ept moving. The beach-combing ex-sailor said that he
was starting for Valparaiso, started for San Domingo, and landed in
Tahiti, whence he sent Carl one post-card, worded, "What price T. T.?"
The engineer from Boston Tech. kept his oath about mining in
Chihuahua. He got the appointment as assistant superintendent of the
Tres Reyes mine--and he took Carl with him.

Carl reached Mexico and breathed the air of high-lying desert and
hill. He found rare days, purposeless and wonderful as the voyages of
ancient Norse Ericsens; days of learning Spanish and sitting quietly
balancing a .32-20 Marlin, waiting for bandits to attack; the joy of
repairing machinery and helping to erect a new crusher, nursing peons
with broken legs, and riding cow-ponies down black mountain trails at
night under an exhilarating splendor of stars. It never seemed to him
that the machinery desecrated the mountains' stern grandeur.

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 diner a 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-thre