“Ham,” he said slowly, “I’ve been sittin’ here all day turnin’ your notions over in my mind.  You want to go away from here and to abandon this place where you was born; where your mother and me started housekeepin’; where we’ve lived for twenty years.  If we decided to do that—­an’ it wouldn’t be no easy thing for either your mother or me—­what plans would you aim to carry out?”

The boy shook his head.  He did not shake it in the abashed fashion of one confronted with a question for which he has no answer, but with the frank manner of one brushing aside a trivial and irrelevant question.

“I don’t know yet.  First I’ve got to have an education, then I’ll decide what I’m going to do, and when I decide I’ll succeed.”

The father’s brows knitted themselves gravely and with displeasure.  “Then, after all your talk and bragging, you haven’t got no definite plan.  All you argue for is cutting loose from the roof over us an’ livin’ up our little savin’s.”

“I know that I can give you big things in the place of little things.”  The lad’s voice again mounted and into his face came the flush of assured inspiration.  “The thing that tells me is something you wouldn’t understand.  I can’t any more put it into words for you than I can tell you why the moon swings the tides, but it’s just as dead sure as that an’ I can feel it here.”  He clapped his hands over his heart and went on with quiet certainty:  “I don’t know no name to call it by except a feelin’ of power.  There’s only one thing in God’s whole world that can stop me, an’ that’s ignorance and lonesomeness.  You call it all dreamin’—­well, give me a chance and I’ll make it all so real that you can’t have any more doubts.”

“I thought,” said Tom Burton a bit wearily, “that maybe you might have some sensible argument, but all you’ve got is moonshine.  I’ve been settin’ here figurin’ all day so that, if you could convince me, I’d know where I stood with the bank, but it don’t hardly seem worth talkin’ about.”

“I can’t make you understand,” declared the boy unwaveringly, “because you’re thinkin’ in hundreds where I’m thinkin’ in millions.  You ask me about details.  All I know is that I’ve got a destiny to be as great as any man can be an’ that success is goin’ to be my slave.  I don’t know what I’m going to do because I haven’t seen yet what battle-field is best worth winnin’.  When I see what’s the biggest—­I’ll win it.”

“So you want us to take what we’ve saved and gamble it all on your good opinion of yourself.  Do you realize, my son, that we ain’t got much and that we’ve saved what we have got by goin’ without all our lives?  When that’s gone, we won’t have nothin’ left to gamble with a second time.  Ain’t it a good deal to pay for learnin’ the folly of self-conceit?”