"After all, William was Frank's son," Dolph told Dayton. "Frank was—what he was. But my sister and I are here to see that the boy is located. Perhaps he can still have a normal childhood."
"We'll do what we can," Dayton replied, smiling crookedly to dampen the man's naive and assertive air.
For the last half of the long summer the search went on, many visitors took brief part, ranging well beyond the short tractor lines which encompassed the tourist's usual view of Mars.
Dolph Terry was dogged, but clumsy and irritable. His sister's rugged cheerfulness and interest in her surroundings, pleased Dayton.
Still, at the end—due as much as anything to sheer luck—it was Joe Dayton who captured Will Terry single-handed. It was almost autumn again. Joe flushed the scampering figure from a thicket. The boy's limp was to Dayton's advantage. He made a flying tackle, and the savage, grimy thing that was an eleven-year-old human, was fighting in his grasp.
His crooned words, finding their way through the thin texture of two air-hoods and the tenuous atmosphere between, did not soften the ferocity of those pale eyes. Such eyes can be like a blank mask, anyway—not unintelligent, but expressive of a different thought-plane.
"Easy, Will—easy, fella," Dayton said. "You couldn't last much longer out here. Your compressor must be nearly worn out."
Reassurance failed. "Lemme go!" the boy snarled blurredly, his speech rusted by solitude. Helped by his father, he had learned the tricks of survival, here. His dimmed past was so different from his present life that perhaps it seemed fearfully alien to him. As he bore the struggling boy to the tractor-vehicle, Dayton had the odd idea that a Martian, trapped by a man, might behave like this.
He recalled old yarns of boys raised by wolves or apes. Here was the same simple loss of human ways—not by soul-migration, but the plain molding of habit by a bizarre environment.