Stolen hours he gave to the building of box-kites with cambered wings, after rapturously learning, in the autumn of 1908, that in August a lanky American mechanic named Wilbur Wright had startled the world by flying an aeroplane many miles publicly in France; that before this, on July 4, 1908, another Yankee mechanic, Glenn Curtiss, had covered nearly a mile, for the _Scientific American_ trophy, after a series of trials made in company with Alexander Graham Bell, J. A. D. McCurdy, "Casey" Baldwin, and Augustus Post. He might have gone on until death, dealing with excitable greasers and hysterical machinery, but for the coming of a new mine superintendent--one of those Englishmen, stolid, red-mustached, pipe-smoking, eye-brow-lifting, who at first seem beefily dull, but prove to have known every one from George Moore to Marconi. He inspected Carl hundreds of times, then told him that the period had come when he ought to attack a city, conquer it, build up a reputation cumulatively; that he needed a contrast to Platonians and Bowery bums and tropical tramps, and even to his beloved engineers. "You can do everything but order a _petit dîner à deux_, but you must learn to do that, too. Go make ten thousand pounds and study Pall Mall and the boulevards, and then come back to us in Mexico. I'll be sorry to have you go--with your damned old silky hair like a woman's and your wink when Guittrez comes up here to threaten us--but don't let the hinterland enslave you too early." A month later, in January, 1909, aged twenty-three and a half, Carl was steaming out of El Paso for California, with one thousand dollars in savings, a beautiful new Stetson hat, and an ambition to build up a motor business in San Francisco. As the desert sky swam with orange light and a white-browed woman in the seat behind him hummed Musetta's song from "La Bohème" he was homesick for the outlanders, whom he was deserting that he might stick for twenty years in one street and grub out a hundred thousand dollars. CHAPTER XVII On a grassy side-street of Oakland, California, was "Jones & Ericson's Garage: Gasoline and Repairs: Motor Cycles and Bicycles for Rent: Oakland Agents for Bristow Magnetos." It was perhaps the cleverest garage in Oakland and Berkeley for the quick repairing of motor-cycles; and newly wed owners of family runabouts swore that Carl Ericson could make a carburetor out of a tomato-can, and even be agreeable when called on for repairs at 2 A.M. He had doubled old Jones's business during the nine months--February to November, 1909--that they had been associated.