“Yes, I know something about the atmosphere,” Tom broke out at last. “It is delightful, but it’s all wrong for me. It discourages me dreadfully. I used to go over there when I was in Washington, and it always made me blue. I don’t believe I could ever work there.”
“But can you trust a child’s impressions to guide you now, in such an important decision?” asked Mrs. St. Peter gravely.
“I wasn’t a child, Mrs. St. Peter. I was as much grown up as I am now—older, in some ways. It was only about a year before I came here.”
“But, Tom, you were on the section gang that year! Why do you mix us all up?” Kathleen caught his hand and squeezed the knuckles together, as she did when she wanted to punish him.
“Well, maybe it was two years before. It doesn’t matter. It was long enough to count for two ordinary years,” he muttered abstractedly.
Again he went away abruptly, and a few days later he told St. Peter that he had definitely accepted the instructorship under Crane, and would stay on in Hamilton.
During that summer after Outland’s graduation, St. Peter got to know all there was behind his reserve. Mrs. St. Peter and the two girls were in Colorado, and the Professor was alone in the house, writing on volumes three and four of his history. Tom was carrying on some experiments of his own, over in the Physics laboratory. He and St. Peter were often together in the evening, and on fine afternoons they went swimming. Every Saturday the Professor turned his house over to the cleaning-woman, and he and Tom went to the lake and spent the day in his sailboat.
It was just the sort of summer St. Peter liked, if he had to be in Hamilton at all. He was his own cook, and had laid in a choice assortment of cheeses and light Italian wines from a discriminating importer in Chicago. Every morning before he sat down at his desk he took a walk to the market and had his pick of the fruits and salads. He dined at eight o’clock. When he cooked a fine leg of lamb, saignant, well rubbed with garlic before it went into the pan, then he asked Outland to dinner. Over a dish of steaming asparagus, swathed in a napkin to keep it hot, and a bottle of sparkling Asti, they talked and watched night fall in the garden. If the evening happened to be rainy or chilly, they sat inside and read Lucretius.
It was on one of those rainy nights, before the fire in the dining-room, that Tom at last told the story he had always kept back. It was nothing very incriminating, nothing very remarkable; a story of youthful defeat, the sort of thing a boy is sensitive about—until he grows older.
Book II
Tom Outland’s Story
I
The thing that sidetracked me and made me so late coming to college was a somewhat unusual accident, or string of accidents. It began with a poker game, when I was a call boy in Pardee, New Mexico.
One cold, clear night in the fall I started out to hunt up a freight crew that was to go out soon after midnight. It was just after pay day, and one of the fellows had tipped me off that there would be a poker game going on in the cardroom behind the Ruby Light saloon. I knew most of my crew would be there, except Conductor Willis, who had a sick baby at home. The front windows were dark, of course. I went up the back alley, through a tumbledown ice house and a court, into a ’dobe room that didn’t open into the saloon proper at all. It was crowded, and hot and stuffy enough. There were six or seven in the game, and a crowd of fellows were standing about the walls, rubbing the whitewash off on to their coat shoulders. There was a birdcage hanging in one window, covered with an old flannel shirt, but the canary had wakened up and was singing away for dear life. He was a beautiful singer—an old Mexican had trained him—and he was one of the attractions of the place.
I happened along when a jackpot was running. Two of the fellows I’d come for were in it, and they naturally wanted to finish the hand. I stood by the door with my watch, keeping time for them. Among the players I saw two sheep men who always liked a lively game, and one of the bystanders told me you had to buy a hundred dollars’ worth of chips to get in that night. The crowd was fussing about one fellow, Rodney Blake, who had come in from his engine without cleaning up. That wasn’t customary; the minute a man got in from his run, he took a bath, put on citizen’s clothes, and went to a barber. This Blake was a new fireman on our division. He’d come up town in his greasy overalls and sweaty blue shirt, with his face streaked up with smoke. He’d been drinking; he smelled of it, and his eyes were out of focus. All the other men were clean and freshly shaved, and they were sore at Blake—said his hands were so greasy they marked the cards. Some of them wanted to put him out of the game, but he was a big, heavy-built fellow, and nobody wanted to be the man to do it. It didn’t please them any better when he took the jackpot.
I got my two men and hurried them out, and two others from the row along the wall took their places. One of the chaps who left
