He was behind the international security checkpoint, thanks to an emergency call to a friend on the Chicago police. Dada—if it was Dada— would be arriving in the next hour from one of the airport’s three domestic terminals. Stride guessed that Dada was flying in from Missouri on his way to Johannesburg. The man he had found on the Web, Hubert Jones, was a professor of African studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

The school’s Web site included a faculty photo. Stride had stared long and hard at the picture to make a mental connection to the young drifter by the railroad tracks thirty years earlier. All he could say for sure was that Hubert Jones might be Dada. His dreadlocks were gone, replaced by a buzz cut of steel gray hair. His devil eyebrows had grown out thick and bushy. His broad, jowly face showed a man much heavier than the fit giant who had overpowered Stride. The eyes could have been Dada’s eyes—black and intense—but in the end, too much time had passed, and too much age was written in the man’s skin.

Stride swigged a large bottle of Coke to wash down the hot dog. He reread the dog-eared sheaf of materials on Hubert Jones that he had printed at his office before the sun came up. Jones was fifty-two years old, with undergraduate and graduate degrees from Berkeley. He had traveled and lectured extensively in Europe, and the visiting professorship he had accepted in South Africa was his third academic stint on the African continent. As a scholar, Hubert Jones was a star.

He had also written a book.

More than anything else, the book made Stride believe that Hubert Jones was Dada. It was called Dandelion Men, and it told the story of three years that Jones had spent living with itinerant laborers around the South and Midwest after he dropped out of college in his early twenties. Over time, he had become one of those wanderers, part of a community of people who came and went as easily as seeds traveling on the wind. They hiked. They hitched. They hopped trains. They worked, stole, got drunk, went to jail, and never knew any area long enough to call it home.

Stride found an excerpt from the book on the Web:

These were not the men that you would call homeless, not the mentally ill deposited onto our city streets in later years when our tax dollars discovered the limits of our compassion. This was a time and era when men chose this lifestyle because it made them free. It was predominantly a rural, not an urban, phenomenon. These men were children of our roots, children of our soil, who lived at the mercy of weather, food, and water. On most days they knew violence. Sometimes it was from those among them, but more often, it was from outside, from men who wore uniforms. You could beat Dandelion Men, you could even kill them, but you could never strip them of their dignity and of their primal humanness. I think sometimes that the people who were most violent toward them, who were most afraid, were those who envied them their freedom.