But Dave’s time had come.  He “yearned over the skyline, where the strange roads go down,” though he put it more sharply to Sam Pickering one late afternoon: 

“Well, Sam, I feel itchy-footed.”

“I knew it,” said Sam.  “When are you leaving?”

“No train out till the six-fifty-eight.”

And Sam knew he would be meaning the six-fifty-eight of that same day.  He never meant the day after, or the day after that.

That evening Dave sauntered down to the depot, accompanied by his son.  There was no strained air of expectancy about him, and no tedious management of bags.  He might have been seeking merely the refreshment of watching the six-fifty-eight come in and go out, as did a dozen or so of the more leisured class of Newbern.  When the train came he greeted the conductor by his Christian name, and chatted with his son until it started.  Then he stepped casually aboard and surrendered himself to its will.  He had wanted suddenly to go somewhere on a train, and now he was going.  “Got to see a man in San Diego,” he had told the boy.  “I’ll drop back some of these days.”

“Maybe you’ll see the gypsies again,” said Wilbur a bit wistfully.

But he was not cast down by his father’s going; that was a thing that happened or not, like bad weather.  He had learned this about his father.  And pretty soon, after he went to school a little more and learned to spell better, to use punctuation marks the way the copy said, and capital letters even if you did have to reach for them, he, too, could swing onto the smoking car of the six-fifty-eight—­after she had really started—­and go off where gypsies went, and people that had learned good loose trades.

There was a new printer at the case in the Advance office the following morning, one of those who constantly drifted in and out of that exciting nowhere into which they so lightly disappeared by whim; a gaunt, silent man, almost wholly deaf, who stood in Dave Cowan’s place and set type with machine-like accuracy or distributed it with loose-fingered nimbleness, seizing many types at a time and scattering them to their boxes with the apparent abandon of a sower strewing seed.  He, too, was but a transient, wherever he might be found, but he had no talk of the outland where gypsies were, and to Wilbur he proved to be of no human interest, so that the boy neglected the dusty office for the more attractive out-of-doors, though still inking the forms for the Wednesday edition, because a quarter is a good thing to have.

When Terry Stamper brought the pail of beer now the new printer drank abundantly of the frothy stuff, and for a time glowed gently with a suggestive radiance, as if he, too, were almost moved to tell of strange cities; but he never did.  Nor did he talk instructively about the beginnings of life and how humans were but slightly advanced simians.  He would continue to set type, silent and detached, until an evening