which he held between his knees, playing solitaire with strained, feverish attention. He wore an ungainly leather coat, polished slick with wear. One tanned cheek bulged with tobacco, and his lips were amber-stained.
He seemed oddly startled by my abrupt entrance. With a sudden, frightened movement, he pushed aside the box, and sprang to his feet. For a moment his eyes were anxiously upon me; then he seemed to sigh with relief. He opened the stove door, and expectorated into the roaring flames, then sank back into his chair.
“Howdy, Mister,” he said, in a drawl that was a little strained and husky. “You sort of scairt me. You was so long comin’ in that I figgered nobody got off.”
“I stopped to listen to the wolves,” I told him. “They sound weird, don’t they?”
He searched my face with strange, fearful eyes. For a long time he did not speak. Then he said briskly, “Well, Mister, what kin I do for ye?”
As I advanced toward the stove, he added, “I’m Mike Connell, the station agent.”
“My name is Clovis McLaurin,” I told him. “I want to find my father, Dr. Ford McLaurin. He lives on a ranch near here.”
“So you’re Doc McLaurin’s boy, eh?” Connell said, warming visibly. He rose, smiling and shifting his wad of tobacco to the other cheek, and took my hand.
“Yes,” I said. “Have you seen him lately? Three days ago I had a strange telegram from him. He asked me to come at once. It seems that he’s somehow in trouble. Do you know anything about it?”
Connell looked at me queerly.
“No,” he said at last. “I ain’t seen him lately. None of ’em off the ranch ain’t been in to Hebron for two or three weeks. The snow is the deepest in years, you know, and it ain’t easy to git around. I dunno how they could have sent a telegram, though, without comin’ to town. And they ain’t none of us seen ’em!”
“Have you got to know Dad?” I inquired, alarmed more deeply.
“No, not to say real well,” the agent admitted. “But I seen him and Jetton and Jetton’s gal often enough when they come into Hebron, here. Quite a bit of stuff has come for ’em to the station, here. Crates and boxes, marked like they was scientific apparatus—I dunno what. But a right purty gal, that Stella Jetton. Purty as a picture.”
“It’s three years since I’ve seen Dad,” I said, confiding in the agent in hope of winning his approval and whatever aid he might be able to give me in reaching the ranch, over the unusual fall of snow that blanketed the West Texas plains. “I’ve been in medical college in the East. Haven’t seen Dad since he came out here to Texas three years ago.”
“You’re from the East, eh?”
“New York. But I spent a couple of years out here with my uncle when I was a kid. Dad inherited the ranch from him.”
“Yeah, old Tom McLaurin was a friend of mine,” the agent told me.
It was three years since my father
had left the chair of astrophysics at an eastern university, to come here to the lonely ranch to carry on his original experiments. The legacy from his brother Tom, besides the ranch itself, had included a small fortune in money, which had made it possible for him to give up his academic position and to devote his entire time to the abstruse problems upon which he had been working.
Being more interested in medical than in mathematical science, I had not followed Father’s work completely, though I used to help him
