Anton's gaze never wavered, but a question crept into his eyes. "Yes," answered the Forecaster, "you can be one. I know your father well, and I'm sure that he will be guaranty for the instruments. The work of making and recording observations will be yours. Never late, never forgetting, never swerving from your duty, your post at the rain-gauge and the barometer will be as honorable and responsible a post as the soldier's at sentry-post or behind the gun." The lad's eyes glowed more deeply. "Storms, frosts, and droughts will be your enemies," the Forecaster continued, "and they never sleep and never give quarter. The lighthouse-keeper who lets his light go out and permits a ship to go unwarned to wreck upon the rocks is not more guilty than the Weather Observer who allows disaster to sweep, unwarned, upon his district. It is a trust, Anton. Can you and will you take it?" The sun broke through the clouds, lighting up the yellow wood of the crutch and turning it into gold. It caught the boy's eye, but with a new significance. No longer would it stand between him and his future. There was something he could do for his country, as well as though he were the strongest and best-built lad in all the neighborhood. Life, with its promises of work, opened before him. "I'll take the trust," he answered simply. CHAPTER III PUTTING THE SUN TO WORK "Fo' the land's sake, Mistah Anton, what fo' yo' puttin' up that pole on the grass?" "So that I can find the sun, Dan'l," the crippled lad answered cheerily, as he held upright the pole, while Ross began to fill in the deep hole that the two boys had spent the morning in making. "Yo' don't need no pole to find the sun," the old darky answered; "why, yonder's the sun, right up over yo' head." "Is it right over my head, Dan'l?" the boy asked. The negro, an old family servant, put his hand above his eyes and squinted at the sky. "Not right over," he corrected himself, "but mighty near it." "How near?" Dan'l looked at the boy with a puzzled air. "Ah don't jest know how near," he answered. "That's the idea, exactly," Anton rejoined, "I want to know how near." "Is this hyar another of your contraptions to tell what the weather's goin' to be like the year after next?" the plantation hand queried, taking advantage of his position as an old family appanage. The instruments had been a point of discussion all summer, for Dan'l prided himself on being a weather prophet, though he based most of his predictions on the behavior of the animals and birds around the farm. "This is to tell time, not weather, Dan'l," Anton answered, "but we'll use it for weather, too." The darky shook his head. "Ah don't hold with none o' them glass things with silver runnin' up an' down in their insides, what you calls 'fermometers," he declared, "they're not nateral. Ah believe in signs. When, in the evenin', a rooster crows like he's done goin' to bust, ah knows sho' it's goin' to rain befo' mornin'."