The little man nodded. "I reckoned that was what he would do. Be a
good boy, Jeff. I never knew a man more honorable than your
father. Run straight, son."

"Yes, sir," the lad promised, a lump in his throat.

It was more than ten years before he saw Captain Chunn again.


Part 2

As an urchin Jeff had taken things as they came without
understanding causes. Thoughts had come to him in flashes, without
any orderly sequence, often illogically. As a gangling boy he
still took for granted the hard knocks of a world he did not
attempt to synthesize.

Even his mother looked upon him as "queer." She worried
plaintively because he was so careless about his clothes and
because his fondness for the outdoors sometimes led him to play
truant. Constantly she set before him as a model his cousin,
James, who was a good-looking boy, polite, always well dressed,
with a shrewd idea of how to get along easily.

"Why can't you be like Cousin James? He isn't always in trouble,"
she would urge in her tired way.

It was quite true that the younger cousin was more of a general
favorite than harum-scarum Jeff, but the mother might as well have
asked her boy to be like Socrates. It was not that he could not