"Bud's going to have charge of Rambler while we're gone," he explained seriously.

"I want to be sure he's in good hands." The two men watched Buddy's departure for the house, and grinned over the manifest struggle between his haste to tell his mother and Jo, and his sense of importance over the trust.
"A kid of your own makes up for a whole lot," Mason observed abstractedly, reaching up to the narrow shelf where he kept his tobacco.
"I wish I had two or three more; they give a man something to work for, and look ahead and plan for." Ford, studying his face with narrowed eyelids, was more than ever thankful that he was not hampered by matrimony..