"Yes, grandfather," Ethel said.
"Hope the army put some stiff backbone into him. We're going to need backbone, I see. Where is Bennet? In your uncle's office again?"
Ethel related details of her cousin's return to business in the Chicago office and items about Aunt Myra's activities in relief organizations, while her grandfather interjected curt criticisms or grunts of approval. His mind always had been keenly alert; he still had excellent eyes, and since his withdrawal to St. Florentin, he had become an indefatigable reader, subscribing not only to all local newspapers and to one daily from Chicago but to more than a score of magazines ranging from the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Economist, of which he partly approved, to the New Republic and the Nation which infuriated him so that he read them through usually upon the hour they arrived; and thereafter, for a day or two, he would compose biting and unanswerable rejoinders to their lunacies which he would repeat to his wife or any guest in the house and which he might even write out. But he never mailed them.
He was rehearsing to Ethel his latest retort for the editor of the New Republic when the sled reached the ruins of the old village,—the windowless, unroofed shacks, the rifted store building and the church with the gray, wind-splintered cross. The emptiness of the place affected Ethel in spite of her many former visits; she had never learned to pass through without glancing at the windows for a face or looking for doors to open and listening for a sound. But her grandfather did not turn his head or pause in his recital of his sarcastic paragraphs. Sam Green Sky also sat motionless, smoking and looking toward the great, ram-
