WHEN Alwyn was seven years old a man came to visit his grandmother, a rancher from New Mexico whose name was John Craig. He ran his brown finger in and out of the small boy's hair and along his eyebrows, saying, "I had an uncle whose forehead was like that."
Alwyn's grandmother bent over him to see. "So it was," she said.
He came again just before the death of Alwyn's grandfather, and spent four or five afternoons at the farm, during which the old man stayed in the garden, not even coming to the house for his medicine or hist usual nap on the sofa: apparently he did not like the stranger. Alwyn's father seemed to have known him a long time, but not well; and they both seemed embarrassed, as if, under circumstances unknown to the boy, they ought to have liked each other perhaps more, perhaps less.
The stranger brought the children expensive presents. He was well dressed, and wore two rings on hist delicate but calloused hands—one silver Indian ring and one set with a piece of onyx on which was carved a cupid astride a fish. His face had an appearance of weariness and controlled excitement: lean and smiling, but smiling only around his mouth—the eyes, with brown upper lids drawn tight across them, never ceased moving about the room or over the countryside, watchfully but without anxiety. He walked with a loose-jointed motion, and Alwyn's grandmother said, "That is a regular horseback walk!"
Late in the afternoon she took her guest to the cemetery to see the new headstone on the grave of her two dead little girls. Alwyn stayed behind with his mother. "Who is Mr. Craig?" he asked.
His mother hesitated for a moment. "I don't know why you shouldn't be told. You are old enough now to keep the family secrets. You have heard us all speak of your father's younger brother Evan—he is Mr. Craig. He changed his name."
The small boy had never in his life been so astonished. He stared in the direction his grandmother and the stranger had gone, down the road toward the cemetery, staring over the head of the little old man in the garden who was the stranger's father, but would not speak to him. "Why did he change his name?" he cried.
His mother told him the little that she had been told; but he did not understand it very well, and years were to pass before he actually found out why. After his grandmother's death he went to New Mexico, and his uncle John Craig became a more intimate friend than his father had been able to be. This fact amused and touched the lonely, extraordinary man, for he himself had loved his uncle Leander more than his father.
During Evan's boyhood—before anyone had dreamed of such a man as John Craig, though his father often prophesied for him a disgraceful future—Leander Tower, in the "old bachelor's wing" of the house, led an idle and, to everyone but his youngest nephew, insignificant existence. Because he knew that the family would have been suffering extreme poverty but for his financial assistance, his brother's evident scorn of his way of life did not embarrass him. His sister-in-law was devoted to his comfort—it was a long-established habit to love him; but the shadow that was left of his character, if she had met him then for the first time, would scarcely have attracted her attention, as in the community it attracted no attention at all. Only Evan took refuge in that shadow from the pain of being misunderstood, the fatigue of adolescence which is more painful though less serious than a man's fatigue, and from his other troubles as they arose.
When Evan entered his room, interrupting his melancholy recollections, the old bachelor looked up with tender interest but no more eagerness. Another unhappy boy coming into the room, a third youngster coming into his life—he wanted neither to shut this one out nor to keep him there. "Sit down, my boy. What's the trouble now?"
"He called me a loafer because I came in from the field half an hour before supper."