As a boy Kinear was one of those who must know how every mechanical contrivance operates. His most cherished possessions were the alarm clocks and the dollar watches other people had thrown away, for the first stage of development in the natural mechanic is the desire to take things apart, followed after a time by the second stage, wherein he tries to put them together again. The purely analytic stage is common to most boys, but the synthetic period is reached only by the genuine mechanic. At the time his schoolmates were dreaming of laurels to be won in the realms of poetry, Fred was out in the backyard monkeying with a toy steam engine, and when they reached the period of vacations spent on tennis court and lake with racket and banjo, Fred was shoveling coal into a squat, puffy thing that was very hot and greasy, and had adopted the monkey wrench and oilcan as constant companions. After he was graduated from high school, he wanted to go to college. Unfortunately for him, he was not a member of the banjo gang. What he got he had to earn, and so he found a job firing in the boiler room of a light plant. One day a boiler exploded and they carried him to a hospital on a stretcher, with a white cloth over his face. Weeks afterward, he was allowed to sit up; a little later he could move around, and still later the bandages were taken from his head. The surgeon who had patched up his face was very proud of his work, but his pride was based on his accomplishment in light of the materials he had to work with, and brought small consolation to Fred Kinear when they first brought him a mirror. What he saw was a face, it was true, but not his face nor did it bear a likeness to any face he had ever seen before. One ear was little more than a gnarled button; cheeks and chin were a series of white scars, ridged and seamed; his nose was partly gone; his eyelids were too small and fiery red, and his upper lip was drawn up in a snarl which would endure forever. There came long hours when Kinear fought with all his might for courage to face the world again--a long uphill fight; but in the end he found a measure of peace, for he knew that after all, he was still Fred Kinear in spite of what the mirror claimed. The steam might have seared his face beyond recognition, but it had not touched his brain, and certainly his soul was intact. He was still a human being, and as such would go forth and take up his work where he had left off.