“And what about Yavapai Joe?” asked Phil.

Patches smiled.  “Where is Joe?  What’s he been doing all day?”

The Dean answered.  “He’s just been moseyin’ around.  I tried to get him to talk, but all he would say was that he’d rather let Mr. Knight tell it.”

“Billy,” said Patches, “will you find Yavapai Joe, and tell him that I would like to see him here?”

When Little Billy, with the assistance of Jimmy and Conny and Jack, had gone proudly on his mission, Patches said to the others, “Technically, of course, Joe is my prisoner until after the trial, but please don’t let him feel it.  He will be the principal witness for the state.”

When Yavapai Joe appeared, embarrassed and ashamed in their presence, Patches said, as courteously as he would have introduced an equal, “Joe, I want my friends to know your real name.  There is no better place in the world than right here to start that job of man-making that we have talked about.  You remember that I told you how I started here.”

Yavapai Joe lifted his head and stood straighter by his tall friend’s side, and there was a new note in his voice as he answered, “Whatever you say goes, Mr. Knight.”

Patches smiled.  “Friends, this is Mr. Joseph Parkhill, the only son of the distinguished Professor Parkhill, whom you all know so well.”

If Patches had planned to enjoy the surprise his words caused, he could not have been disappointed.

Presently, when Joe had slipped away again, Patches told them how, because of his interest in the young man, and because of the lad’s strange knowledge of Professor Parkhill, he had written east for the distinguished scholar’s history.

“The professor himself was not really so much to blame,” said Patches.  “It seems that he was born to an intellectual life.  The poor fellow never had a chance.  Even as a child he was exhibited as a prodigy—­a shining example of the possibilities of the race, you know.  His father, who was also a professor of some sort, died when he was a baby.  His mother, unfortunately, possessed an income sufficient to make it unnecessary that Everard Charles should ever do a day’s real work.  At the age of twenty, he was graduated from college; at the age of twenty-one he was married to—­or perhaps it would be more accurate to say—­he was married by—­his landlady’s daughter.  Quite likely the woman was ambitious to break into that higher life to which the professor aspired, and caught her cultured opportunity in an unguarded moment.  The details are not clear.  But when their only child, Joe, was six years old, the mother ran away with a carpenter who had been at work on the house for some six weeks.  A maiden aunt of some fifty years, who was a worshiper of the professor’s cult, came to keep his house and to train Joe in the way that good boys should go.

“But the lad proved rather too great a burden, and when he was thirteen they sent him to a school out here in the West, ostensibly for the benefit of the climate.  The boy, it was said, being of abnormal mentality, needed to pursue his studies under the most favorable physical conditions.  The professor, unhampered by his offspring, continued to climb his aesthetic ladder to intellectual and cultured glory.  The boy in due time escaped from the school, and was educated by the man Dryden and Nick Cambert.”