Here is the advertisement it carried:

WANTED – Boy, age six to eight years old. Good home till twenty-one years old. Payment twenty dollars depending. Apply B. Wikin’s General Store & Post Office at 3 o’clock this Saturday afternoon.

Black slaves were out of the question: the Civil War was over. Besides, black slaves had been expensive – a thousand dollars for no more than a little girl. But all wars leave dead soldiers, poor widows and hungry children; wars tend to leave out-of-work soldiers, too, who can’t feed the children they have and, in those days, didn’t know how to keep from fathering more. The result after the Civil War was a crop of kids nobody wanted. A farmer could pick one up cheap, and a boy at that, as long as the boy wasn’t black. Lots of people did it. They called it ‘bounding out’. Alvah didn’t really think he could find a boy for twenty dollars. He was figuring on thirty at least – and a saddle probably, when (and if, of course, if) the kid finally made it to twenty-one.

‘But deals are possible,’ Benbow said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Deals are always possible.’

2

I’d flown the northern route over the Pole from London to Washington state, over thousands of miles of dead white landscape, to take down what my uncle Atlas could tell me about Jonathan, my grandfather. It was all very spur-of-the-moment. I’d been reading a book about paradoxes and run across this one of Lichtenberg’s: ‘The thing that astonished him was that cats should have two holes cut in their coat exactly at the place where their eyes are.’ The moment I read this, I could hardly believe I hadn’t thought of talking to Atlas before, and having thought of it, couldn’t bear to wait any longer. Atlas was dangerously old: if I wasn’t quick I might never find out where the holes in that cat’s coat belonged. Suppose he died on me: who else was there? The rest were already dead. There’s an attachment for a portable phone on my wheelchair, which was made for me by the very same man in Cambridge who built the great Professor Hawking his chair. I punched in Atlas’s number, forgetting in my excitement about such details as time changes; it turned out to be one o’clock in the morning on the west coast of the United States, some six thousand miles away from my little Devon village, where the morning was just beginning – milkman, postman, newspaper. At first Atlas was less than pleased; as we talked, though, he began to seem as anxious to tell me about Jonathan as I was to hear about him – or almost anyway.

‘I got to go into the hospital Friday,’ he said and then rushed on, ‘nothing much, but you wouldn’t be able to get here for a month or more, anyway, would you? I’ll be in good shape again by then. When were you thinking of coming?’