Allan told him of Hillton, and Tommy and Hal chimed in from time to time and helped him along. It was a large subject and one they liked, and half an hour passed before they had finished. Burley listened with evident interest, and only interrupted occasionally to ask a question. “How’d you happen to come to Erskine?” asked Tommy, when the subject had been exhausted. Burley took one big knee into his hands and considered the question for a moment in silence. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said at last. “You see, I had a go at the university over in Boulder; that’s near Denver,” he explained, parenthetically. “But we didn’t get on very well together, the faculty and me, and I was always turning up at the ranch. Well, the old man got tired of seeing me around so much; said he’d paid for my keep at the university, and I’d ought to stay there and get even with the game. But, ginger! the corral wasn’t big enough. Every time I’d try to be good, something would come along and happen, and--first thing I knew, I’d be roaming at large again. So the old man said he guessed what I needed was to get far enough away from home so I wouldn’t back-trail so often; said there wasn’t much doing when I went to college Monday morning and showed up for feed Thursday night. First he tried taking my railroad pass away; but when I couldn’t scare up the money, I rode home on a freight. I got to know the train crews on the D. & R. G. pretty well long toward spring. When vacation came, we all agreed to call it off--the faculty and the old man and me. So I went up to Rico and fooled around a mine there all summer. When----” “What was the name of the mine?” asked Allan, eagerly. “This one was the Indian Girl. There’s lots of ’em thereabouts. The old man----” “Say, is the ‘old man’ your father?” asked Tommy. “Yes; why?” “Nothing, only I should think he’d lick you if he heard you calling him that.” “Oh, he doesn’t mind. Besides, he isn’t really old; only about forty. He calls me Kid, too,” he added, smiling broadly. “Well, in the summer he wanted to know where I’d rather go to college--Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Pennsylvania; he said he didn’t care so long as it was far enough away to keep me from diggin’ out for home every week and presenting myself with vacations not down on the calendar. Well, there was a fellow up at the mine named Thompson; he was superintendent. I was helping him--or thought I was--and so we got to be pretty good friends. He was a nice little fellow, about as high as a sage-bush, and as plucky as a bulldog. Well, he went to college here about ten years ago, and he used to tell me a good deal about the place. So, when the old man said, ‘Which is it?’ I told him Erskine. He said he’d never heard tell of it, but so long as it was about two thousand miles from Blackwater he guessed it would do. And that’s how. Now you talk.”