At the graveyard, his mother's black figure stumbled heavily beside her husband's stiff preoccupation. Son and father did not look once at each other; there was no recognition. But Mary came over beside her brother, and his quietly sobbing family, and held Pelham to her breast. "Mother's own big boy.... He was always so fond of you." Then she did an unexpected thing. With a quick motion she turned to the younger woman beside him, and kissed her cheek. "I pray God you make my son happy," she whispered. "May he never be unhappy...." She cast a half-broken look back to where she had been. Sobbing heavily, she left them. The slow echoes of "The Sweet By-and-By" ceased; the simple service ended. The horses stepped down the dirt road to their next task. Jane packed to return on the morning train. Pelham, in answer to Uncle Jimmy Barbour's questions, went into a restrained discussion of his new beliefs. "I don't understand all about socialism," the uncle finally decided, "but it seems to be, as you say, for the brotherhood of man. And surely that is following in the Master's footsteps." "And I know Mary's boy wouldn't do anything we could be ashamed of," said Aunt Lotta, in soft certainty. The simple trust moved him. As he was leaving, Pelham took his aunt aside. "Don't let grandmother worry too much over--it," he said softly. "It's all so beautiful, and natural. If you believe in a heaven, you know he is happier there than here. Just as flowers blossom and die, just as the leaves stretch out their green leaves and then grow bare under winter skies, grow old, and die, while their place is taken by the younger saplings--it is all natural, and beautiful. We wouldn't want an endless day, or an eternal spring; there must come night and winter, that the new blossoming may follow." "It is a lovely idea," Aunt Lotta said brokenly. "It will comfort mother." Then he and Jane turned north again, to take up the unfinished labors at Adamsville--the hazard of losing the strike, and the delight of building their home together. XXIII The iron city interrupted its bitter struggle for an event of local magnitude. January 17th, 1917--Adamsville celebrated its semi-centennial! Fifty years since the first farm-shack had been built on the farm beside Ross's Creek: ten years of sleepy and indeterminate farm growth, with a forty year waking that had made it the third largest city in the oldest quarter of the country! Fifty years between old Thaddeus Ross's unhitching his single horse to begin plowing, and the creation of the billion-dollar Gulf Iron and Steel Corporation, with his great-grandson Sam Ross as president, and Judge Florence and Paul Judson on the board.