fixed to give me a written guarantee, ain’t you?” he demanded.  “But maybe just for the sake of makin’ talk you’d better tell how you know you can swing such a man-sized contract.”