Every Sunday a sad-faced man with ash-colored hair and bony fingers, who had been a lieutenant in the Peruvian navy, a teacher in St. John's College, China, and a sub-contractor for railroad construction in Montana, and who was now a minor clerk in the cool, lofty offices of the Materials and Supplies Department, came over from Colon, relaxed in a tilted-back chair, and fingered the Masonic charm on his horsehair watch-guard, while he talked with the P. R. R. conductor and the others about ruby-hunting and the Relief of Peking, and Where is Hector Macdonald? and Is John Orth dead? and Shall we try to climb Chimborazo? and Creussot guns and pig-sticking and Swahili tribal lore. These were a few of the topics regarding which he had inside information. The others drawled about various strange things which make a man discontented and bring him no good. Carl was full member of the circle because of his tales of the Bowery and the Great Riley Show, and because he pretended to be rather an authority on motors for dirigibles, about which he read in _Aeronautics_ at the Y. M. C. A. reading-room. It is true that at this time, early 1907, the Wrights were still working in obscurity, unknown even in their own Dayton, though they had a completely successful machine stowed away; and as yet Glenn Curtiss had merely developed a motor for Captain Baldwin's military dirigible. But Langley and Maxim had endeavored to launch power-driven, heavier-than-air machines; lively Santos Dumont had flipped about the Eiffel Tower in his dirigible, and actually raised himself from the ground in a ponderous aeroplane; and in May, 1907, a sculptor named Delagrange flew over six hundred feet in France. Various crank inventors were "solving the problem of flight" every day. Man was fluttering on the edge of his earthy nest, ready to plunge into the air. Carl was able to make technical-sounding predictions which caught the imaginations of the restless children. * * * * * The adventurers kept moving. The beach-combing ex-sailor said that he was starting for Valparaiso, started for San Domingo, and landed in Tahiti, whence he sent Carl one post-card, worded, "What price T. T.?" The engineer from Boston Tech. kept his oath about mining in Chihuahua. He got the appointment as assistant superintendent of the Tres Reyes mine--and he took Carl with him. Carl reached Mexico and breathed the air of high-lying desert and hill. He found rare days, purposeless and wonderful as the voyages of ancient Norse Ericsens; days of learning Spanish and sitting quietly balancing a .32-20 Marlin, waiting for bandits to attack; the joy of repairing machinery and helping to erect a new crusher, nursing peons with broken legs, and riding cow-ponies down black mountain trails at night under an exhilarating splendor of stars. It never seemed to him that the machinery desecrated the mountains' stern grandeur.