The head nodded on its feeble neck. “You found things to do? I—I hoped you would. But I always worried about you. Every day, son, every day for all these years, I picked up the papers and looked at them with misgivings. ‘Suppose,’ I said to myself, ‘suppose my boy lost his temper last night. Suppose someone wronged him and he undertook to avenge himself.’ I trusted you, Hugo. I could not quite trust—the other thing. I’ve even blamed myself and hated myself.” He smiled. “But it’s all right—all right. So I am glad. Then, tell me—what—what—”

“What have I done?”

“Do you mind? It’s been so long and you were so far away.”

“Well—” Hugo swept his memory back over his career—“so many things, father. It’s hard to recite one’s own—”

“I know. But I’m your father, and my ears ache to hear.”

“I saved a man pinned under a wagon. I saved a man from a shark. I pulled open a safe in which a man was smothering. Many things like that. Then—there was the war.”

“I know. I know. When you wrote that you had gone to war, I was frightened—and happy. Try as I might, I could not think of a great constructive cause for you to enter. I had to satisfy myself by thinking that you could find such a cause. Then the war came. And you wrote that you were in it. I was happy. I am old, Hugo, and perhaps my nationalism and my patriotism are dead. Sides in a war did not seem to matter. But peace mattered to me, and I thought—I hoped that you could hasten peace. Four years, Hugo. Your letters said nothing. Four years. And then it stopped. And I understood. War is property fighting property, not David fighting Goliath. The greatest David would be unavailing now. Even you could do little enough.”

“Perhaps not so little, father.”

“There were things, then?”

Hugo could not disappoint his father with the whole formidable truth. “Yes.” He lied with a steady gaze. “I stopped the war.”

“You!”

“After four years I perceived the truth of what you have just said. War is a mistake. It is not sides that matter. The object of war is to make peace. On a dark night, father, I went alone into the enemy lines. For one hundred miles that night I upset every gun, I wrecked every ammunition train, I blew up every dump—every arsenal, that is. Alone I did it. The next day they asked for peace. Remember the false armistice? Somehow it leaked out that there would be victory and surrender the next night—because of me. Only the truth about me was never known. And a day later—it came.”