"Yes; I know. I've been West before, thank you! Pardon my curiosity, but are all you creatures of the desert queer and inexplicable?" "Not me," he returned promptly if ungrammatically, "if you're looking in my direction." "I'll admit that I find you as interesting as the owl--almost. And quite as hard to understand." "Nobody ever called me queer; not to my face." "But you are, you know. You oughtn't to be here at all." "Where ought I to be?" "How can I answer that riddle without knowing where you have been? Are you Ulysses--" "'Knowing cities and the hearts of men,'" he answered, quick to catch the reference. "No; not the cities, certainly, and very little of the men." "There, you see!" she exclaimed plaintively. "You're up on a classical reference like a college man. No; not like the college men I know, either. They are too immersed in their football and rowing and too afraid to be thought high-brow, to confess to knowing anything about Ulysses. What was your college?" "This," he said, sweeping a hand around the curve of the horizon. "And in any one else," she retorted, "that would be priggish as well as disingenuous." "I suppose I know what you mean. Out here, when a man doesn't explain himself, they think it's for some good reason of his own, or bad reason, more likely. In either case, they don't ask questions." "I really beg your pardon, Mr. Banneker!" "No; that isn't what I meant at all. If you're interested, I'd like to have you know about me. It isn't much, though." "You'll think me prying," she objected. "I think you a sort of friend of a day, who is going away very soon leaving pleasant memories," he answered, smiling. "A butterfly visit. I'm not much given to talking, but if you'd like it--" "Of course I should like it." So he sketched for her his history. His mother he barely remembered; "dark, and quite beautiful, I believe, though that might be only a child's vision; my father rarely spoke of her, but I think all the emotional side of his life was buried with her." The father, an American of Danish ancestry, had been ousted from the chair of Sociology in old, conservative Havenden College, as the logical result of his writings which, because they shrewdly and clearly pointed out certain ulcerous spots in the economic and social system, were denounced as "radical" by a Board of Trustees honestly devoted to Business Ideals. Having a small income of his own, the ex-Professor decided upon a life of investigatory vagrancy, with special reference to studies, at first hand, of the voluntarily unemployed. Not knowing what else to do with the only child of his marriage, he took the boy along. Contemptuous of, rather than embittered against, an academic system which had dispensed with his services because it was afraid of the light--"When you cast a light, they see only the resultant shadows," was one of his sayings which had remained with Banneker--he had resolved to educate the child himself.