"We had so hoped that you would stay with us," said Nancy. We had thought it might be only a passing fancy, and that in time you would get over it. But now it is apparent to us that you will not get over it. Monty and I talked it over, not once, but many times. We were convinced finally that for some compelling reason you did wish to go."

"There is one thing that bothers me," said Cushing. "You are right, of course. I've been trying to screw up my courage to tell you. I cringed from it, but each time that I decided not to go, there was something in me that told me I had to go. The thing that bothers me is that I don't know why. I tell myself it's the Place of Going to the Stars and then I wonder if, deep down, it may be something else. Is it, I ask myself, the wolf blood still in me? For three years before I came knocking at the gate of the university, I was a woods runner. I think I told you that."

"Yes," said Monty. "Yes, you told us that."

"But nothing more," said Cushing. "You never asked. Neither of you ever asked. I wonder now why I never told you.

"You need not tell us now," said Nancy, gently. "We have no need to know."

"But now I have a need to tell you," Cushing said. "The story is a short one. There were three of us: my mother and my grandfather—my mother's father—and myself. My father, too, but I don't remember him. Maybe just a little. A big man with black whiskers that tickled when he kissed me."

He'd not thought of it for years, not really thought of it, forcing himself not to think of it, but now, quite suddenly, he saw it clear as day. A little coulee that ran back from the Mississippi, in that land of tangled hills that lay a week's walking to the south. A small sand-bottomed creek ran through the narrow meadowlands that lay between the sharply sloping bluffs, fed by a large spring that gushed out of the sandstone at the coulee's head, where the hills pinched in.