It became Sharon’s pretense that he was not hugging the boy, merely feeling the muscles in his shoulders and back to see if he were as good a lightweight as ever.  He pounded and thumped and punched and even made as if to wrestle with the returned soldier, laughing awkwardly through it; but his florid face had paled with the excitement.

“I knew you’d come back!  Old Sammy Dodwell happened to mention he’d seen you; said he hadn’t noticed you before for most a month, he thought.  But I knew you was coming, all right!  Time and time again I told people you would.  Told every one that.  I bet you had some narrow escapes, didn’t you now?”

Wilbur Cowan considered.

“Well, I had a pretty bad cold in the Argonne.”

“I want to know!” said Sharon, much concerned.  He pranced heavy-footedly before the other, thumping his chest.  “Well, I bet you threw it off!  A hard cold ain’t any joke.  But look here, come on for a ride!”

They entered the car and Sharon drove.  But he continued to bubble with questions, to turn his head and gesture with one hand or the other.  The passenger applied imaginary brakes as they missed a motor truck.

“Better let me take that,” he suggested, and they changed seats.

“Out to the Home Farm,” directed Sharon.  “You ain’t altered a mite,” he went on.  “Little more peaked, mebbe—­kind of more mature or judgmatical or whatever you call it.  Well, go on—­tell about the war.”

But there proved to be little to tell, and Sharon gradually wearied from the effort of evoking this little.  Yes, there had been fights.  Big ones, lots of noise, you bet!  The food was all right.  The Germans were good fighters.  No; he had not been wounded; yes, that was strange.  The French were good fighters.  The British were good fighters.  They were all good fighters.

“But didn’t you have any close mix-ups at all?” persisted Sharon.

“Oh, now and then; sometimes you couldn’t get out of it.”

“Well, my shining stars!  Can’t you tell a fellow?”

“Oh, it wasn’t much!  You’d be out at night, maybe, and you’d meet one, and you’d trade a few punches, and then you’d tangle.”

“And you’d leave him there, eh?”

“Oh, sometimes!”

“Who did win the war, anyway?” Sharon was a little irritated by this reticence.

The other grinned.

“The British say they won it, and the last I heard the French said it was God Almighty.  Take your choice.  Of course you did hear other gossip going round—­you know how things get started.”

Sharon grunted.

“I should think as much.  Great prunes and apricots!  I should think there would of been talk going round!  Anyway, it was you boys that stopped the fight.  I guess they’d admit that much—­small-towners like you that was ready to fight for their country.  Dear me, Suz!  I should think as much!”

On the crest of a hill overlooking a wide sweep of valley farmland the driver stopped the car in shade and scanned the fields of grain where the green was already fading.