friends. They could not tell whether they owned him or were owned by him completely; it made no difference: either concept made them happy.
The three of them set out every morning on adventures of their own kind. Once, an elderly professor of literature, Mrs. Taggart's friend, saw them on top of a pile in a junk yard, dismantling the carcass of an automobile. He stopped, shook his head and said to Francisco, "A young man of your position ought to spend his time in libraries, absorbing the culture of the world." "What do you think I'm doing?" asked Francisco.
There were no factories in the neighborhood, but Francisco taught Dagny and Eddie to steal rides on Taggart trains to distant towns, where they climbed fences into mill yards or hung on window sills, watching machinery as other children watched movies. "When I run Taggart Transcontinental . . ." Dagny would say at times. "When I run d'Anconia Copper . . ." said Francisco. They never had to explain the rest to each other; they knew each other's goal and motive.
Railroad conductors caught them, once in a while. Then a stationmaster a hundred miles away would telephone Mrs. Taggart: "We've got three young tramps here who say that they are - " "Yes," Mrs. Taggart would sigh, "they are. Please send them back."
"Francisco," Eddie asked him once, as they stood by the tracks of the Taggart station, "you've been just about everywhere in the world.
What's the most important thing on earth?" "This," answered Francisco, pointing to the emblem TT on the front of an engine. He added, "I wish I could have met Nat Taggart."
He noticed Dagny's glance at him. He said nothing else. But minutes later, when they went on through the woods, down a narrow path of damp earth, ferns and sunlight, he said, "Dagny, I'll always bow to a coat-of-arms. I'll always worship the symbols of nobility. Am I not supposed to be an aristocrat? Only I don't give a damn for moth-eaten turrets and tenth-hand unicorns. The coats-of-arms of our day are to be found on billboards and in the ads of popular magazines." "What do you mean?" asked Eddie. "Industrial trademarks, Eddie," he answered.
Francisco was fifteen years old, that summer.
"When I run d'Anconia Copper . . ." "I'm studying mining and mineralogy, because I must be ready for the time when I run d'Anconia Copper. . . ." "I'm studying electrical engineering, because power companies are the best customers of d'Anconia Copper. . . ." "I'm going to study philosophy, because I'll need it to protect d'Anconia Copper. . . ."
"Don't you ever think of anything but d'Anconia Copper?" Jim asked him once.
"No."
"It seems to me that there are other things in the world."
"Let others think about them."
"Isn't that a very selfish attitude?"
"It is."
"What are you after?"
"Money."
"Don't you have enough?"
"In his lifetime, every one of my ancestors raised the production of d'Anconia Copper by about ten per cent. I intend to raise it by one hundred."
"What for?" Jim asked, in sarcastic imitation of Francisco's voice.
"When I die, I hope to go to heaven - whatever the hell that is - and I want to be able to afford the price of admission."
"Virtue is the price of admission," Jim said haughtily.
"That's what I mean, James. So I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money."
"Any grafter can make money."
"James, you ought to discover some day that words have an exact meaning."
Francisco smiled; it was a smile of radiant mockery. Watching them, Dagny thought suddenly of the difference between Francisco and her brother Jim. Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great.
She noticed the particular quality of Francisco's smile again, one night, when she sat with him and Eddie at a bonfire they had built in the woods. The glow of the fire enclosed them within a fence of broken, moving strips that held pieces of tree trunks, branches and distant stars.
She felt as if there were nothing beyond that fence, nothing but black emptiness, with the hint of some breath-stopping, frightening promise . . . like the future. But the future, she thought, would be like Francisco's smile, there was the key to it, the advance warning of its nature - in his face in the firelight under the pine branches - and suddenly she felt an unbearable happiness, unbearable because it was too full and she had
no way to express it. She glanced at Eddie. He was looking at Francisco. In some quiet way of his own, Eddie felt as she did.
"Why do you like Francisco?" she asked him weeks later, when Francisco was gone.
Eddie looked astonished; it had never occurred to him that the feeling could be questioned. He said, "He makes me feel safe."
She said, "He makes me expect excitement and danger."
Francisco was sixteen, next summer, the day when she stood alone with him on the summit of a cliff by the river, their shorts and shirts torn in their climb to the top. They stood looking down the Hudson; they had heard that on clear days one could see New York in the distance. But they saw only a haze made of three different kinds of light merging together: the river, the sky and the sun.
She knelt on a rock, leaning forward, trying to catch some hint of the city, the wind blowing her hair across her eyes. She glanced back over her shoulder - and saw that Francisco was not looking at the distance: he stood looking at her. It was an odd glance, intent and unsmiling. She remained still for a moment, her hands spread flat on the rock, her arms tensed to support the weight of her body; inexplicably, his glance made her aware of her pose, of her shoulder showing through the torn shirt, of her long, scratched, sunburned legs slanting from the rock to the ground. She stood up angrily and backed away from him. And while throwing her head up, resentment in her eyes to meet the sternness in his, while feeling certain that his was a glance of condemnation and hostility, she heard herself asking him, a tone of smiling defiance in her voice: "What do you like about me?"
He laughed; she wondered, aghast, what had made her say it. He answered, "There's what I like about you," pointing to the glittering rails of the Taggart station in the distance.
"It's not mine," she said, disappointed.
"What I like is that it's going to be."
She smiled, conceding his victory by being openly delighted. She did not know why he had looked at her so strangely; but she felt that he had seen some connection, which she could not grasp, between her body and something within her that would give her the strength to rule those rails some day.
He said brusquely, "Let's see if we can see New York," and jerked her by the arm to the edge of the cliff. She thought that he did not notice that he twisted her arm in a peculiar way, holding it down along the
length of his side; it made her stand pressed against him, and she felt the warmth of the sun in the skin of his legs against hers. They looked far out into the distance, but they saw nothing ahead except a haze of light.
When Francisco left, that summer, she thought that his departure was; like the crossing of a frontier which ended his childhood: he was to start college, that fall. Her turn would come next. She felt an eager impatience touched by the excitement of fear, as if he had leaped into an unknown danger. It was like the moment, years ago, when she had seen him dive first from a rock into the Hudson, had seen him vanish under the black water and had stood, knowing that he would reappear in an instant and that it would then be her turn to follow.
She dismissed the fear; dangers, to Francisco, were merely opportunities for another brilliant performance; there were no battles he could lose, no enemies to beat him. And then she thought of a remark she had heard a few years earlier. It was a strange remark - and it was strange that the words had remained in her mind, even though she had thought them senseless at the time. The man who said it was an old professor of mathematics, a friend of her father, who came to their country house for just that one visit. She liked his face, and she could still see the peculiar sadness in his eyes when he said to her father one evening, sitting on the terrace in the fading light, pointing to Francisco's figure in the garden, "That boy is vulnerable. He has too great a capacity for joy.
What will he do with it in a world where there's so little occasion for it?"
Francisco went to a great American school, which his father had chosen for him long ago. It was the most distinguished institution of learning left in the world, the Patrick Henry University of Cleveland.
He did not come to visit her in New York, that winter, even though he was only a night's journey away. They did not write to each other, they had never done it. But she knew that he would come back to the country for one summer month.
There were a few times, that winter, when she felt an undefined apprehension: the professor's words kept returning to her mind, as a warning which she could not explain. She dismissed them. When she thought of Francisco, she felt the steadying assurance that she would have another month as an advance against the future, as a proof that the world she saw ahead was real, even though it was not the world of those around her.
"Hi, Slug!"
"Hi, Frisco!"
Standing on the hillside, in the first moment of seeing him again, she grasped suddenly the nature of that world which they, together, held against all others. It was only an instant's pause, she felt her cotton skirt beating in the wind against her knees, felt the sun on her eyelids, and the upward thrust of such an immense relief that she ground her feet into the grass under her sandals, because she thought she would rise, weightless, through the wind.
It was a sudden sense of freedom and safety - because she realized that she knew nothing about the events of his life, had never known and would never need to know. The world of chance - of families, meals, schools, people, of aimless people dragging the load of some unknown guilt - was not theirs, could not change him, could not matter. He and she had never spoken of the things that happened to them, but only of what they thought and of what they would do. . . . She looked at him silently, as if a voice within her were saying: Not the things that are, but the things we'll make . . . We are not to be stopped, you and I . . .
Forgive me the fear, if I thought I could lose you to them - forgive me the doubt, they'll never reach you - I'll never be afraid for you again. . . .
He, too, stood looking at her for a moment - and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning to point at the birch tree behind him and saying in the tone of their childhood game: "I wish you'd learn to run faster. I'll always have to wait for you."
"Will you wait for me?" she asked gaily.
He answered, without smiling, "Always."
As they went up the hill to the house, he spoke to Eddie, while she walked silently by his side. She felt that there was a new reticence between them which, strangely, was a new kind of intimacy.
She did not question him about the university. Days later, she asked him only whether he liked it.
"They're teaching a lot of drivel nowadays," he answered, "but there are a few courses I like."
"Have you made any friends there?"
"Two."
He told her nothing else.
Jim was approaching his senior year in a college in New York. His studies had given him a manner of odd, quavering belligerence, as if he had found a new weapon. He addressed Francisco once, without provocation, stopping him in the middle of the lawn to say in a tone of aggressive self-righteousness: "I think that now that you've reached college age, you ought to learn something about ideals. It's time to forget your selfish greed and give some thought to your social responsibilities, because I think that all those millions you're going to inherit are not for your personal pleasure, they are a trust for the benefit of the underprivileged and the poor, because I think that the person who doesn't realize this is the most depraved type of human being."
Francisco answered courteously, "It is not advisable, lames, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener."
Dagny asked him, as they walked away, "Are there many men like Jim in the world?"
Francisco laughed. "A great many."
"Don't you mind it?"
"No. I don't have to deal with them. Why do you ask that?"
"Because I think they're dangerous in some way . . . I don't know how . . ."
"Good God, Dagny! Do you expect me to be afraid of an object like James?"
It was days later, when they were alone, walking through the woods on the shore of the river, that she asked: "Francisco, what's the most depraved type of human being?"
"The man without a purpose."
She was looking at the straight shafts of the trees that stood against the great, sudden, shining spread of space beyond. The forest was dim and cool, but the outer branches caught the hot, silver sunrays from the water. She wondered why she enjoyed the sight, when she had never taken any notice of the country around her, why she was so aware of her enjoyment, of her movements, of her body in the process of walking.
She did not want to look at Francisco. She felt that his presence seemed more intensely real when she kept her eyes away from him, almost as if the stressed awareness of herself came from him, like the sunlight from the water.