"When his mother died in the mover wagon, and Tom was a baby, she forgot to tell the O'Briens when his birthday was. She even forgot to tell them how old he was. They thought he must be a year and a half, because he was so big, but Mrs. O'Brien always said he didn't have enough teeth for that."
St. Peter asked her whether Tom had ever said how it happened that his mother died in a wagon.
"Well, you see, she was very sick, and they were going West for her health. And one day, when they were camped beside a river, Tom's father went in to swim, and had a cramp or something, and was drowned. Tom's mother saw it, and it made her worse. She was there all alone, till some people found her and drove her on to the next town to a doctor. But when they got her there, she was too sick to leave the wagon. They drove her into the O'Briens' yard, because that was nearest the doctor's and Mrs. O'Brien was a kind woman. And she died in a few hours."
"Does Tom know anything about his father?"
"Nothing except that he was a school-teacher in Missouri. His mother told the O'Briens that much. But the O'Briens were just lovely to him."
St. Peter had noticed that in the stories Tom told the children there were no shadows. Kathleen and Rosamond regarded his free-lance childhood as a gay adventure they would gladly have shared. They loved to play at being Tom and Roddy. Roddy was the remarkable friend, ten years older than Tom, who knew everything about snakes and panthers and deserts and Indians. "And he gave up a fine job firing on the Santa Fé, and went off with Tom to ride after cattle for hardly any wages, just to be with Tom and take care of him after he'd had pneumonia," Kathleen told them.
"That wasn't the only reason," Rosamond added dreamily. "Roddy was proud. He didn't like taking orders and living on pay cheques. He liked to be free, and to sit in his saddle all day and use it for a pillow at night. You know Tom said that, Kitty."
"Anyhow, he was noble. He was always noble, noble Roddy!" Kathleen finished it off.
After the first day, when he had walked into the garden and introduced himself, Tom never took up the story of his own life again, either with the Professor or Mrs. St. Peter, though he was often encouraged to do so. He would talk about the New Mexico country when questioned, about Father Duchene, the missionary priest who had been his teacher, about the Indians; but only with the two little girls did he ever speak freely and confidentially about himself. St. Peter used to wonder how the boy could afford to spend so much time with the children. All through that summer and fall he used to come in the afternoon and join them in the garden. In the winter he dropped in two or three evenings a week to play Five Hundred or to take a dancing-lesson.
There was evidently something enchanting about the atmosphere of the house to a boy who had always lived a rough life. He enjoyed the prettiness and freshness and gaiety of the little girls as if they were flowers. Probably, too, he liked being so attractive to them. A flush of pleasure would come over Tom's face—so much fairer now than when he first arrived in Hamilton—if Kathleen caught his hand and tried to squeeze it hard enough to hurt, crying: "Oh, Tom, tell us about the time you and Roddy found the water hole dry, and then afterward tell us about when the rattlesnake bit Henry!" He would whisper: "Pretty soon," and after a while, through the open windows, the Professor would hear them in the garden: the laughter and exclamations of the little girls, and that singularly individual voice of Tom's—mature, confident, seldom varying in pitch, but full of slight, very moving modulations.