A week and a half in to the next spring semester, when it was really still winter, Heyes got a letter from "Thaddeus Jones." It started "Dear Professor." Heyes cringed. He knew that the Kid was only joking around, but professor was a title that Heyes took very seriously. He wrote back:
"Don't give me that title till I've earned it, Thaddeus. That's going to take years. I'm sorry it takes so long, but that's part of how you learn. Or how I learn. Times goes by. How's Cat? I hope she's not too mad at all the time you spent out here with me. I was darned glad to have you. I hope she understands that."
Being publically "dead" helped Heyes to relax about his legal status and concentrate on his schooling. He and his Columbian friends were making great progress as they advanced in their mathematics classes. In addition to his usual school papers, Heyes was writing a lot of other letters that spring. Many of them were in German. Heyes had gotten Charlie Homer to introduce him by letter to a German mathematics professor whose ideas interested Heyes. This was Gustave Heintzelman of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich. Heyes, using the German he had been learning, and getting help from his German professor, began writing some of his most advanced mathematical questions and ideas to Professor Heintzelman. Heintzelman was immediately friendly and encouraging to this American student from the west. Heyes soon figured out that the man was intrigued by the idea of the West. Heyes' letters about mathematical theory were enlivened by the occasional story about cattle herding or riding through the Yellowstone, much to the evident glee of his German mentor. Heintzelman only wished that his American correspondent had more experience with Indians, but Heyes just had never spent much time with them other than the time that he and Curry had been tied up and hauled back to an Indian camp. Needless to say, this wasn't a story Heyes was very keen to relate. He was happier when writing about his geometry and applied mathematics ideas. It was a bit annoying to wait weeks for his own letter to get to Germany and then for Heintzelman to write back to New York, but such was intercontinental communication in those days. Heyes couldn't help but wonder how Heintzelman would react if he ever learned who the correspondent he knew as Joshua Smith really was. Considering his enthusiasm about the colorful aspects of the West, the great German mathematician might just be intrigued rather than disappointed.
One day in early March Charlie Homer called Joshua Smith and Paul Huxtable both into his office. "Boys," he said, "I've got a letter here from a friend of mine at Harvard. They're going to be holding a mathematical conference up there in April. They want some of our best and brightest undergrads to go up and present their ideas. Most of the men I want to send are upper classmen, but I though you two boys might want to join them. I mean, you may officially be underclassmen, but you're so advanced that you come off like juniors or so. It will take some work to prepare, but are you interested?"
"Sure thing, Charlie," said Heyes, without even thinking. "I've always wanted to visit Harvard – and meet from math guys from other places. Be nice to find out what they can do – and show them what we can do."
"And Boston!" Huxtable chimed in enthusiastically, his freckled face aglow, "The Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Symphony, the Public Garden!"
As soon as Heyes heard Huxtable talking about Boston, Charlie Homer could see the reformed outlaw's face cloud over. "What's wro . . ." he started to ask, only to have Heyes wave him off warily. Homer shut his mouth immediately on that topic and just talked to Huxtable and Smith about the coming mathematical conference and where they could stay etc. Homer was starting to be able to recognize when he had stumbled onto one of those dangerous Hannibal Heyes aspects of his student's life, and this, despite the eastern setting, was obviously one of them.
When Huxtable had set off for his next class, Heyes remained behind in his advisor's office for a moment. "Alright, Heyes," said Homer when Huxtable was safely gone and the door was closed, "what's wrong with Boston that you don't want me to talk about? Is it going to keep you from going to the conference? This is going to be an important professional opportunity for you."
"Oh, nothing," Heyes said, his worried face denying his words. "Nothing that would keep me from going, but . . .
"So it's not nothing, Heyes. What is it?" Homer was wondering what on earth could connect Hannibal Heyes with Boston.
"I have a – well, an old flame there. She figured out who I am. She wasn't real happy with me last time we met. I think she'd turn me in as soon as look at me," Heyes said in a low, unhappy voice. He liked Julia, but he hadn't liked at all having her pity him when he couldn't talk. She just hadn't understood his situation at all.
"Boston is a big city, Heyes. The chances of your meeting one old flame in that whole town are pretty small, you know. You won't be there that long. And honestly, no matter what Huxtable hopes, most of the time would be spent in Cambridge, where Harvard is, across the river from Boston." Homer grinned at his protégé who was still pretty ignorant about eastern cities, at least outside of New York.
"I know, I know. But I can't help thinking about it. Now that I'm "dead," I don't want anybody resurrecting me." Heyes knew that he came across as kind of paranoid sometimes. But he also knew that there really were people who were out to get him – or there would be if they knew he was still alive.
"Come on, you're pretty sophisticated on the subject of probability, Heyes. What's the real probability?" laughed Charlie Homer.
"I don't know. I don't have enough facts to even start to figure it out. I mean, what's the population of Boston – plus the population of Cambridge? And how many people are we likely to meet? I don't like working without the facts." Heyes sounded irritable.
"How should I know? Stop worrying, and start getting your presentation together." said Homer and shooed Heyes out the door.
The following month a little contingent of mathematics students from Columbia set off on the train for Boston in high spirits. Spring was coming fast and they were glad to get away from their school routines for a weekend of intensive math. The young men joked together noisily, until they got over their initial excitement and settled into reviewing their papers for their presentations. Heyes felt confident on his, so he soon fell to looking out the windows of the train. He was fascinated to see the unfamiliar countryside out the train windows, including the colorful New England coastal towns of Rhode Island and Connecticut. As they went through the coastal marshes, sometimes there was water on both sides of the train tracks. Heyes was intrigued to see cormorants for the first time, perched on pilings drying their wings when they came from diving after fish. Once he even saw a flight of trumpeter swans taking off from a Connecticut pond. That made him smile. Heyes had always liked birds, but out west riding to jobs and away from posses, he had rarely had time to look for them.
Then, too soon, they were in Cambridge. A group of Harvard students came to accompany the Columbia visitors on a walking tour around campus and to take them to the dorm rooms where they would be staying as guests of Harvard men for the weekend. Hands were shaken all around. Heyes was rather awed to meet these impressed students and to see Harvard. The tree-lined quads looked just like his ideal of a college campus. The eighteenth-century buildings like wooden Christ Church, and the red brick residence Massachusetts Hall, and the elegant classically trimmed brick Harvard Hall were the oldest buildings he had ever seen in his life. He stared at them as the group of mathematical students passed on a quick walking tour, looking for the dorms where they would be staying with fellow students while they were in town for the weekend. Heyes tried to imagine what life would have been like for student and teachers there a hundred or more years before coming to school in these buildings, perhaps walking along these same paths. He wondered if some of the towering trees, just leafing out well in the April sun, might date back to the days of the American Revolution. And then there were the handsome new stone buildings with bold arches in the latest styles – they would look elegant, he was sure, a hundred years hence.
But mostly, Heyes strained his ears and his mind as he tried to listen as hard as he could to the mathematical discussions flying back and forth between the Columbian upperclassmen and the students from Harvard, and the other men already there from Yale and Princeton. There was so much to be learned. He tried to just stay quiet and listen, foreign as that was to his nature. For once, other worries crowded being spotted as an outlaw out of his mind. He was afraid to embarrass himself in front of the impressive upperclassmen, and he didn't want to come off as a crude westerner in front of these sophisticated Harvard men.
Heyes saw one of the Harvard mathematics majors - a middle-height, brown-haired, quiet sort of guy – asked Paul Huxtable something. Huxtable pointed at Heyes, who looked up curiously. The Harvard man came over to Heyes and put out his hand. "Hello! Are you Joshua Smith?" he said in a friendly baritone voice.
"Yes, I'm Smith," answered Heyes quietly.
"Good! I'm George Jones. You'll be staying with me. Glad to meet you, Smith." The two shook hands. Heyes, having expected all the Harvard students to be arrogant snobs, found this to be entirely untrue of Jones. The two men walked along companionably beneath the towering oaks and elms. They had no math events until that evening and could afford a bit of time to talk.
"Thanks, Jones. Good of you to take me on. It sure is great to see Harvard – I've heard so much about it." Heyes was eager to be nice to his host.
"Oh, it's just a school. It's a good one, but so is Columbia from all I've heard. But you aren't from New York, are you? I am, so I know that's no New York accent." Jones immediately struck Heyes as a nice, down to earth guy, among a bunch of mathematics students who were mostly showing off like mad in high excitement.
"You're right. I'm from a bit west of there – Kansas. But I've been gone from it most of my life. You aren't from New York City – I know those accents by now." Heyes didn't want to get asked details about Kansas – it was a subject that always made him uneasy. He hadn't been there since the terrible events of his childhood.
"No - I'm from upstate – a little town in the Adirondacks called Blue Mountain Lake." Heyes knew that the Adirondacks were mountains north of New York State where some rich people went on vacation, but he had certainly never been there.
"Sounds pretty. I've never been up there – most of my life I've been west of the Mississippi." Heyes hoped he could avoid going into a lot of detail about his life, but he supposed it was kind of paranoid of him to always avoid talking about the presentable parts of his past.
Jones smiled. He was evidently fond of his home. "It is pretty. At least in the summer it is. In winter it's beautiful, but a tough place to live in – real cold and snowy and lonely. But I like it. If you don't mind my asking, how old are you? You sure didn't get to Columbia right out of high school."
Heyes was glad at least that Jones came out and asked his questions instead of just speculating and staring the way some people did. "I don't mind. You're right. I'm 34. I never went to high school. It was all one-room school houses out where we were and I didn't ever finish school until just a couple of years ago." Heyes preferred to tell as much of the truth as he could.
Jones nodded. "I went to a one-room schoolhouse, too, but I did finish there before I got to a prep school in Albany, and then here. The Adirondacks are pretty remote, specially in winter. There's plenty of time to work on your slate by the fire."
"You must be good, Jones - to get from a little school to Harvard." Heyes was impressed – he had some idea of how hard a transition that would be.
"Not bad, I guess. I didn't really catch the math bug until prep school. I was more interested in English before that, believe it or not. I was lucky to have a good teacher in prep school. How'd you get from no high school to Columbia?" Jones was just following up the obvious questions – not really pushing hard. But Heyes exhaled hard and looked down. He didn't mind signaling to his new friend Jones that this was a tough topic. "I didn't mean to pry – you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."
Heyes shrugged. "I guess there's no reason to keep it a secret. I came to Columbia from a tutor at a medical clinic. I had – I still have, a bit – aphasia. I guess you don't know what it is?"
Jones tried to keep his reaction low key, but he couldn't help guessing at a traumatic history behind the purposefully casual words. "I can understand enough Greek to figure it out – but you talk just fine. Doesn't it mean the inability to speak?"
"It does. And for a long time there, I couldn't speak at all. I had to go to a clinic in New York and learn talking and writing all over again. After . . ." Heyes pulled back the long hair that usually covered the scar on his temple.
Jones gasped. "Wow! That's quite a scar. What happened?"
Heyes tried to stay very casual about it, still. He didn't want to catch the attention of other students talking nearby. "Bullet. Sometimes there's a lot of lead flying around out there."
Jones appreciated his new friend's wish not to garner too much attention, so he didn't exclaim loudly, but he couldn't help asking. "Gosh! Who shot you?"
Heyes shrugged again. "Damned if I know. Don't remember a thing about it. My partner saved my life - hauled me to a little town in Colorado where they took care of me until we found the right doctor to treat me in New York."
"Partner? You mean your business partner?" Jones was puzzled.
Heyes grinned. He wasn't about to reveal what the business really had been. "Not business – just watching each other's backs. We just bummed around – ranch work, mining, body-guarding. Anything that paid a little and wasn't too hard on the back."
"That's quite the change from bumming around the west to mathematics at Columbia. You must be good, too." Jones smiled at him.
Heyes tried to stay modest, while hearing a fair amount of bragging going on between other students around them. "Not bad. I always liked math and had a man who taught me some good stuff out west, but my tutor is the one who really got me to be serious about it."
"So no more bumming around?"
"Not much. What are you presenting on?" Heyes changed the subject, hoping to avoid more autobiographic stuff. He had said about as much as he was comfortable with. And, indeed, now math took over. The Harvard men were enthusiastic and talented, Jones not the least. That evening started off with a pompous speech from a professor from Yale. Then there was a dinner and a lot of talk afterwards between the students getting to know each other. Heyes kept pretty quiet and mostly listened, although he was pretty much forced to recite a bit of his western background a couple of times to the eastern boys of Harvard and their other eastern academic guests. It was pretty late when Smith and a different Jones than usual got back to a small dorm room. As Heyes got undressed and donned a night shirt before he climbed into the small folding bed provided for him, he felt Jones' eyes on him. He wondered which of his scars the man had caught sight of. Jones didn't say anything, but it didn't take a genius to combine Smith's story and his scars to come up with a pretty violent and, for an academic, unusual, background. But Heyes was too tired for any worries about that to keep him awake.
The next day was all student presentations - theorems and complex equations. Heyes made a brief presentation just before noon about an idea he'd had on equations for figuring stresses and forces in small explosions. He had worked out some of the details with Professor Homer, and some with Professor Heintzelman via letters from Germany. With Homer, at least, Heyes could be honest about his experience with such explosions in real life – in blowing safes. He had to hide this from everyone else, of course. Heyes kept himself from pacing and just drew a couple of diagrams and some long equations on a blackboard. He explained a bit and answered some questions and then it was on to the next guy. Heyes mostly enjoyed learning from what the other guys had to say – and how they said it. He was there in Harvard as much to learn how such academic affairs worked as to hear specific math discussions. He felt the weight of how much he had to learn about academics itself, but kept reminding himself that he was very early in his academic career.
Heyes felt like what he had to say was nothing like as impressive as what the Harvard and Yale and Princeton guys had, but people seemed impressed. Perhaps it was because he was still only a sophomore, or because word of his scant academic background was getting around. Any of the Columbia guys could have shared that. Heyes didn't think that Jones was talking a lot about what his new friend had told him.
On Sunday morning, there was a nice, relaxed breakfast and a brief visit to the newly built Museum of Fine Arts. And then it was back on the train and back to New York. Heyes felt he had come out of the whole thing pretty well and learned a lot. And he had made a friend. He and George Jones had promised to keep in touch. They would be sure to see each other around the field. It would be good, next time Heyes went to some academic math event, to have the chance to see a friend there. And he had gotten acquainted with quite a few guys from Harvard and Princeton and Yale. It was an important beginning for Heyes in his new field. He felt satisfied about that.
But after class, Charlie Homer called Heyes into his office. The look on his face promised trouble, it seemed to Heyes. Once the door was safely closed, Charlie said, "Never let me call you paranoid again, Heyes."
Homer held up one of the myriad New York City newspapers. Heyes swore. It wasn't on the front page, but on the second page there was a small head line reading, "Hannibal Heyes Seen Alive in Boston." There was a story, referred from a small Boston paper, that a woman who professed to know the notorious outlaw well had spotted him on a street in the Boston Back Bay. She had gone to get a policeman and by the time she gotten back to the spot where he had been, he had vanished. But she had given a strong description and been sure of who he was. The woman's name was not given, but her identity was clear enough to Heyes – it had to be Julia. The next day, the story showed up in more newspapers. Some papers seemed to doubt the report. But Heyes had no doubts: he had been resurrected.