“Well, you will be, won’t you?” said Dave.  “We ain’t so fussy about free speech here as they are in that free Russia that he writes about, but we’re beginning to take notice.  Naturally it’s a poor time for free speech when the Government’s got a boil on the back of its neck and is feeling irritable.  Besides, no one ever did believe in free speech, and no government on earth ever allowed it.  Free speakers have always had to use judgment.  Up to now we’ve let ’em be free-speakinger than any other country has, but now they better watch out until the boat quits rocking.  They attack the machinery and try to take it apart, and then cry when they’re smacked.  Maybe they might get this boy the other side of a cell door.  Wouldn’t hurt him any.”

“Of course,” protested Harvey D., “we can hardly expect you to have a father’s feeling for him.”

“Well, I have!” retorted Dave.  “I got just as much father’s feeling for him as you have.  But you people are small-towners, and I been about in the world.  I know the times and I know that boy.  I’m telling you what’s best for him.  No more cream!  If it had been that other boy of mine you took, and he was believing what this one thinks he believes, I’d be telling you something different.”

“Always said he had the gumption,” declared Sharon Whipple.

“He’s got the third eye,” said Dave Cowan.

“We want to thank you for this talk,” interposed Gideon Whipple.  “Much of what you have said is very, very interesting.  I think my son will now know what course to pursue.”

“Don’t mention it!” said Dave, graciously.  “Always glad to oblige.”

The consultation seemed about to end, but even at the door of the little room Dave paused to acquaint them with other interesting facts about life.  He informed them that we are all brothers of the earth, being composed of carbon and a few other elements, and grow from it as do the trees; that we are but super-vegetables.  He further instructed them as to the constitution of a balanced diet—­protein for building, starches or sugar for energy, and fats for heating and also for their vitamine content.

The Whipples, it is to be feared, were now inattentive.  They appeared to listen, but they were merely surveying with acute interest the now revealed lower half of Dave Cowan.  The trousers were frayed, the shoes were but wraiths of shoes.  The speaker, quite unconscious of this scrutiny, concluded by returning briefly to the problems of human association.

“We’ll have socialism when every man is like every other man.  So far Nature hasn’t made even two alike.  Anyway, most of us got the third eye of wisdom too wide open to take any stock in it.  We may like it when we read it in a book, but we wouldn’t submit to it.  We’re too inquiring.  If a god leaned out of a cloud of fire and spoke to us to-day we’d put the spectroscope on his cloud, get a moving picture of him, and take his voice on a phonograph record; and we wouldn’t believe him if he talked against experience.”