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because of the slim well-proportioned body. The slimness, like the quiet, was deceptive. He was a little over six feet. But he weighed one hundred and eighty-one pounds. Nobody in Arrow Junction would have guessed that. There were a lot of things about Hugh Stewart that nobody in Arrow Junction would have guessed.
    He turned, looking at the simple neatness of his office. It was clean, normal, economically equipped. He was now a small-town doctor. And he was not even successful at that. Hugh Stewart lifted his hands and looked at them.
    They were large hands with long, strong fingers. He had not used those hands with the true skill they owned since he’d gotten here. He smiled bitterly. He wondered what Dr. Emil Ludgaard would think about that. Perhaps, he thought, Emil Ludgaard would understand. Perhaps Emil Ludgaard had understood a lot about him.
    Hugh Stewart had never talked anything but medicine and surgery with Emil Ludgaard. In those terse working days the walls of that New York clinic formed a barrier against anything else.
    “You could be a great surgeon, Hugh,” Emil Ludgaard had said in his softly clipped, European-accented words.
    Emil Ludgaard was a great surgeon himself. He did not make mistakes in judgment. He never lied. It was an occasion when he offered the faintest compliment.
    “You could be a great surgeon, Hugh…”
    Yes, Hugh Stewart breathed to himself, a great surgeon…
    His mind raced back through the tunnel of time; those childhood parentless years. He’d been just seven months old in 1926 when that Atlantic boat had sunk and killed both parents. But he’d been saved, handed ashore to an aunt who was too busy, too pretty, to want an orphaned infant seven months old.
    Later he’d learned something about his parents through this sister of his mother’s. He’d learned about their gaiety, their money, their whirlwind life of excitement. But he’d really understood nothing. Not even later when the Crash had disintegrated the family money and sent the aunt to sudden poverty and too much alcohol, when she’d finally drawn a razor across her wrists.
    He’d been found in that small apartment with her. Hungry. Dirty. Screaming his lungs out. He had not understood then. But later he did, through the lean and lonely years of being shunted from family to family. The same fire blazed inside himself, he’d discovered, that must have blazed inside his parents and his aunt. But the elements around him were different. He learned to case the fire in armor.
    But he had not been entirely unlucky. There had finally been Uncle Ben, clear on the opposite coast in California.
    Uncle Ben had given him understanding and love. It was a quietly good time with Uncle Ben, who was not really his uncle but the uncle of his father. There was a neat picket-fenced cottage. There was a room of his own. If he’d felt any insecurity before, he lost it with Uncle Ben.
    Uncle Ben had worked with him and been proud of the results. It was high school by that time. It was study and athletics. He’d accomplished both. Honor student. Star halfback.
    He’d achieved his accomplishments quietly, trying to hide the fire. But the fire exploded now and then. Twice with girls which only gave him a reputation that was not uninviting to other girls. They were a little afraid of him. The bolder and better-looking of them searched him out. When, almost invariably, he continued with his quiet and his armor, they went away puzzled.
    The fire exploded in other directions too. He found a sudden switch of interest and discovered medicine. As a result the athletic drive lessened. The summer after high school he worked with an ice company, loading cakes of ice. But every night he’d gone home and pored over books. The hunger for medicine became full-blown.
    Uncle Ben had been steadily behind him. Grayer now. More bent. Working at his factory job with uncomplaining good humor.
    “You want to be a doctor, Hugh. I’ll help all I can…”
    But