Ted landed in our midst with all the attendant violence of a meteor. He didn’t arrive, he landed, bag and baggage, and until his departure weeks later our tranquil existence was sufficiently hectic to suit even Bill.
After numerous letters from his doting aunt, we reluctantly consented to look after Ted while she was in Europe recuperating from a nervous break-down. At the end of the first week, we understood why Aunt Elizabeth found recuperation necessary, and I suggested to Owen, it might be well to engage our passage on a later steamer, for I had a premonition that my own nerves might require a rest after two months of Ted’s strenuous companionship.
He wasn’t bad; there was not a bad thing about him. He was just overflowing with youth and energy, which had been pent up for years, between boarding school in the winter and Newport in the summer.
Motherless, fatherless, rich, neglected or over-indulged by a none too wise aunt, Ted was an appealing young person, a character easily to be made or marred by circumstances.
He looked like a member of the celestial choir—blue-eyed, fair-haired and mild—but he produced the effect of a Kansas cyclone.
There was nothing he did not see, there was nothing he did not hear and there was nothing he did not do. Even on eighty thousand acres of land his activities were somewhat limited.
He was wildly enthusiastic about the West, fascinated by the men, and was Bill’s shadow, so we promptly turned him over to those “rough persons” Aunt Elizabeth had especially hoped that he might avoid, to get it all out of his system.
“Let him stay at the bunk-house,” Owen advised after Ted had besought me to allow him to stay with the men. “It will do him more good than anything else in the world, if he has the right stuff in him.”
Ted stood on the porch, uneasily shifting from one foot to the other, when I came out of the office.
“All right, Ted, Mr. Brook and I are perfectly willing for you to stay with the men, if you really want to.”