‘You’ve broken into the pile,’ interrupted Lucius. ‘For five years you’ve been grubbing and saving all for one purpose, working overtime, and making odds and ends here and there for the boys, all for one purpose—that you might go to college. And now you’ve gone and upset everything. I’ll bet you haven’t a dollar left of all your savings. Now, have you?’ ‘No,’ mumbled Ephraim shamefacedly. ‘But’—— ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ broke in Lucius—‘you did it for me. You are always doing things for me. But you’d no right to do this. You’d no right to spoil your whole life just for me. What can I do? I can’t pay you back. And father’—— ‘Ez ter thet,’ interjected Ephraim, ‘it war my own. I ain’t askin’ any wan ter put it back.’ ‘It wasn’t your own,’ burst out Lucius. ‘At least it wasn’t your own to do as you liked with. It was to help you on in the world. It was to give your brains a chance. Oh! weren’t there heaps of ways in which we could have had our fun without this? If I’d known it, if I’d dreamed of it, I’d have gone off and ‘listed without a word to any one.’ ‘I know ye would, Luce,’ said Ephraim quietly. ‘Ye were mighty nigh doin’ it thet snowy night when ye came ter me. Thet sot me thinkin’. I sez ter m’self, sez I, I reckon it’s mostly froth on Luce’s part. Ef I ken git him pinned down ter come with me, I guess I kin keep him out er harm’s way. Lordy! Luce, what would I hev done ef I’d gone and lost ye? Waal, ez I sot thar thinkin’ ter m’self, all at once thar comes an idee. I dunno whar it came from, but thet’s it’—he pointed to the balloon—‘and wanst I gripped it I never let it go again, fer it jest seemed the best way in all the world fer ter let ye see all ye wanted ter see, and ter keep ye safe et the same time.’ He held up his hand as Lucius was about to speak. ‘Don’t say it again, Luce. It’s done now, and can’t be undone. Maybe some folk’d think it war a mad thing ter do; but it didn’t seem so ter me, seein’ it war done fer you.’ Sometimes the step from the ridiculous to the sublime is as easy as that in the opposite direction. It was so now, when the rough, hard-handed mechanic, whose brains, nevertheless, had been able to devise and execute this wonderful thing, stood before the high-spirited, empty-headed boy, whom he loved, and for whose well-being, as he imagined, he had thrown away his substance and his worldly hopes. For a few moments there was silence between the boys, Ephraim standing with his hand upon the bolt of the door, Lucius driving first the toe and then the heel of his boot into the ground. At last he shuffled over to Ephraim, glanced shyly up into the big gray eyes that beamed so affectionately down on him, and with something that sounded suspiciously like a sob, clasped Grizzly’s free hand in both his own. Ephraim flung wide the door. ‘Garn away!’ he said with a genial grin, and tenderly shoved Lucius out of the cabin.