Nor did he; it was Nelson Forrest that stole furtive glances at the lad’s profile, the knitted brows, the freckled cheeks, the undecided nose, and firm mouth.

The boyish shoulders slouched forward at the same angle as that of the fifty-year-old shoulders beside him.  Nelson, through long following of the plough, had lost the erect carriage painfully acquired in the army.  He was a handsome man, whose fresh-colored skin gave him a perpetual appearance of having just washed his face.  The features were long and delicate.  The brown eyes had a liquid softness like the eyes of a woman.  In general the countenance was alertly intelligent; he looked younger than his years; but this afternoon the lines about his mouth and in his brows warranted every gray hair of his pointed short beard.  There was a reason.  Nelson was having one of those searing flashes of insight that do come occasionally to the most blindly hopeful souls.  Nelson had hoped all his life.  He hoped for himself, he hoped for the whole human race.  He served the abstraction that he called “PROgress” with unflinching and unquestioning loyalty.  Every new scheme of increasing happiness by force found a helper, a fighter, and a giver in him; by turns he had been an Abolitionist, a Fourierist, a Socialist, a Greenbacker, a Farmers’ Alliance man.  Disappointment always was followed hard on its heels by a brand-new confidence.  Progress ruled his farm as well as his politics; he bought the newest implements and subscribed trustfully to four agricultural papers; but being a born lover of the ground, a vein of saving doubt did assert itself sometimes in his work; and, on the whole, as a farmer he was successful.  But his success never ventured outside his farm gates.  At buying or selling, at a bargain in any form, the fourteen-year-old Tim was better than Nelson with his fifty years’ experience of a wicked and bargaining world.

Was that any part of the reason, he wondered to-day, why at the end of thirty years of unflinching toil and honesty, he found himself with a vast budget of experience in the ruinous loaning of money, with a mortgage on the farm of a friend, and a mortgage on his own farm likely to be foreclosed?  Perhaps it might have been better to stay in Henry County.  He had paid for his farm at last.  He had known a good moment, too, that day he drove away from the lawyer’s with the cancelled mortgage in his pocket and Tim hopping up and down on the seat for joy.  But the next day Richards—­just to give him the chance of a good thing—­ had brought out that Maine man who wanted to buy him out.  He was anxious to put the money down for the new farm, to have no whip-lash of debt forever whistling about his ears as he ploughed, ready to sting did he stumble in the furrows; and Tim was more anxious than he; but—­there was Richards!  Richards was a neighbor who thought as he did about Henry George and Spiritualism, and belonged to the Farmers’ Alliance, and had lent Nelson all the