The complicating elements in regard to David were of quite another nature.
To Simeon Holly the boy was a riddle to be sternly solved.

To Ellen Holly he was an everpresent reminder of the little boy of long ago, and as such was to be loved and trained into a semblance of what that boy might have become.

To Perry Larson, David was the "derndest checkerboard of sense an' nonsense goin'"-- a game over which to chuckle.
At the Holly farmhouse they could not understand a boy who would leave a supper for a sunset, or who preferred a book to a toy pistol--as Perry Larson found out was the case on the Fourth of July; who picked flowers, like a girl, for the table, yet who unhesitatingly struck the first blow in a fight with six antagonists: who would not go fishing because the fishes would not like it, nor hunting for any sort of wild thing that had life; who hung entranced for an hour over the "millions of lovely striped bugs" in a field of early potatoes, and who promptly and stubbornly refused to sprinkle those same "lovely bugs" with Paris green when discovered at his worship.

All this was most perplexing, to say the least.
Yet David worked, and worked well, and in most cases he obeyed orders willingly.

He learned much, too, that was interesting and profitable; nor was he the only one that made strange discoveries during those July days.