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As the time drew near for leaving home, Jim planned to say a number of things to his Uncle Denny. He wanted to tell him about his feeling for Pen and he wanted to tell how much he was going to miss the fine old Irishman's companionship. He wanted to tell him that he was not merely Jim Manning, going to work, but that he was a New Englander going forth to retrieve old Exham.
And there was something deeper than this that suddenly spoke; the desire of his race to force his ideas on others, the same desire that had made his father talk to the men in the quarry at Exham. With a sudden swing of his long legs he mounted a pile of camp chairs and balanced himself with a hand on Sara's shoulder. "Shut up!" he shouted. "Everybody shut up and listen to me!"
Charlie Tuck and Iron Skull both had done what they could to make him see, but wrapped in his futile dreams he had refused to look, and, he told himself, long before he had left Exham, his father had tried to set him on the right path but he always had put off the quest on which his father had sent him, always thrust it over into tomorrow when today was waiting for his start.
Jim, after the two had left, sat for a long time in the sand. He wished that he could have a look at the old swimming hole up at Exham. He wished that he and Uncle Denny and his mother and Pen were living at Exham. For the first time he felt a vague distrust of Sara.
When Little Jim was five, the Mannings had come back to Exham, with the hope of somehow, sometime, buying back the old farm. Little Jim passed the old farmhouse slowly. It was used for a storehouse for quarry supplies now. Yet it still was beautiful. Two great elms still shaded the wide portico. The great eaves still sheltered many paned windows.
The third floor had two large rooms opening off a big central room, and this floor, comfortably furnished, was for the use of Mrs. Manning and Jim and the maid. Mrs. Manning solved the maid question by sending back to Exham for Annie Peyton. Annie was about forty. Her mother had been housekeeper for Mrs. Manning's mother and Annie was the domestic day worker for the village.
Somehow he felt that his father had been a futile sacrifice to the thing that was destroying New England and that old New England spirit which he had been taught to revere. What the thing was he did not know. And yet, with his boyish lips trembling, he promised the old mansion to make good for his father and for Exham poor old Exham, with its lost ideals!
But you kids have got to think about it. What's happened to us? What's happened to this old town? I want you to think about it." Little Jim took the dinner bucket and started for home. His father had not been talking on a topic new to the Mannings or to the Mannings' friends. Little Jim had been brought up to wonder what was the matter with his breed, what had happened to Exham.
This suggestion that he might be the instrument of a mighty plan, he and Pen and Uncle Denny, awed him. Uncle Denny eyed the fine drooping brown head for a moment. "Ah, me boy! Me boy!" he said tenderly. "The old house at Exham is not a futile ruin. 'Tis the cocoon that gave birth to the butterfly wings of a great hope. Look up, Still! You've friends with you till the end of the fight."
Football and track work, debating societies and glee-clubs straightened his round shoulders and found him friends. Most important of all, he ceased to brood for a time over his Exham problems. Jim's stepfather, whom the boy called Uncle Denny, took a pride and interest in the boy that sometimes brought the tears to his mother's eyes.
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