“You don’t know how good it seems to get back home again, pappy,” he said, over the bacon and eggs.  “I’ve been grinding pretty hard this year, and now it’s over, I feel as if I could whip my weight in wildcats, as Japheth used to say.  By the way, how is Japheth?”

Caleb Gordon smiled in spite of the corroding industrial anxieties.

“Japheth’s going to surprise you some, I reckon, son; he’s gone and got religion.”

Tom put down his knife and fork.

“Why, the old sinner!” he laughed.  “How did that happen?”

“Oh, just about the way it always does,” said Caleb slowly.  “The spirit moved your Uncle Silas to come out to Little Zoar and hold a protracted meetin’, and Japhe joined the mourners and was gathered into the fold.”

“Pshaw!” said Tom, in good-natured incredulity.  “Why, the very meat and marrow of his existence is his horse-trading; and who could swap horses and tell the truth at the same time?”

“I don’t know,” was the doubtful reply.  “But Brother Japheth allows that’s about what he aims to do.  It’s sort o’ curious the way it works out, too.  About a week after the baptizin’, Jim Bledsoe came down from Pine Knob with a horse to swap.  ’Long about sundown he met up with Japhe, and struck him for a trade on a piebald that the Major wouldn’t let run in the same lot with the Deer Trace stock.  They had it up one side and down the other; Brother Japhe tryin’ to tell Bledsoe that his piebald was about the no-accountest horse in the valley, and Jim takin’ it all by contraries and gettin’ more and more p’intedly anxious to trade.”

“Well?” said Tom, enjoying his return to nature like any creature freed of the urban cage.

“They came to the trade, after a tolerable spell of it,” Caleb went on, “and the last thing I heard Japhe say was, ’now you recollect, Brother Bledsoe, I done told you that there piebald’s no account on the face of the earth—­a-lovin’ of my neighbor like I promise’ Brother Silas I would.’”

Tom laughed again.  There was the smell of the good red soil in the little story, a whiff of the home earth reminiscent and heartening.  But the under-thought laid hold on Japheth and his change of heart.

“Japhe was about the last man in Paradise, always excepting Major Dabney,” he said half-musingly.  “Haven’t you often wondered what sort of a maggot it is that gets into the human brain to give it the superstitious twist?”

Caleb’s gentle frown was the upcast of paternal bewilderment, partly prideful, partly disconcerting.  He was not yet fully acquainted with this young giant with the frank face, the sober gray eyes, and the conscious grasp of himself.  More than once since their meeting at the steps of the Pullman car he had felt obliged to reassure himself by saying, “This is Tom; this is my son.”  There were so many and such marked changes:  the quick, curt speech, caught in the Northland; the nervous, sure-footed stride, and the athletic swing of the shoulders; the easy manner and confident air, not of college-boy conceit, but of the assurance of young manhood; and, lastly, this blunt right-about-face in matters of religion.  Caleb was not quite sure that this latter change was entirely welcome.