Waring had risen.  He stood with one hand touching the table, the tips of his fingers drumming the rhythm of a song he hummed to himself.  The boy’s back was toward him.  Waring’s gaze traveled from his son’s head to his boot-heel.

Lorry noticed that his mother seemed perturbed.  He turned to Waring with a questioning challenge in his gray eyes.

Mrs. Adams touched the boy’s arm.  “This is your father, Lorry.”

Lorry glanced from one to the other.

Waring made no movement, offered no greeting, but stood politely impassive.

Mrs. Adams spoke gently:  “Lorry!”

“Why, hello, dad!” And the boy shook hands with his father.

Waring gestured toward a chair.  Lorry sat down.  His eyes were warm with mild astonishment.

“Smoke?” said Waring, proffering tobacco and papers.

Lorry’s gaze never left his father’s face as he rolled a cigarette and lighted it.  Mrs. Adams realized that Waring’s attitude of cool indifference appealed to the boy.

Lorry remembered his father dimly.  He was curious to know just what kind of man he was.  He didn’t talk much; that was certain.  The boy remembered that his mother had not said much about her husband, answering Lorry’s childish questionings with a promise to tell him some day.  He recalled a long journey on the train, their arrival at Stacey, and the taking over of the run-down hotel that his mother had refurnished and made a place of neatness and comfort.  And his mother had told him that she would be known “Mrs. Adams.”  Lorry had been so filled with the newness of things that the changing of their name was accepted without question.  Slowly his recollection of Sonora and the details of their life there came back to him.  These things he had all but forgotten, as he had grown to love Arizona, its men, its horses, its wide ranges and magic hills.

Mrs. Adams remembered that her husband had once told her he could find out more about a man by watching his hands than by asking questions.  She noticed that Waring was watching his son’s hands with that old, deliberate coldness of attitude.  He was trying to find out just what sort of a man his boy had grown to be.

Lorry suddenly straightened in his chair.  Mrs. Adams, anticipating his question, nodded to Waring.

“Yes,” said Waring; “I am the Waring of Sonora that you are thinking about.”

Lorry flushed.  “I—­I guess you are,” he stammered.  “Mother, you never told me that.”

“You were too young to understand, Lorry.”

“And is that why you left him?”

“Yes.”

“Well, maybe you were right.  But dad sure looks like a pretty decent hombre to me.”

They laughed in a kind of relief.  The occasion had seemed rather strained.

“Ask your mother, Lorry.  I am out of it.”  And, rising Waring strode to the doorway.

Lorry rose.

“I’ll see you again,” said Waring.  And he stepped to the street, humming his song of “Sonora and the Silver Strings.”