The latter listened in silence till his father had finished, and his boyish face was preternaturally thoughtful.
"I've seen boys make just such mistakes at the blackboard," he observed in a tone of melancholy reflection. "And they generally catch it afterwards too," he added. "It's natural."
"I've 'caught it,'" Overholt answered. "You have too, my dear boy, though you didn't make the mistake--that's not just."
"Well, father, I don't know what we're going to do, but something has got to be done right away, and we've got to find out what it is."
"Thank goodness you're not a girl!" cried Overholt fervently.
"I'm glad too; only, if I were one, I should most likely die young and go to heaven, and you'd have me off your mind all right. The girls always do in storybooks."
He made this startling and general observation quite naturally. Of course girls died and went to heaven when there was nothing to eat; he secretly thought it would be better if more of them did, even without starvation.
"Let's work, anyhow," he added, as his father said nothing. "Maybe we'll think of something while we're building that railroad depôt. Don't you suppose that now you've got so far the Motor would keep while you taught, and you could go at it again in the vacations? That's an idea, father, come now!"
He was already in his place before the board on which the little City was built, and his eyes were fixed on the lines his father had drawn as a plan for the station and the diverging tracks. But Overholt did not sit down. His usual place was opposite the Motor, where he could see it, but he did not want to look at it now.
"Change seats with me, boy," he said. "I cannot stand the sight of it. I suppose I'm imaginative. All this has upset me a good deal."
He wished he had the lad's nerves, the solid nerves of hungry and sleepy thirteen. Newton got up at once and changed places, and for a few minutes Overholt tried to concentrate his mind on the little City, but it was of no use. If he did not think of the Motor, he thought of what was much worse, for the little streets and models of the familiar places brought back the cruel memory of happier things so vividly that it was torment. All his faculties of sensation were tense and vibrating; he could hear his wife's gentle and happy voice, her young girl's voice, when he looked at the little bench in the lane where he had asked her to marry him, and an awful certainty came upon him that he was never to hear her speak again on this side of the grave; there was the house they had lived in; from that window he had looked out on a May morning at the budding trees half an hour after his boy had been born; there, in the pretty garden, the young mother had sat with her baby in the lovely June days--it was full of her. Or if he looked at the College, he knew every one of the steps, and the entrance, and the tall windows of the lecture-rooms, where he had taught so contentedly, year after year, till the terrible Motor had taken possession of him, the thing that was driving him mad; and, strangely enough, what hurt him most and brought drops of perspiration to his forehead was the National Bank in Main Street; it made him remember his debt, and that he had no money at all--nothing whatsoever but the few dollars in his pocket left after paying the bills on the first of the month.