Wilbur Cowan came to him and, even as had Porter in the days when the sign was bright, did everything.  It was a distinct relief to puzzle over a sewing machine after labouring with too easily diagnosed motor troubles, or to restore a bit of marquetry in a table, or play at a feat of locksmithing.  The First-Class Garage urged him to quit fiddling round and become its foreman, but this glittering offer he refused.  It was too much like settling down to your future.

“Got his father’s vagabond blood in his veins,” declared Judge Penniman.  “Crazy, too, like his father.  You can’t tell me Dave Cowan was in his right mind when the Whipples offered, in so many words, to set him up in any business he wanted to name, and pay all expenses, and he spurned ’em like so much dirt beneath his heel.  Acted like a crazy loon is what I say, and this Jack-of-all-trades is showing the strain.  Mark my words, they’ll both end their days in a madhouse!”

No one did mark his words.  Not even Winona, to whom they were uttered with the air of owlish, head-snapping wisdom which marked so many of the invalid’s best things.  She was concerned only with the failure of Wilbur to select a seemly occupation.  His working dress was again careless; he reeked with oil, and his hands—­hard, knotty hands—­seemed to be permanently grimed.  Even Lyman Teaford managed his thriving flour and feed business, with a butter and eggs and farm produce department, in the garments of a gentleman.  True, he often worked with his coat off, but he removed his cuffs and carefully protected the sleeves of his white shirt with calico oversleeves held in place by neat elastics.  Once away from the store he might have been anybody—­even a banker.

Winona sought to enlist Lyman’s help in the matter of Wilbur’s future.  Lyman was flaccid in the matter.  The boy had once stolen into the Penniman parlour while Lyman and Winona were out rifling the ice box of delicacies, and enticed by the glitter of Lyman’s flute had thrillingly taken it into his hands to see what made it go, dropping it in his panic, from the centre table to the floor, when he heard their returning steps.  Lyman had never felt the same toward Wilbur after that.  Now, even under the blandishments of Winona, he was none too certain that he would make a capable flour and feed merchant.  Wilbur himself, to whom the possibility was broached, proved all too certain that he would engage in no mercantile pursuit whatever; surely none in which he might be associated ever so remotely with Lyman Teaford, whom for no reason he had always viewed with profound dislike.  This incident closed almost before it opened.

Winona again approached Sharon Whipple in Wilbur’s behalf.  But Sharon was not enough depressed by the circumstance that Wilbur’s work was hard on clothes, or that tasks were chosen at random and irregularly toiled at.

“Let him alone,” advised Sharon.  “Pretty soon he’ll harden and settle.  Besides, he’s getting his education.  He ain’t educated yet.”