o. Pretty sleepy, are you? I'll
tell you a story. J' like to hear about how Napoleon smashed the
theory of divine rule, or about how me and Charlie Weems explored
Tiburon? Well----"

Though Carl afterward remembered not one word of what Bone Stillman
said, it is possible that the outcast's treatment of him as a grown-up
friend was one of the most powerful of the intangible influences which
were to push him toward the great world outside of Joralemon. The
school-bound child--taught by young ladies that the worst immorality
was whispering in school; the chief virtue, a dull quietude--was here
first given a reasonable basis for supposing that he was not always to
be a back-yard boy.

The man in the flannel shirt, who chewed tobacco, who wrenched
infinitives apart and thrust profane words between, was for fifteen
minutes Carl's Froebel and Montessori.

Carl's recollection of listening to Bone blurs into one of being
somewhere in the back of a wagon beside Gertie, wrapped in buffalo
robes, and of being awakened by the stopping of the wagon when Bone
called to a band of men with lanterns who were searching for the
missing Gertie. Apparently the next second he was being lifted out
before his home, and his aproned mother was kissing him and sobbing,
"Oh, my boy!" He snuggled his head on her shoulder and said:

"I'm cold. But I'm going to San Francisco."

CHAPTER III

Carl Ericson, grown to sixteen and long trousers, trimmed the
arc-lights for the Joralemon Power and Lighting Company, after school;
then at Eddie Klemm's billiard-parlor he won two games of Kelly pool,
smoked a cigarette of flake tobacco and wheat-straw paper, and
"chipped in" five cents toward a can of beer.

A slender Carl, hesitating in speech, but with plenty to say; rangy as
a setter pup, silken-haired; his Scandinavian cheeks like petals at an
age when his companions' faces were like maps of the moon; stubborn
and healthy; wearing a celluloid collar and a plain black
four-in-hand; a blue-eyed, undistinguished, awkward, busy proletarian
of sixteen, to whom evening clothes and poetry did not exist, but who
quivered with inarticulate determinations to see Minneapolis, or even
Chicago. To him it was sheer romance to parade through town with a tin
haversack of carbons for the arc-lights, familiarly lowering the
high-hung mysterious lamps, while his plodding acquaintances "clerked"
in stores on Saturdays, or tended furnaces. Sometimes he donned th