Page:Son of the wind.djvu/138

RV 126 joking. "How odd that seems! Father and I have always done exactly as we wanted."

"So I have noticed. Mrs. Rader is very gentle. I like women to be gentle. My mother was what is called capable. I used to wonder how she ran the church society, and the improvement society, and the other society, and the house, and still had so much energy left for me." His lip twitched with amusing memories. "She had the strongest convictions—she called them principles—and the strongest will of any human being I have ever known, and she had a way of imposing them. She kept me under that thumb of hers until after I was in college. It was in my junior year that I suddenly woke up to the fact that I didn't have to mind her. Funny the way it came, like a bolt clean out of the sky. I kicked over the traces then and there; I took what little was mine of the estate and came out here, out west."

"But then you were free. You could do what you wanted to then?"

"Oh, as to being free, I didn't know what it was. I thought it was like traveling through space above the earth; I thought it was going to be like one prolonged spree. Lord, how things narrowed down around me! I bought some ranching interests, and that showed me that I liked to run things. I've got