That winter there was a meeting of an Association of Electrical Engineers in Hamilton. Louie Marsellus, who was a member, gave a luncheon for the visiting engineers at the Country Club, and then motored them to Outland. Scott McGregor was at the lunch, with the other newspaper men. On his return he stopped at the university and picked up his father-inlaw.

“I’ll run you over home. Which house, the old? How did you get out of Louie’s party?”

“I had classes.”

“It was some lunch! Louie’s a good host. First-rate cigars, and plenty of them,” Scott tapped his breast pocket. “We had poor Tom served up again. It was all right, of course — the scientific men were interested, didn’t know much about him. Louie called on me for personal recollections; he was very polite about it. I didn’t express myself very well. I’m not much of a speaker, anyhow, and this time I seemed to be talking uphill. You know, Tom isn’t very real to me any more. Sometimes I think he was just a — a glittering idea. Here we are, Doctor.”

Scott’s remark rather troubled the Professor. He went up the two flights of stairs and sat down in his shadowy crypt at the top of the house. With his right elbow on the table, his eyes on the floor, he began recalling as clearly and definitely as he could every incident of that bright, windy spring day when he first saw Tom Outland.

He was working in his garden one Saturday morning, when a young man in a heavy winter suit and a Stetson hat, carrying a grey canvas telescope, came in at the green door that led from the street.

“Are you Professor St. Peter?” he inquired.

Upon being assured, he set down his bag on the gravel, took out a blue cotton handkerchief, and wiped his face, which was covered with beads of moisture. The first thing the Professor noticed about the visitor was his manly, mature voice — low, calm, experienced, very different from the thin ring or the hoarse shouts of boyish voices about the campus. The next thing he observed was the strong line of contrast below the young man’s sandy hair — the very fair forehead which had been protected by his hat, and the reddish brown of his face, which had evidently been exposed to a stronger sun than the spring sun of Hamilton. The boy was fine-looking, he saw — tall and presumably well built, though the shoulders of his stiff, heavy coat were so preposterously padded that the upper part of him seemed shut up in a case.

“I want to go to school here, Professor St. Peter, and I’ve come to ask you advice. I don’t know anybody in the town.”

“You want to enter the university, I take it? What high school are you from?”

“I’ve never been to high school, sir. That’s the trouble.”

“Why, yes. I hardly see how you can enter the university. Where are you from?”

“New Mexico. I haven’t been to school, but I’ve studied. I read Latin with a priest down there.”

St. Peter smiled incredulously. “How much Latin?”

“I read Caesar and Virgil, the AEneid.”

“How many books?”

“We went right through.” He met the Professor’s questions squarely, his eyes were resolute, like his voice.

“Oh, you did.” St. Peter stood his spade against the wall. He had been digging around his red-fruited thorn-trees. “Can you repeat any of it?”

The boy began: Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem and steadily continued for fifty lines or more, until St. Peter held up a checking hand.

“Excellent. Your priest was a thorough Latinist. You have a good pronunciation and good intonation. Was the Father by any chance a Frenchman?”

“Yes, sir. He was a missionary priest, from Belgium.”

“Did you learn any French from him?”

“No, sir. He wanted to practise his Spanish.”

“You speak Spanish?”

“Not very well, Mexican Spanish.”

The Professor tried him out in Spanish and told him he thought he knew enough to get credit for a modern language. “And what are your deficiencies?”

“I’ve never had any mathematics or science, and I write very bad hand.”

“That’s not unusual,” St. Peter told him. “But, by the way, how did you happen to come to me instead of the registrar?”

“I just got in this morning, and your name was the only one here I knew. I read an article by you in a magazine, about Fray Marcos. Father Duchene said it was the only thing with any truth in it he’d read about our country down there.”

The Professor had noticed before that whenever he wrote for popular periodicals it got him into trouble. “Well, what are your plans, young man? And, by the way, what is your name?”

“Tom Outland.”

The Professor repeated it. It seemed to suit the boy exactly.

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty.” He blushed, and St. Peter supposed he was dropping off a few years, but he found afterward that the boy didn’t know exactly how old he was. “I thought I might get a tutor and make up my mathematics this summer.”

“Yes, that could be managed. How are you fixed for money?”

Outland’s face grew grave. “I’m rather awkwardly fixed. If you were to write to Tarpin, New Mexico, to inquire about me, you’d find I have money in the bank there, and you’d think I had been deceiving you. But it’s money I can’t touch while I’m able-bodied. It’s in trust for someone else. But I’ve got three hundred dollars without any string on it, and I’m hoping to get work here. I’ve been bossing a section gang all winter, and I’m in good condition. I’ll do anything but wait table. I won’t do that.” On this point he seemed to feel strongly.

The Professor learned some of his story that morning. His parents, he said, were “mover people,” and both died when they were crossing southern Kansas in a prairie schooner. He was a baby and had been informally adopted by some kind people who took care of his mother in her last hours, — a locomotive engineer named O’Brien, and his wife. This engineer was transferred to New Mexico and took the foundling boy along with his own children. As soon as Tom was old enough to work, he got a job as call boy and did his share toward supporting the family.

“What’s a call boy, a messenger boy?”

“No, sir. It’s a more responsible position. Our town was an important freight division on the Santa Fé, and a lot of train men live there. The freight schedule is always changing because it’s a single track road and the dispatcher has to get the freights through when he can. Suppose you’re a brakeman, and your train is due out at two A.M.; well, like as not, it will be changed to midnight, or to four in the morning. You go to bed as if you were going to sleep all night, with nothing on your mind. The call boy watches the schedule board, and half an hour before your train goes out, he comes and taps on your window and gets you up in time to make it. The call boy has to be on to things in the town. He must know when there’s a poker game on, and how to slip in easy. You can’t tell when there’s a spotter about, and if a man’s reported for gambling, he’s fired. Sometimes you have to get a man when he isn’t where he ought to be. I found there was usually a reason at home for that.” The boy spoke with gravity, as if he had reflected deeply upon irregular behaviour.

Just then Mrs. St. Peter came out into the garden and asked her husband if he wouldn’t bring his young friend in to lunch. Outland started and looked with panic toward the door by which he had come in; but the Professor wouldn’t hear of his going, and picked up his telescope to prevent his escape. As he carried it into the house and put it down in the hall, he noticed that it was strangely light for its bulk. Mrs. St. Peter introduced the guest to her two little girls, and asked him if he didn’t want to go upstairs to wash his hands. He disappeared; as he came back something disconcerting happened. The front hall and the front staircase were the only hard wood in the house, but as Tom came down the waxed steps, his heavy new shoes shot out from under him, and he sat down on the end of his spine with a thump. Little Kathleen burst into a giggle, and her elder sister looked at her reprovingly; Mrs. St. Peter apologized for the stairs.

“I’m not much used to stairs, living mostly in ‘dobe houses,” Tom explained, as he picked himself up.

At luncheon the boy was very silent at first. He sat looking admiringly at Mrs. St. Peter and the little girls. The day had grown warm, and the Professor thought this was the hottest boy he had ever seen. His stiff white collar began to melt, and his handkerchief, as he kept wiping his face with it, became a rag. “I didn’t know it would be so warm up here, or I’d have picked a lighter suit,” he said, embarrassed by the activity of his skin.

“We would like to hear more about your life in the Southwest,” said his host. “How long were you a call boy?”

“Two years. Then I had pneumonia, and the doctor said I ought to go on the range, so I went to work for a big cattle firm.”

Mrs. St. Peter began to question him about the Indian pueblos. He was reticent at first, but he presently warmed up in defence of Indian housewifery. He forgot his shyness so far, indeed, that having made a neat heap of mashed potato beside his chop, he conveyed it to his mouth on the blade of his knife, at which sight the little girls were not able to conceal their astonishment. Mrs. St. Peter went on quietly talking about Indian pottery and asking him where they made the best.

“I think the very best is the old, — the cliff-dweller pottery,” he said. “Do you take an interest in pottery, Ma’am? Maybe you’d like to see some I have brought along.” As they rose from the table he wen............