Bayliss had a farm implement business in Frankfort, and though he was still under thirty he had made a very considerable financial success.  Perhaps Wheeler was proud of his son’s business acumen.  At any rate, he drove to town to see Bayliss several times a week, went to sales and stock exhibits with him, and sat about his store for hours at a stretch, joking with the farmers who came in.  Wheeler had been a heavy drinker in his day, and was still a heavy feeder.  Bayliss was thin and dyspeptic, and a virulent Prohibitionist; he would have liked to regulate everybody’s diet by his own feeble constitution.  Even Mrs. Wheeler, who took the men God had apportioned her for granted, wondered how Bayliss and his father could go off to conventions together and have a good time, since their ideas of what made a good time were so different.

Once every few years, Mr. Wheeler bought a new suit and a dozen stiff shirts and went back to Maine to visit his brothers and sisters, who were very quiet, conventional people.  But he was always glad to get home to his old clothes, his big farm, his buckboard, and Bayliss.

Mrs. Wheeler had come out from Vermont to be Principal of the High School, when Frankfort was a frontier town and Nat Wheeler was a prosperous bachelor.  He must have fancied her for the same reason he liked his son Bayliss, because she was so different.  There was this to be said for Nat Wheeler, that he liked every sort of human creature; he liked good people and honest people, and he liked rascals and hypocrites almost to the point of loving them.  If he heard that a neighbour had played a sharp trick or done something particularly mean, he was sure to drive over to see the man at once, as if he hadn’t hitherto appreciated him.

There was a large, loafing dignity about Claude’s father.  He liked to provoke others to uncouth laughter, but he never laughed immoderately himself.  In telling stories about him, people often tried to imitate his smooth, senatorial voice, robust but never loud.  Even when he was hilariously delighted by anything,—­as when poor Mahailey, undressing in the dark on a summer night, sat down on the sticky fly-paper,—­he was not boisterous.  He was a jolly, easy-going father, indeed, for a boy who was not thin-skinned.

II

Claude and his mules rattled into Frankfort just as the calliope went screaming down Main street at the head of the circus parade.  Getting rid of his disagreeable freight and his uncongenial companions as soon as possible, he elbowed his way along the crowded sidewalk, looking for some of the neighbour boys.  Mr. Wheeler was standing on the Farmer’s Bank corner, towering a head above the throng, chaffing with a little hunchback who was setting up a shell-game.  To avoid his father, Claude turned and went in to his brother’s store.  The two big show windows were full of country children, their mothers standing behind them to watch the parade.  Bayliss was seated in the little glass cage where he did his writing and bookkeeping.  He nodded at Claude from his desk.