But they rarely spoke of her, for her name meant not only Chalender, but all the dangers of the sea, the infamous storms of the antarctic waters, the long climb up the infinitely distant Pacific Ocean to the equator and far, far beyond; and then all the fabulous hazards of the San Francisco frontier. Between that new city and New York lay the oceanic continent. Railroads and wagon-trains were pushing through the vast wastes where the buffaloes swept in tides and the Indians lurked, but letters were forever in coming, and Immy’s parents could know nothing of her fate for half a year; if, indeed, they ever heard of her again. There were the other children. Keith had turned twenty, a young Viking indifferent to girls except as clowns to amuse him—which gave Patty almost her only comfort in the world. But David the younger, whom they called Junior, was coming along to the last of his teens, and he was as full of romance as an Orlando. He did not stick poems on trees, but he carved linked initials in the bark of the tulip trees and quickly gouged them out before his father could discover what they were. When RoBards reminded him that he was endangering the life of some of the slenderer trees, he groaned, “All right, Dad; I’ll quit,” and walked away as cheerful as Job. His father and mother eyed him from a distance anxiously, and exchanged glances of alarm over his sagging head at table, but they could not imagine what siren had bewitched him; and he would not answer their questions. They made light remarks about love, forgetting how important it had been to them in their equal age, and how important it was to them now. But Junior rebuked them with eyes as old as those of Prometheus chained to a cliff and torn by a vulture’s hooked beak. The unsolved puzzle of David’s infatuation began to harass his parents and frighten them, for he was wasting away to a melancholia. They tried to keep track of him, to see which one of which neighbor’s daughters he was frequenting. But he always managed to elude them. He would lie coiled in a chair somewhere reading Walter Scott or Dickens or Byron, or the morbid Poe, until they gave over watching him. When they looked for him he had vanished. They decided to take him back to the city, in spite of the heat of the late September and the charm of the golden countryside. The announcement staggered the boy. It dazed them to see one so young so capable of despair—as if any age were immune to anguish; as if a little pitcher could not overflow as well as a large. One afternoon he got away from the house with a fox’s craftiness. RoBards missed him immediately and, seizing his hat, set out in pursuit, knowing that Junior had but little start of him.