boys--an intimacy which seemed all the stranger to Caleb
because of the very contrast between them.

Garret Devereau was two years older in actual age and a half dozen in
the matter of knowledge. Already, while still in knickerbockers, he
was beginning to show how entirely he was the son of his father. For
the older Devereau had grown up from a handsome, dark-skinned, reticent
boy into a moody and cynical skeptic who, at the age of thirty, had put
the muzzle of his own revolver against his temple and pulled the
trigger, because as he phrased it, "he was tired of the game." The
skepticism was already there in Garry Devereau's slow smile. And Caleb
often felt that the boy's black eyes were looking through and beyond,
rather than at him. The bond of mutual understanding which seemed to
exist between him and Steve puzzled Caleb; but he was glad of it, for
all that. It kept the boy from being left entirely alone.

Later, when he had had weeks and months to ponder it, the outcome of it
all seemed only logical to Caleb Hunter. It seemed to him then that he
should have foreseen it from the very first. But as it was, when the
denouement of which neither he nor Sarah had dreamed did come, it broke
with a suddenness that was cataclysmic to both of them.

From the beginning Steve had evinced an insatiable appetite for books;
he started in to devour everything upon which he could lay his hands,
and the Hunter library was lined with well-stocked cases. But it was
the history volumes which drew him most; with a fat tome upon his knees
he would sit for hours in a corner upon the floor, his eyes glued to
the pages. And one day, two weeks after the occurrence of the eggs, he
came to Sarah with a shy question, a book in one hand. After she had
caught the drift of his query, Sarah took the volume and found that he
had been reading of the fabulous deeds of King Arthur and his Knights
of the Round Table. His breathless interest in the subject thrilled
and warmed the tiny woman, for more than once she had asserted to her
brother that his very bearing was that of a small and sturdy knight of
old, and she explained and elaborated upon the printed text far more
appealingly than she had had any idea was in her power.

Steve went back to his reading after she had finished, but ever and
again that morning his eyes, blank with preoccupation, wandered from
the type; ever and again his ears seemed to be straining to catch the
echo of c