He glanced sympathetically after the car.  A block away it had slowed to turn a corner.  The parrot’s ironic laughter came back to them.

“Yes, I remember her,” said Dave, musingly.  He was glad to recall that he had once shown the woman a little attention.

CHAPTER XXII

Of all humans cumbering the earth Dave Cowan thought farmers the most pitiable.  To this tireless-winged bird of passage farming was not a loose trade, and the news that his son was pledged to agrarian pursuits shocked him.  To be mewed up for life on a few acres of land!

“It was the land tricked us first,” admonished Dave.  “There we were, footloose and free, and some fool went and planted a patch of ground.  Then he stayed like a fool to see what would happen.  Pretty soon he fenced the patch to keep out prehistoric animals.  First thing he knew he was fond of it.  Of course he had to stay there—­he couldn’t take if off with him.  That’s how man was tricked.  Most he could ever hope after that was to be a small-towner.  You may think you can own land and still be free, but you can’t.  Before you know it you have that home feeling.  Never owned a foot of it!  That’s all that saved me.”

Dave frowned at his son hopefully, as one saved might regard one who still might be.

“I’m not owning any land,” suggested his son.

“No; but it’s tricky stuff.  You get round it, working at it, nursing it—­pretty soon you’ll want to own some, then you’re dished.  It’s the first step that counts.  After that you may crave to get out and see places, but you can’t; you have to plant the hay and the corn.  You to fool round those Whipple farms—­I don’t care if it is a big job with big money—­it’s playing with fire.  Pretty soon you’ll be as tight-fixed to a patch of soil as any yap that ever blew out the gas in a city hotel.  You’ll stick there and raise hogs en masse for free people that can take a trip when they happen to feel like it.”  Dave had but lately learned en masse and was glad to find a use for it.  He spoke with the untroubled detachment of one saved, who could return at will to the glad life of nomady.  “You, with the good loose trades you know!  Do you want to take root in this hole like a willow branch that someone shoves into the ground?  Don’t you ever want to move—­on and on and on?”

His son at the time had denied stoutly that he felt this urge.  Now, after a week of his new work, he would have been less positive.  It was a Sunday afternoon, and he sprawled face down on the farther shaded slope of West Hill, confessing a lively fear that he might take root like the willow.  Late in that first week the old cry had begun to ring in his ears—­Where do we go from here?—­bringing the cold perception that he would not go anywhere from here.

Through all his early years in Newbern he had not once felt the wander-bidding; never, as Dave Cowan put it, had he been itchy-footed for the road.  Then, with the war, he had crept up to look over the top of the world, and now, unaccountably, in the midst of work he had looked forward to with real pleasure, his whole body was tingling for new horizons.