For all its decrepitude, Hal had to hang on to the old truck. It furnished his living--and a living for his mother and his great-uncle Telemachus, who was "stove-up with rheumatism." The weeks when hauling was brisk, the truck even earned a few strange luxuries such as queer Hal Dane would want--bottles of odd-smelling glue, old wire springs and bits of metal from Kerrigan's junk pile, and now and then a precious book full of diagrams of aeronautical engines.