“That’s one of the real old ones. I know, for I got it out myself. I don’t know just how old, but there’s piñon trees three hundred years old by their rings, growing up in the stone trail that leads to the ruins where I got it.”
“Stone trail … piñons?” she asked.
“Yes, deep, narrow trails in white rock, worn by their moccasin feet coming and going for generations. And these old piñon trees have come up in the trails since the race died off. You can tell something about how long ago it was by them.” He showed her a coating of black on the under side of the jar.
“That’s not from the firing. See, I can scratch it off. It’s soot, from when it was on the cook-fire last—and that was before Columbus landed, I guess. Nothing makes those people seem so real to me as their old pots, with the fire-black on them.” As she gave it back to him, he shook his head. “That one’s for you, Ma’am, if you like it.”
“Oh, I couldn’t think of letting you give it to me! You must keep it for yourself, or put it in a museum.” But that seemed to touch a sore spot.
“Museums,” he said bitterly, “they don’t care about our things. They want something that came from Crete or Egypt. I’d break my jars sooner than they should get them. But I’d like this one to have a good home, among your nice things”—he looked about appreciatively. “I’ve no place to keep them. They’re in my way, especially that big one. My trunk is at the station, but I was afraid to leave the pottery. You don’t get them out whole like that very often.”
“But get them out of what, from where? I want to know all about it.”
“Maybe some day, Ma’am, I can tell you,” he said, wiping his sooty fingers on his handkerchief. His reply was courteous but final. He strapped his bag and picked up his hat, then hesitated and smiled. Taking a buckskin bag from his pocket, he walked over to the window-seat where the children were, and held out his hand to them, saying: “These I would like to give to the little girls.” In his palm lay two lumps of soft blue stone, the colour of robins’ eggs, or of the sea on halcyon days of summer.
The children marvelled. “Oh, what are they?”
“Turquoises, just the way they come out of the mine, before the jewellers have tampered with them and made them look green. The Indians like them this way.”
Again Mrs. St. Peter demurred. She told him very kindly that she couldn’t let him give his stones to the children. “They are worth a lot of money.”
“I’d never sell them. They were given to me by a friend. I have a lot, and they’re no use to me, but they’ll make pretty playthings for little girls.” His voice was so wistful and winning that there was nothing to do.
“Hold them still a moment,” said the Professor, looking down, not at the turquoises, but at the hand that held them: the muscular, many-lined palm, the long, strong fingers with soft ends, the straight little finger, the flexible, beautifully shaped thumb that curved back from the rest of the hand as if it were its own master. What a hand! He could see it yet, with the blue stones lying in it.
In a moment the stranger was gone, and the St. Peter family sat down and looked at one another. He remembered just what his wife had said on that occasion.
“Well, this is something new in students, Godfrey. We ask a poor perspiring tramp boy to lunch, to save his pennies, and he departs leaving princely gifts.”
Yes, the Professor reflected, after all these years, that was still true. Fellows like Outland don’t carry much luggage, yet one of the things you know them by is their sumptuous generosity—and when they are gone, all you can say of them is that they departed leaving princely gifts.
With a good tutor, young Outland had no difficulty in making up three years’ mathematics in four months. Latin, he owned, had been hard for him. But in mathematics, he didn’t have to work, he had merely to give his attention. His tutor had never known anything like it. But St. Peter held the boy at arm’s length. As a young teacher full of zeal, he had been fooled more than once. He knew that the wonderful seldom holds water, that brilliancy has no staying power, and the unusual becomes commonplace by a natural law.
In those first months Mrs. St. Peter saw more of their protégé than her husband did. She found him a good boarding-place, took care that he had proper summer clothes and that he no longer addressed her as “Ma’am.” He came often to the house that summer, to play with the little girls. He would spend hours with them in the garden, making Hopi villages with sand and pebbles, drawing maps of the Painted Desert and the Rio Grande country in the gravel, telling them stories, when there was no one by to listen, about the adventures he had had with his friend Roddy.
“Mother,” Kathleen broke out one evening at dinner, “what do you think! Tom hasn’t any birthday.”
“How is that?”
“When his mother died in the mover wagon, and Tom was a baby, she forgot to tell the O’Briens when his birthday was. She even forgot to tell them how old he was. They thought he must be a year and a half, because he was so big, but Mrs. O’Brien always said he didn’t have
