It was this hurt which had caused Joseph to spring up, stumble and fall, and whose pain had later made him swoon. The man came back to his senses. Opening his eyes and seeing above him an officer in the uniform of a captain, he raised his uninjured arm with difficulty in an all-but-involuntary salute. “Joe!” cried the old man. “Don’t you know me? Don’t you know me? It’s Dad. I--mean ‘father.’” Joseph Brinton looked up dully; with eyes that had in them no faintest glint of recognition. He had known the uniform. He did not at all know the face. His father, to the best of his son’s belief, was still spending the bulk of his days and nights lording it in frowzy dignity in the Eagle bar; his long, silvery hair hanging down above his film-eyed and somewhat bloated face; his pursy form incased in the shiny old-fashioned frock suit. Mrs. Joseph Brinton had not thought best to notify her absent lord that his father had run away. Partly for fear of worrying the soldier-husband; partly lest Joseph be inclined in his primly perfect way to blame her for not keeping closer watch on the old man, or of making his stay at the big house happier than had been her frigid course in reality. Of Jimmie’s deflection from the home nest, Joseph knew nothing, for the very good reason that Mrs. Brinton, still in Europe, had not herself been to date apprised of the fact. Her family had feared her lofty wrath, and they still hoped that, his war craze satiated, Jimmie might return home before his mother should arrive back at Ideala. In the alert and muscular soldierly figure and the lean, strong face bent above him, Joseph now saw not one lineament of a father whose vagaries he had borne so long and with such exemplary patience. But at a repetition of the words: “Don’t you know me, Joe?” something in the voice struck him as vaguely familiar. Not in the intonation which was wholly new; but the timber. He blinked perplexedly. Then a new twinge of pain made him wince. “You are not dangerously hurt,” said Dad. “It is a painful wound, but it is not serious. Try to stand it like a soldier.” “Yes, sir,” answered Joseph. “You still don’t know me? Think, man! I am your father.” “My--my _father_!” echoed Joseph incredulously. CHAPTER XXI THE LITTLE LADY AGAIN Dad looked up, and his gaze through the window fell on Jimmie. The boy had paused in his flight across the field--almost at the threshold of the cottage. His grandfather passed out to see what was delaying him. On the porch Dad halted, staring into the hot haze of sunshine and dust that rolled up from the fields. In the shade of a magnolia, Battle Jimmie was squatting on all fours, pulling a bayonet out of the ground. “What are you doing?” asked Dad. The boy looked up half guiltily. “I saw this bayonet stuck here,” he explained. “And--” “And your father is waiting for a nurse,” reproved Dad.