Jed hesitated.  Things the hardware dealer had said had been reported to him, of course; but gossip—­particularly the Bearse brand of gossip—­was not the most reliable of evidence.  Then he remembered his own recent conversation with Leander and the latter’s expressed fear that his father might get into trouble.  Jed determined, for the son’s sake, not to bring that trouble nearer.

“Well, Major,” he answered, “I shouldn’t want to say that he was.  Phineas talks awful foolish sometimes, but I shouldn’t wonder if that was his hot head and bull temper as much as anything else.  As to whether he’s anything more than foolish or not, course I couldn’t say sartin, but I don’t think he’s too desperate to be runnin’ loose.  I cal’late he won’t put any bombs underneath the town hall or anything of that sort.  Phin and his kind remind me some of that new kind of balloon you was tellin’ me they’d probably have over to your camp when ’twas done, that—­er—­er—­dirigible; wasn’t that what you called it?”

“Yes.  But why does Babbitt remind you of a dirigible balloon?  I don’t see the connection.”

“Don’t you?  Well, seems’s if I did.  Phin fills himself up with the gas he gets from his Anarchist papers and magazines—­the ’rich man’s war’ and all the rest of it—­and goes up in the air and when he’s up in the air he’s kind of hard to handle.  That’s what you told me about the balloon, if I recollect.”

Grover laughed heartily.  “Then the best thing to do is to keep him on the ground, I should say,” he observed.

Jed rubbed his chin.  “Um-hm,” he drawled, “but shuttin’ off his gas supply might help some.  I don’t think I’d worry about him much, if I was you.”

They separated at the front gate before the shop, where the rows of empty posts, from which the mills and vanes had all been removed, stood as gaunt reminders of the vanished summer.  Major Grover refused Jed’s invitation to come in and have a smoke.

“No, thank you,” he said, “not this evening.  I’ll wait here a moment and say good-night to the Armstrongs and Phillips and then I must be on my way to the camp. . . .  Why, what’s the matter?  Anything wrong?”

His companion was searching in his various pockets.  The search completed, he proceeded to look himself over, so to speak, taking off his hat and looking at that, lifting a hand and then a foot and looking at them, and all with a puzzled, far-away expression.  When Grover repeated his question he seemed to hear it for the first time and then not very clearly.

“Eh?” he drawled.  “Oh, why—­er—­yes, there is somethin’ wrong.  That is to say, there ain’t, and that’s the wrong part of it.  I don’t seem to have forgotten anything, that’s the trouble.”

His friend burst out laughing.

“I should scarcely call that a trouble,” he said.

“Shouldn’t you?  No, I presume likely you wouldn’t.  But I never go anywhere without forgettin’ somethin’, forgettin’ to say somethin’ or do somethin’ or bring somethin’.  Never did in all my life.  Now here I am home again and I can’t remember that I’ve forgot a single thing. . . .  Hum. . . .  Well, I declare!  I wonder what it means.  Maybe, it’s a sign somethin’s goin’ to happen.”