“It always said how long an average student took, and I’d take that long,” said Tim, “so, of course, I had to be working several schools at the same time.”
“And carpentry at the playground summer school?”
“Oh, yes. But there I couldn’t do too much, because people could see me. But I learned how, and it made a good cover-up, so I could make cages for the cats, and all that sort of thing. And many boys are good with their hands. I like to work with my hands. I built my own radio, too—it gets all the foreign stations, and that helps me with my languages.”
“How did you figure it out about the cats?” said Welles.
“Oh, there had to be recessives, that’s all. The Siamese coloring was a recessive, and it had to be mated with another recessive. Black was one possibility, and white was another, but I started with black because I liked it better. I might try white too, but I have so much else on my mind—”
He broke off suddenly and would say no more.
Their next meeting was by prearrangement at Tim’s workshop. Welles met the boy after school and they walked to Tim’s home together; there the boy unlocked his door and snapped on the lights.
Welles looked around with interest. There was a bench, a tool chest. Cabinets, padlocked. A radio, clearly not store-purchased. A file cabinet, locked. Something on a table, covered with a cloth. A box in the corner—no, two boxes in two corners. In each of them was a mother cat with kittens. Both mothers were black Persians.
“This one must be all black Persian,” Tim explained. “Her third litter and never a Siamese marking. But this one carries both recessives in her. Last time she had a Siamese shorthaired kitten. This morning—I had to go to school. Let’s see.”
They bent over the box where the new-born kittens lay. One kitten was like the mother. The other two were Siamese-Persian; a male and a female.
“You’ve done it again, Tim!” shouted Welles. “Congratulations!”
They shook hands in jubilation.
“I’ll write it in the record,” said the boy blissfully.
In a nickel book marked “Compositions” Tim’s left hand added the entries. He had used the correct symbols—Fx, F2, F3; Ss, Bl.
“The dominants in capitals,” he explained, “B for black, and S for short hair; the recessives in small letters—s for Siamese, 1 for long hair. Wonderful to write 11 or ss again, Peter! Twice more. And the other kitten is carrying the Siamese marking as a recessive.”
He closed the book in triumph.
“Now,” and he marched to the covered thing on the table, “my latest big secret.”
Tim lifted the cloth carefully and displayed a beautifully built doll house. No, a model house—Welles corrected himself swiftly. A beautiful model, and—yes, built to scale.
“The roof comes off. See, it has a big storage room and a room for a play room or a maid or something. Then I lift off the attic—”
“Good heavens!” cried Peter Welles. “Any little girl would give her soul for this!”
“I used fancy wrapping papers for the wallpapers. I wove the rugs on a little hand loom,” gloated Timothy. “The furniture’s just like real, isn’t it? Some I bought; that’s plastic. Some I made of construction paper and things. The curtains were the hardest; but I couldn’t ask grandmother to sew them—”
“Why not?” the amazed doctor managed to ask.
“She might recognize this afterwards,” said Tim, and he lifted off the upstairs floor.
“Recognize it? You haven’t showed it to her? Then when would she see it?”
“She might not,” admitted Tim. “But I don’t like to take some risks.”
“That’s a very livable floor plan you’ve used,” said Welles, bending closer to examine the house in detail.
“Yes, I thought so. It’s awful how many house plans leave no clear wall space for books or pictures. Some of them have doors placed so you have to detour around the dining room table every time you go from the living room to the kitchen, or so that a whole corner of a room is good for nothing, with doors at all angles. Now, I designed this house to—”
“You designed it, Tim!”
“Why, sure. Oh, I see—you thought I built it from blue-prints I’d bought. My first model home, I did, but the architecture courses gave me so many ideas that I wanted to see how they would look. Now, the cellar and game room—”
Welles came to himself an hour later, and gasped when he looked at his watch.
“It’s too late. My patient has gone home again by this time. I may as well stay—how about the paper route?”
“I gave that up. Grandmother offered to feed the cats as soon as I gave her the kitten. And I wanted the time for this. Here are the pictures of the house.”
The color prints were very good.
“I’m sending them and an article to the magazines,” said Tim. “This time I’m T. L. Paul. Sometimes I used to pretend all the different people I am were talking together—but now I talk to you instead, Peter.”
“Will it bother the cats if I smoke? Thanks. Nothing I’m likely to set on fire, I hope? Put the house together and let me sit here and look at it. I want to look in through the windows. Put its lights on. There.”
The young architect beamed, and snapped on the little lights.
“Nobody can see in here. I got Venetian blinds; and when I work in here, I even shut them sometimes.”
“If I’m to know all about you, I’ll have to go through the alphabet from A to Z,” said Peter Welles. “This is Architecture. What else in the A’s?”
“Astronomy. I showed you those articles. My calculations proved correct. Astrophysics—I got A in the course, but haven’t done anything original so far. Art, no. I can’t paint or draw very well, except mechanical drawing. I’ve done all the Merit Badge work in scouting, all through the alphabet.”
“Darned if I can see you as a Boy Scout,” protested Welles.
“I’m a very good Scout. I have almost as many badges as any other boy my age in the troop. And at camp I do as well as most city boys.”
“Do you do a good turn every day?”
“Yes,” said Timothy. “Started that when I first read about Scouting—I was a Scout at heart before I was old enough to be a Cub. You know, Peter, when you’re very young, you take all that seriously about the good deed every day, and the good habits and ideals and all that. And then you get older and it begins to seem funny and childish and posed and artificial, and you smile in a superior way and make jokes. But there is a third step, too, when you take it all seriously again. People who make fun of the Scout Law are doing the boys a lot of harm; but those who believe in things like that don’t know how to say so, without sounding priggish and platitudinous. I’m going to do an article on it before long.”
“Is the Scout Law your religion—if I may put it that way?”
“No,” said Timothy. “But ‘a Scout is Reverent.’ Once I tried to study the churches and find out what was the truth. I wrote letters to pastors of all denominations—all those in the phone book and the newspaper—when I was on a vacation in the East, I got the names, and then wrote after I got back. I couldn’t write to people here in the city. I said I wanted to know which church was true, and expected them to write to me and tell me about theirs, and argue with me, you know. I could read library books, and all they had to do was recommend some, I told them, and then correspond with me a little about them.”
“Did they?”
“Some of them answered,” said Tim, “but nearly all of them told me to go to somebody near me. Several said they were very busy men. Some gave me the name of a few books, but none of them told me to write again, and… and I was only a little boy. Nine years old, so I couldn’t talk to anybody. When I thought it over, I knew that I couldn’t very well join any church so young, unless it was my grandparents’ church. I keep on going there—it is a good church and it teaches a great deal of truth, I am sure. I’m reading all I can find, so when I am old enough I’ll know what I must do. How old would you say I should be, Peter?”