Page:The purple pennant (IA purplepennant00barb).pdf/45

Rh terribly scant returns in the way of either money or fame. No, he wouldn't be a doctor. Lawyers had a far better time of it; so did bankers and—and almost everyone. Sometimes he thought that engineering was the profession for him. He would go to Boston or New York and enter a technical school and learn civil or mining engineering. Mining engineers especially had a fine, adventurous life of it. And he wouldn't have to spend all the rest of his life in Clearfield then.

Clearfield was all right, of course; Perry had been born in it and was loyal to it; but there was a whole big lot of the world that he'd like to see! He got up and pulled an atlas from the lower shelf of his book-case and spread it open. Colorado! Arizona! Nevada! Those were names for you! And look at all the territory out there that didn't have a mark on it! Prairies and deserts and plateaus! Miles and miles and miles of them without a town or a railroad or anything! Gee, it would be great to live in that part of the world, he told himself. Adventures would be thick as blueberries out there. Back here nothing ever happened to a fellow. He wondered if it would be possible to persuade his father to move West, to some one of those fascinating towns with the highly romantic names; like Manzanola or Cotopaxi or Painted Rock. His thoughts