Richard Hand had taken John Vanton to a school in New Jersey and had seen him settled there before going back to New York to prepare for a job in Arizona. The Western enterprise necessitated a long absence from his office in lower Broadway, and made it improbable that he would be able to see the Vantons for nearly a year. But late in October Mary Vanton got a letter from him in which he said:

    Things are in such shape here that I think I shall be able to run away for a couple of weeks at Christmas time, and if you like I will go to the school and pick up John, who will be coming home about then for the holidays. I am going to[264] invite myself to come and stay with you part of the time I am East—the first part of it. After Christmas I shall have to get back to the New York office and clean up some work there. May I come?

    I do not suppose you have heard from Guy, though I sincerely hope you may have. I made some inquiries in New York and did a little investigation by wire. Through a friend in Washington I had a search made of records of the Federal Employment Bureaus in some of the cities and we found that under his own name he had been shipped on a British vessel, the Sea Wanderer, of Liverpool, sailing from San Francisco to Leith, Scotland. That was months ago.

    The Sea Wanderer is an old ship, a squarerigger, and she went around Cape Horn. Of course I inquired right away about her and learned that she arrived safely at Leith after a passage of five months—not very swift, you see. I wasn’t able to find out what became of Guy after that, but he reached Scotland all right, for there was no trouble on the passage and no one was lost or died. He was paid off at the Board of Trade office in Leith along with the rest of the crew.

    He appears to have gone straight to San Francisco from New York and to have shipped there on this passage before doing anything else. The time interval is too short to have allowed him to do anything else. It was not more than ten days, apparently, from the time he left New York to the day the Sea Wanderer sailed. The people at the Federal Employment Bureau in San Francisco have no recollection of him. They don’t recall anything he said nor what he looked like. He was just one of hundreds of others they deal with every day. The only actual identification, of course, lies in the[265] name, and it is highly improbable that the man who was shipped on the Sea Wanderer was some other Guy Vanton. I think that, in a way, you will be glad to know that he kept his own name. It makes him seem more like a fellow going about his proper business and not trying to hide or run away from something.

    He wasn’t doing that, I feel sure. He was just going after something he hadn’t got. Let’s hope he gets it and comes back safely with it.

    John is a trump. I like that older boy of yours and suspect he’s got great stuff in him—not that it surprises me. As your boy I should be surprised if he hadn’t. I rather expected, though, that he would say something about his father, talk to me about him in some way, try to get my opinion or something of that sort. But he never opened his mouth on the subject. He’s self-contained without being conceited. He’ll get on well at school. And whatever befalls, when he gets a little older you are going to be able to have real reliance on him. He writes me regularly and seems to like the place and the fellows. I think he inherits your taste for chemistry, and as I’m a chemical engineer he thinks something of me on that account. In fact, when we’re alone together it’s pretty much a case of “talk shop” for me all the time. Not that I mind that! I never knew before how interesting shop talk can be. And if I give him my confidence he won’t withhold his. I wonder, anyway, if a certain relation of friendliness and exchanged confidence and shared confidence doesn’t come rather easier between two people who aren’t joined by ties of blood. It has sometimes struck me, from what I’ve seen of other men and their sons,[266] that the very fact that a man is a boy’s father somehow makes it more difficult for him to come into a real confidential relation with the boy—at times, anyway. For even nowadays the father is more or less an embodiment of Authority, more or less the sovereign, and intimacy with the sovereign is not particularly easy. Since I have no real authority over John he is rather more inclined to listen to my advice and heed it. “If I were you” gets farther, lots of times, than “You must.” Well, I won’t theorize about it; the fact is what matters, and the fact is what gives me immens............