She looked up at me. I had never seen her face more beautiful. It was flushed and eager. She clutched my arm. Then she whispered: "My man--my wonderful, good man!" The primitive appellation was in itself like a whiff of salt air. It bore me back to the days when a husband's chief function was just that--being a man to his own good woman. We looked for a moment into each other's eyes. Then the same question was born to both of us in a moment. "What of the boy?" It was a more serious question to her, I think, than it was to me. I knew that the sons of other fathers and mothers had wrestled with that life and come out strong. There were Murphy's boys, for instance. Of course the life would be new to my boy, but the keen competition ought to drive him to his best. His present life was not doing that. As for the coarser details from which he had been so sheltered--well, a man has to learn sooner or later, and I wasn't sure but that it was better for him to learn at an age when such things would offer no real temptations. With Ruth back of him I didn't worry much about that. Besides, the boy had let drop a phrase or two that made me suspect that even among his present associates that same ground was being explored. "Ruth," I said, "I'm not worrying about Dick." "He has been kept so fresh," she murmured. "It isn't the fresh things that keep longest," I said. "That's true, Billy," she answered. Then she thought a moment, and as though with new inspiration answered me using again that same tender, primitive expression: "I don't fear for my man-child." When the boy came home from school that night I had a long talk with him. I told him frankly how I had been forced out of my position, how I had tried for another, how at length I had resolved to go pioneering just as his great-grandfather had done among the Indians. As I thought, the naked adventure of it appealed to him. That was all I wished; it was enough to work on.