He never saw the boy again. With the first light he was gone, and his little belongings with him. Afterward they found out that he had walked to the station, and taken the morning train.
“There’s a possible clue lost,” said Dick Colton to the professor, “that might have helped us.”
But Professor Ravenden was little concerned. He had discovered a print which might possibly indicate a rudimentary sixth toe on the pteranodon and he was absorbed in measurements.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE PROFESSOR’S SERMON
FOLLOWING the injunction left by Haynes, they buried him in the wind-swept knoll behind the Third House. A clergyman who had been sent for from New York took charge of the services, which were attended by the score of newspaper men and the little Third House group. A pompous, precise, and rather important person, was the clergyman; encased within a shell of prejudice which shut him off from any true estimate of the man over whose body he was to speak.
In Haynes he was able to see only an agent in a rather disapproved enterprise, mighty, indeed, but, to his unseeing eye, without the ideals which he had formulated for himself, and for those upon whom he imposed his standards. So his address was purely formal; with a note of the patronising and the exculpatory as if there were something to be condoned in the life which the reporter had laid down.
At the end there were sneering faces among the newspaper men. Helga wore an expression of piteous bewilderment; Dick Colton’s teeth were set hard; and Dolly Ravenden’s dark beauty glowed with suppressed wrath. To the surprise of all, as the minister closed, Professor Ravenden got to his feet hesitantly and nervously.
“My friends,” he said, “before we part I wish to add a slight tribute to what little we may say of the dead. For me to speak to you of his qualifications of mind and character would be an impertinence. But as a follower of what we call science I have one word to speak.
“To see the truth, exact and clear, is given to no human. Now and again are born and matured minds which solve some small portion of the great problem that we live in. These are the world’s master intellects, the Darwins, the Linnaeuses, the Cuviers, the Pasteurs. Borrowing their light, we perhaps may illuminate some tiny crevice, and thus pay our part of the human debt. That is the task to which the scientist sets his long and patient efforts.
“And this is achieved how? By an instinct which asserts itself potently in a certain type of humanity, in the highest type which we know. For want of a better term, I may call it the truth-vocation. The truth-seeker may concern himself with the smallest scale of a moth’s wing; he may devote himself to the study of the human soul in its most profound recesses; or he may strive with the immediate facts of life. Lie his field of endeavour where it may, his is the one great calling. Your friend and my friend who lies dead before us was of that world-old army. He died under its flag and on the field of honour.