PART I

RULERS OF KINGS

I

WHEN Fessenden Abbott heard that he was to inherit four hundred millions of dollars he experienced the profoundest discouragement he was ever to know, except on that midnight ten years later when he stood on a moonlit balcony in Hungary, alone with the daughter of an Emperor, and opened his contemptuous American mind to the deeper problems of Europe.

His ambition had been immeasurable, yet almost defined. His hopes had been the confident imperious extravagances of a youth in whom narrow circumstances and a high indomitable spirit had developed that ardent personal force which equips man to conquer life. His ideals had soared in stellar spaces—ideals created by passionate brooding on the careers of Washington, Hamilton, Napoleon, Nelson, Cromwell, Kossuth, the great Hunyadis, Alexander, Cæsar, Rudolph the First of Austria. How he had pored over the lives of this catholic assortment of heroes while his fingers froze and the winds roared through the Adirondack wilderness; on hot summer afternoons as he trudged behind his plough, the reins wound about one arm, his book in the bend of the other, vaguely wondering sometimes why his manifest delinquencies were never noticed.

As he looked back he marvelled at the bluntness of his observation. His difference from the other young men of that high gallery of the continent must have been obvious, and whenever he thought of his dead mother it was to associate her with a magnificence of personal environment which in time he grew to believe he had borrowed from the Arabian Nights for the more loyal framing of a created memory; certainly in real life, even in those huge cities where men made money, even in the vast cold palaces of Europe, of which he had read, there could be nothing to-day like those splendors which haunted his young mind.

He had just investigated the interiors of the toys of his third Christmas when he was made to keep so quiet for four days that he became a miserable and obstreperous baby; on the fifth he forgot the troubles of his past in a twelve-hours’ journey with his doting father. His indulgent nurse had been dismissed, and a woman with a white cap and a firm admonishing eye formed the rear of his body-guard, and held him to the window when his restless legs sent his father to the smoking compartment. He could remember still his bewildered sensation as the train climbed slowly through dark forests, as hard black peaks travelled across his blinking vision. Of the night ride through the woods in a springless wagon he recalled little but the sharp accentuations of the “bull’s-eye” and the deep sighs of his nurse. After that, life for several years was too monotonous for memories. He lived in a farm-house without toys and sweets—which he quickly forgot—and after the departure of his nurse at the end of three months his was the life of any mountain-boy; out of doors in the wildest weather, out of bed at six o’clock, cuffed, spanked, roughly petted by the farmer’s mother, beside whose bed he slept during the remaining years of his childhood. Twice a year his father came and spent a day on the Nettlebeck farm. In summer Fessenden led him through the woods, and exhibited his many treasures, expounded the forest lore to which he had instinctively applied himself as soon as he could run alone—unanticipative of the lore to which it would be the golden key in more difficult years. In winter they sat in the best parlor, close to a red stove, which made the boy, little used to the luxury of fires, sleepy and almost ill. Neither woods nor fire inspired Mr. Abbott to many words. He examined the boy in his studies, and took his physical measurements, comparing them with previous entries in a little red book. Then, after an interval of sound fatherly advice, and another of tender interest, he usually went to sleep; or remained motionless for hours, his weary eyes fixed and rapt, his lips and nostrils quivering occasionally, but stern, immobile, relentless, the lower lip raised, the upper drawn down and under. His little son fidgeted, coughed respectfully, yawned shamelessly, and finally stole away. Mr. Abbott, upon his arrival, always presented Fessenden with a box of books, several red sweaters, and, as soon as he was old enough, a new pair of trousers—for his Sunday use; the boy wore overalls on other days. Mr. Abbott forbade him to clothe his more conspicuous part in anything but red, that he might be found in briefer time if lost, and avoided with less effort in the hunting season.

The books were selected with a careful regard for his succeeding years, and under their insidious gardening his imagination developed and his horizon receded. He received his elementary schooling from a young woman on a neighboring farm. At the same time his body grew tall and strong and his temper fierce. He took as easily to fighting as to books; he was sometimes ignominiously whipped by hulking mountain-boys, sometimes he won against heavy odds, for he had an instinct for the scientific rules of the game, a long wind, hard muscles, and the primitive delight of the small boy in war. The fights were not uncommonly for the favor of some baby minx, but oftener for the pure lust of battle. He was frequently mangled and battered when his father arrived, but Mr. Abbott merely laughed, and, on the whole, seemed to approve his appearance. So passed the uneventful years until his tenth birthday, when life began to ring its changes.

II

Mr. Abbott sat in the rocking-chair by the hot stove regarding his son with his dreamy far-seeing eyes. For the first time Fessenden wondered who and what his father was. This man was like no one in the books he had read, like no one in the Adirondacks. He was a boy of direct methods, and was about to ask for information when his father spoke.

“I am more gratified at your physical development than you will ever know, my son,” said Mr. Abbott, tenderly. “When I brought you here you were fragile and undersized; it was thought that your chance of becoming a strong man, or of reaching manhood at all, was perhaps two in ten. But I knew the magic of the mountains; I made my experiment, and I have succeeded. There are other things I wish to say to you, however, so sit down and listen attentively.”

Fessenden, in a glow of expectation, fell upon a corner of the sofa, and Mr. Abbott continued.

“Originally I planned to speak to you decisively when you were thirteen or fourteen, but it seems to me that you are brighter than most boys of your age; I think I cannot begin too soon to prepare you for the future. Some boys are taught to say their prayers. I presume you have been taught to say yours by our good Mrs. Nettlebeck, and I am sure I hope you say them; but I want you to repeat, every Saturday night before you lie down, these words I am going to teach to you; if you forget them, to rise in the coldest and darkest night, stand in the middle of the room, and repeat them twice. The words are these—write them down: ‘Life is a fight. Millions fail. Only the strong win. Failure is worse than death. Man’s internal strength is created by watching Circumstance like a hawk, meeting her every spring stiff and straight, laughing at her pitfalls—which in the beginning of life are excess, excess, and always excess, and all manner of dishonor. Strength is created by adversity, by trying to win first the small battles of life, then the great, by casting out fear, by training the mind to rule in all things—the heart, the passions, the impulses, which if indulged make the brain the slave instead of the master. Success, for which alone a man lives, if he be honest with himself, comes to those who are strong, strong, strong.’ When you have finished that I want you to repeat ‘No’ aloud for ten minutes. The time will come when you will rejoice that ‘No’ flies, instead of moving reluctantly, to your tongue. As for that prayer I have given you, you may not understand it all now, but you will as you grow older, better and better; you will analyze and ponder upon it. Life is choked and gasping with young men trying to get a decent living, with thousands besides struggling for a career, reputation. I shall do my best to educate you, but I want you to grow up with the distinct understanding that you must support yourself when that preparatory period is over. I may be able to help you to some sort of a position, but I may be dead—and I must do what I can for your sister—”

“My what?” shouted Fessenden. “You never told me I had a sister!”

“Did I not? I should have thought I must have mentioned it. She was born when your mother died, and her name is Alexandra. Do not interrupt me again, and listen attentively. I wish you, as I have just said, to grow up with the clearly defined idea that you must make your own way in the world, make every dollar you spend, owe your position, and the respect you may be able to inspire, to your personality—to the dignity of your character and the brilliancy of your mind. I shall keep you here until you are ready for college, where I hope to be able to send you; for, unlike many Americans, I believe in educating a man like a gentleman. I have just met with a piece of extraordinary good fortune: the other day an old friend called on me for the first time in many years; he told me that his son, a Harvard man, and a profound student, was so delicate that he might be obliged to spend the remainder of his life in the high altitudes. I called on the young man immediately—his name is Stanley Morris—and persuaded him to come here, for I realized what such companionship would mean to my bright little son. He was very glad of the suggestion, and agreed, for the sake of a small annual sum, to become your teacher—in time to prepare you for college. It was a great relief to my mind, for I want you to remain in this healthy mountain region until you are grown, and, of course, expensive tutors and schools are out of the question. He will be able to teach you German and French among other things, and he has a large library. Therefore, I shall not send you any more books. Fortunately you need only these rough clothes up here. I feel quite confident that I shall be able to afford the small yearly sum Mr. Morris demands. But you are never to forget that you are studying for equipment, not as the mere routine of youth. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” Fessenden was deeply impressed, but longing, nevertheless, to get away from the stove and steer the conversation to lighter topics. His young brain felt as if it had been hammered. “Couldn’t you send my sister up here?” he asked.

“No; you will have little in common till you are grown. You would act detrimentally upon each other. Girls have such a different part to play in life,” he concluded, somewhat vaguely.

“I’d like her picture.”

“I will send it to you, but you are to promise me first that you will not write to her. I want no sentimental nonsense.”

“I hate to write letters, so I don’t mind promising.”

There was a long silence during which Mr. Abbott dreamed and Fessenden squirmed.

“Are you a success, father, or a failure?”

Mr. Abbott jumped. “I?—well—I will let you judge of that for yourself when you are grown.”

“Do you keep a grocery store?—or teach school?—or write books?”

“No,” Mr. Abbott laughed. “But I get my humble living honestly. I am a lawyer by profession.”

“What is a lawyer?”

“Dear, happy child! All in good time, my boy. Now run out in the air if you like. Your cheeks are very red. Perhaps you will find an apple in my bag.”

III

During the following week Fessenden read little and was too amiably excited for battle. He had seen few strangers in that primeval wilderness—no gentleman but his father; and Mr. Abbott had taken pains to admonish him that he was never to forget he was a gentleman—to criticise his table manners, gait, and carriage. In the course of his last visit, after he had twice swept his son’s elbows off the table and arrested his knife on its flight to the butter-dish, he had said, severely: “I am not raising you to be a congressman from a backwoods district. Without manners your morals might just as well be bad as good. I am no democrat. I believe in hard work, and above all things I despise the idle fools that rich fathers foist upon the world; but I equally despise the man who ever forgets he was born a gentleman. You were. One reason why I have persuaded Stanley Morris to come here is that you may be reminded constantly that you are not to grow up a country lout, and disgrace—your sister, when the time comes for you to meet. Do you think that small head can remember all this tiresome advice?”

“Youbetcherlife! But can’t I fight any more?” Fessenden had asked anxiously. “I feel my goodest when I’ve wiped the face off’n a chap.”

“Oh, fight all you like. Never take an insult. Never see a woman insulted. Never take a back seat. If you did I’d disown you. But put on no airs, even when you are being properly educated by Morris. I despise a snob as much as I abhor a weakling.”

“What is a snob?”

“The snob is a man who furnishes comedy for others and tragedy for himself.”

Fessenden’s eyes were a hard blue stare, but experience had taught him that when his father was cryptic he did not intend to be questioned further.

Two rooms on the second floor facing the south were put in such order as young Abbott had heretofore associated with the unlicensed imagination of the story-teller. Not only were the walls covered with heavy red paper, but a special car was switched off at a distant station, and its contents, when hauled the intervening miles and unpacked, proved to be worn but red and luxurious furniture, four bookcases, several heavy rugs, two stoves, and some nine hundred books. Fessenden unwrapped and shelved every book, his fingers tingling, unfaithful for the moment to his chipmunks and rabbits, his hidden places in the forest where he was the mighty leader of an invisible robber band.

When all was in order, Mr. Stanley Morris arrived. He was very tall and attenuated, with a bulging brow and long pale fingers. Nature had designed him for the ascetic and scholar, and doubtless had taken back a mere sufficiency of his lung cells to complete her purpose. On this shelf of the world he could live into old age, pack his avid brain with the master thoughts of other men, and one day, possibly, give to the world a thought system of his own.

“He kinder gives me the dumps,” remarked Fritz Nettlebeck, as he filled his pipe in the kitchen that evening. “I don’t take to people who looks as if their brains was distributed all over them. His head-piece is twice the size of an ordinary man’s, but he looks as if he kept that for Sundays, and any other part of him would do as well for other days.”

“You’re gitten imagination,” said Christina, with contempt. She was a sour and elderly virgin, hard-worked, now that her mother was growing old, and disapproving of her brothers in all their phases. Beaux were few in that vast and lonely wilderness, and these few had passed her by. Even the hired man had failed to succumb to the potencies of propinquity and the only woman. She was an uncommonly good cook for an American of her class—her parents were Hamburgers—and had won favor with the campers who ventured into this part of the Adirondacks, Mr. Abbott among the number; but if her cake was delicate, her griddle-cakes light, her venison a culinary achievement, her temper had been bitter from childhood, her sarcasm a thing to make a strong man falter and slink away. Christina was very proud of this substitute for scholarship, and persuaded herself that it compensated her for all that lay buried in ligneous spinsterhood. “The young un’ll have to turn to now, I guess,” she continued. “Much chores you’ll git out of him if he’s got to learn all them books. And he’s real handy about the house, too. He’s mended a power of things for me.”

“You’re sweet on that kid,” said Nettlebeck, with borrowed sarcasm. “It’s about the only soft spot you’ve got. But if you make him sick again on cocoanut-cake, and his father finds it out, he’ll be packed off, I give you that.”

“Who is that father of his, anyhow?” Christina never argued when she was sure of defeat; and having sat up all night with Fessenden—who had stolen the greater part of the cake—she was not prepared to face the enemy. “I don’t believe he’s as poor as he makes out. The mortgage is paid off this farm, I happen to know—”

“And you’re insinuatin’ that your two brothers ain’t hard-workin’ enough to pay it off theirselves!” cried Nettlebeck, bringing his fist down on the table with such violence that Christina’s pile of clean plates rattled, and she gave a wholly feminine shriek. “If you ever insult me like that again I’ll git a wife, and how’ll you like that?”

This threat never failed to subdue Christina, for although she shrewdly guessed that no girl within a radius of a hundred miles had the courage to become her sister-in-law, she knew that a desperate man might make a pilgrimage to some distant town which her fame had not penetrated. She sniffed, muttered something about not being minded to insult her own family, whatever she might think of folks in general, and carried off her dishes to their shelves.

“Mr. Abbott,” resumed Nettlebeck, having given his wrath such time to cool as a female could expect, “is a generous and self-sacrificin’ father, and he just worships that kid; he’d wear one suit of clothes a year to give him what he needed, and of course keep don’t cost much up here. As for this here Morris, he’s spent all his money on books and furniture, thinkin’ he was goin’ to be a college professor. Mr. Abbott must have got him cheap. And the little we git from the old man’s regular. Just you remember that.”

“I ain’t forgettin’. Nobody asked you to make excuses for Mr. Abbott bein’ alive. I s’pose he ain’t payin’ fur that canoe, either.”

“That there canoe is a second-handed one, and I got it dirt cheap. Mr. Abbott consulted me about it when he was here last, and asked me to do the best I could, as he’d like the kid to have a canoe if one could be got inside his means. But Fess ain’t to know it’s here till his birthday comes round; so mind your own business till the ice goes out, if you can.” And Mr. Nettlebeck slouched off to join his brother in the barn and avoid further questions.

“I ain’t no fool,” confided Christina to herself, as she “covered” her fire. “But I know which side my bread’s buttered on, and the young un’ll git no hint from me. Then when our share in raisin’ him is over, there’ll be a big present all-round, or my name ain’t Christina Nettlebeck. There’s been too many campers in these woods in my time, and I know a rich man and a gentleman when I see one. Mr. Abbott was the worst-lookin’ tramp in the woods I ever saw, and that’s a sure sign. It’s lucky, though, the kid’s what he is, for I couldn’t stand a hateful brat, nohow.”

IV

Like all invalids, Morris had little affection for any one but himself, but what he lacked in human sympathy he atoned for in courtesy of manner and nicety of conscience. He instructed Fessenden until that restless youngster besought Nettlebeck to find him many “chores.” But Fessenden was still too small to chop down trees, to plough ice, or to saw wood, and there is little other work in the mountains in winter. There was no alternative but to accommodate himself to his new condition, and brace his endurance by repeating his father’s advice and attempting to understand it. At the end of the long winter he was studying hard and fighting less. Now that he did not recite on the neighboring farm, there was no one to fight with, except on such rare occasions as when a boy came to borrow of Christina after some culinary disaster at home or some unexpected shortage at the mountain “store.” Fessenden, no matter how deep in study, seemed to scent the messenger from afar, and was standing in the middle of the slippery road, his muscles bunched, his eye glaring like a tiger’s, when his expectant foe, uttering a hideous war-whoop, flung his bag into a snowdrift and hurled himself upon the champion. Upon these occasions, Dolf, the younger of the Nettlebeck brothers, always dropped his work and encouraged the sport. When it was over, no matter what the issue, Christina invariably cuffed Fessenden, then made him a cake; and gentle old Mrs. Nettlebeck wept profusely as she sponged him off, convinced that it would yet be her mournful duty to lay him out. Her own sons had the peaceful blood of the German peasant in them, and this enterprising American lad was a dear and perpetual mystery. Upon one occasion, when he looked like a blind puppy, and study was out of the question for two days, Morris improved the occasion in the interest of reform.

“You are a great fighter, Fess,” he began, tactfully; “and it does my poor blood good to watch so much energy explode. Only it seems to me a waste. Why don’t you concentrate your energy in your brain and become a leader by the force of superior will and intelligence?”

“When I fight with my head I fight with its outside,” replied Fessenden dryly. “I’ve got to make myself understood, and I do, you bet. And I’m not complaining of the headache next day, neither.”

“Think of what I’ve said, however. You have established your reputation as a fighter; you occupy the proud position of champion among boys of your own age and older. The raging hate which must saturate you when fighting like a savage would make me feel mean and terrified for days after. It is all very well to know how to use your fists, and no doubt they are of service to you here, and at your age; but they will play a small part in after-life, and your character will play a very great one. You are so constituted that if you would learn to control yourself you could command your fellows with little effort; and at least when you fight try not to hate so hard.”

“How would you like Christina’s puddings with all the raisins left out? Would you mind reading to me?”

“As long as you like.” And Morris made him comfortable on the sofa, and read from the lives of ancient warriors until the heir of the ages fell asleep.

Fessenden’s mind at this time was a virgin field into which seeds fell to rise again and be tended by a curious young tiller. Those flung into a fertile crevice by Morris, who took the responsibility very seriously, put out their green heads in time. Fessenden nodded his recognition, and, although they were by no means his favorite products, between their insistency and a decreasing lack of opportunity, he arrived, in the course of another year, at the conclusion that it might be interesting to make boys follow his lead without resorting to primitive methods. “I suppose one might as well wait till one has a real call to fight,” he remarked to himself with philosophy. “The animals don’t fight till they have to—none, that is, but dogs, and perhaps that’s living so much with us—we sickin’ them on and all that. It’s good to fight, though,” he added, with a long sigh, “even if the headache does last longer than the fun—that’s a point. Perhaps Mr. Morris is right, although I’d like to know what he knows about it. Maybe I’ll try the other tack and see what there’s in it, but there are some things will make my fists fly till I’m eighty. I guess I wasn’t cut out for a Sunday-school teacher.” Nevertheless, he worked himself into such a terrific rage the next time he was challenged—after an unusual period of virtuous abstinence—that he was thoroughly frightened at the result: for several days he felt flat and peevish, and more worn out in mind than in body. Morris came upon him in the forest where he was seated on a stump dismally chewing a cud, and embraced an obvious opportunity.

“After all,” he said sympathetically, “what you fight for is supremacy, is it not? Why not get it some other way? Although you poison yourself with the hate you feel while actually fighting, hate is never the motive of battle with you. You like all these boys well enough, but you must find out who is the best man or burst. Find it out some other way—or rather, having decided that point, try others. Besides, the great man uses the brute force of others, he rarely indulges in it himself. Did not Napoleon sit aloft on a hill while his hundreds of thousands of nameless minions did the fighting? So long as they could see that being whom they looked upon as an emanation from the divine intellect, they were willing to fight like fanatics, but if he had rushed forward with a musket and fallen, the ranks would have scattered in irretrievable panic. Are you cultivating your prowess to fight years hence when a great man orders you out?”

“Not much,” growled Fessenden.

“Well, take me out in your canoe now. We’ll talk it over further this evening.”

Fessenden’s twelfth birthday occurred a week later, and he persuaded Christina to give him a party and invite his enemies. They came, howling through the mountain passes, brandishing big sticks as a manifest of their readiness for the fray. But although, having been invited to dinner and birthday cake, they expected a respite of perhaps two hours, they were disconcerted, and privately alarmed at being received by young Abbott quite in the style of the grand seigneur. He wore a new white sweater and a new pair of trousers, and he had been scrubbed and brushed by Mrs. Nettlebeck until, to mountain taste, he was offensively godly. He greeted his weather-beaten guests with a hearty grip of the hand, insinuated his appreciation of the forgiving spirit so touchingly displayed, and when he had them all seated about the table in the large kitchen he entertained them brilliantly with anecdotes from his most exciting books, while they devoured Christina’s substantial dainties. When he had gorged them into a state of sleepy good-nature, he led them out into the woods, and, mounting a stump, invited them to spin yarns of personal prowess. Each youth in turn told a tale of terrible adventure and glorious triumph, which Fessenden applauded as a host should. When they were alert once more and ready for action, he organized them into a band of pirates, and they scuttled several ships with such demoniacal vigor that they worked off all the steam that was left in them; and departed at nightfall vowing that Fessenden—who was now dirty enough to satisfy the most exacting standard—was the finest fellow in the woods, and that they’d never had such a Time since they were born.

After supper Fessenden untied his canoe, Pocahontas—whom he loved better than any mortal except his father—and pulled out into the evening shadows. The Nettlebeck farm was on a clearing of some fifty acres on the north and east shores of a large lake. Surrounding it on three sides was the virgin unkempt forest, as yet undesecrated by the lumberman or the logger. Just beyond the clearing the forest grew to the shores of the lake—a body of water so clear that in the early morning and evening, until the ice came, or except when the winds raged, the great spruces and pines, the beeches and maples, looked as if petrified in one of the old glaciers which had ground this vast region into form. Beyond the lake, beyond the surrounding forest, rose the encircling chain of gentle peaks, some barren rocks of eccentric shape, others black with woods. This evening their upper slopes were white with a late fall of snow. The Nettlebecks, like all American farmers, had done what they could to make Nature hideous, and their big house with its haphazard additions, the barns and boat-house, the ragged orchard and vegetable garden, were like a patchwork apron on the robes of a goddess. But Fessenden had turned his back on the Nettlebeck outrage, and not a shingle could he see—not a column of smoke. The blue shadows on the mountains were melting as the stars came out. The silence was so intense that Nature seemed to laugh noiselessly at man’s puny attempt to impress himself upon her higher solitudes.

Fessenden shot his canoe round a bend, and entered a long water-pass, irregular, half-choked with reeds and swamp, dark from the forest on the slopes of the gorge. It led to another lake, the second in a long chain of lakes great and small, on many of which some farmer had made his clearing and erected his monstrosities. But the gorge was long, and the next lake too wild and rocky to invite the attentions of man. Fessenden could paddle far, and fancy himself as alone in the great Adirondack wilderness as the first Red Indian. From the day when Mrs. Nettlebeck had allowed him to run unattended, much of his time had been spent apart. The nearest neighbor lived three miles away, on the farm where with several other boys he had attended school of a sort for four months in the year. The boys were kept busy at other times, and only sought him out when, like himself, they ached for a fight. Solitude had become as necessary in his life as his bed and his bread; and except when storms raged and the thermometer stood too far below zero, he left the house the moment his studies with his tutor were over, and took his reading into the woods or his canoe. On Saturdays and Sundays he was not permitted to open a book, and during the short summer there were no mental tasks. He spent these holidays in the woods or on the water, only returning to the house for his evening meal and his hard bed. Occasionally Morris accompanied him, and taught him much of practical forestry; but although the man and the boy were good friends, each preferred his solitudes—his long silences.

To-night Fessenden was in a strangely exultant mood which he was anxious to understand. He was tired, for he had played hard; but it was a pleasant languor beside the exhaustion which followed his pitched battles, to say nothing of their accompaniment of gaping wounds and nervous depression. He had passed successfully through his first attempt at diplomacy and self-command; his fists had ached more than once, for Jeff Hunter was in fine fighting trim and invariably lashed his crimson tide; and he tasted all the sweets of power, of dominating in a new rôle, of discovering unsuspected talents, and of using them easily in the control of his fellows. He looked back upon his career of fists and blood, this youngster of twelve, with much the same disgust and contempt as might animate a debauchee crossing the threshold of reform. He did not return home until midnight, and in those lonely hours under the stars, in the profoundest stillness that America can give us, his ambition was born. He felt able to go out and conquer the world then and there; but he was modest by an earlier endowment, and the value of a sound education had been impressed upon his responsive mind. But his soul took a long flight, and met on high vague and beautiful shapes, which, when he was older, he knew men called ideals—looked down upon a wonderful world far beyond these mountains, wherein was stored the records of an eternity of great deeds, where greater still were doing; where, in the nebulous galleries of time, things beyond human imaginings awaited the quickening touch of men still in the making.

Fessenden returned and raided the pantry for a glass of milk, but it was some time before he sought his bed. In the depths of his soul the sleeping man still muttered, and he felt like Mercury poised for a flight and not knowing which way to turn, but half drunk with wondrous possibilities. The full moon hung low on the reflecting lake. The mountain-tops were white, their lower forests black. The deer came noiselessly out of the woods and drank. The sublime and lonely scene murmured voicelessly of its greater kin in the highest valleys of the alpine world. Fessenden, standing on the upper veranda of the house, again saw only Nature, unchanged since a thousand years. Her silences might never have been broken.

“You—kid!” cried a shrill voice as a window flew open. “What on earth are you doin’ up this time of night? Lands sakes! Git into bed this minute or I’ll come out and cuff you good.” And Fessenden, who had a wholesome respect for Christina, fled to his room and was asleep in ten minutes.

V

But although solitude moulded unceasingly in the structure of Fessenden Abbott’s character, and with coincident intellectual development opened Gothic spaces in his soul which made him lastingly different from the city-bred man, yet was his life on the whole much like that of any healthy youngster of his age who lived his boyhood in an American wilderness. He played pioneer to his complete satisfaction, and blazed trails in all directions through the forest. In company with the redoubtable Jeff Hunter, he built a hut on an island in a lake of wild and uninhabitable surroundings, and impersonated Crusoe to his old enemy’s Friday. This social triumph was not won without another struggle, partly fistic, partly diplomatic; and Fessenden regarded the issue as his greatest achievement. After the first supper, cooked by Friday and eaten with the graciousness of royalty by his master, Jeff succumbed amiably and followed Fessenden on such adventurous tramps as his hard-working father would permit. They spent many days and nights, during the summer months, on the island, from which they sallied forth into the forest or to the high peaks of the range in search of Nature’s dearest terrors. They were once treed by a bear, whose cubs they stumbled over; but managed to escape, by climbing from tree-top to tree-top, when the bear was obliged to return to maternal duties; they had, with what discrimination was possible, selected trees too slender for the bear to mount. During one of Mr. Abbott’s visits he was entertained on the island; and by the light of a camp-fire and to the accompaniment of ominous sounds in the surrounding forest was regaled by an account of this adventure, to say nothing of one with a panther, and yet another with a catamount, told by Fessenden in a direct unvarnished style which made his father tingle with pride and an echo of youth. Shortly after, Fritz Nettlebeck remarked to the boys that he had two shotguns which “he guessed they were old enough to use, and he’d teach ’em and give ’em the loan of the guns provided they learned how to shoot straight and would promise to be careful.” The immediate result was an indiscriminate slaughter and loud protests from Christina, who viewed an overstocked and gory larder with disfavor. When, however, they had riddled and dragged home a bear, they were thereafter too proud to kill small game for other than purposes of replenishment. In the hunting season they spent their Saturdays on the runs, and killed more deer than the law allowed. One fine buck was shipped to Mr. Abbott by Nettlebeck. Fessenden had brought it down, and it was the prize of the season. Having achieved this fresh distinction, Fessenden, who, if he now fought rarely, still burned with youthful ambitions, which had no relation to the swirling yet luminous desires in his soul, organized a canoe race in which boys from seven lakes competed. As his practice had been constant for three years, and as he applied a very superior brain to the sport, he not unnaturally came off best man; but this he did not realize, and he embraced his canoe that night in a glow of complete happiness. He had named her after his favorite girl in history, and he loved her with his first boyish passion.

VI

Fessenden shivered and sat up in bed. It was the first time he had ever heard sounds in the house at this hour, and even the birds and the cocks were still asleep. He felt more oppressed than curious, and, dressing hastily, opened his window and slipped out upon the veranda. The moon shone on vast fields of ice and snow, on white peaks sharply defined against the dark starry sky, on great stretches of woods whose heavy spruce and naked maples were laden and glittering. The lake was a sheet of ice several feet in depth. Fessenden had driven a team across it yesterday to the opposite woods, where the men were chopping trees blown down in a recent storm. The thermometer was very low, but the air so still that the cold had no sting in it. Without the house the world might have been dead; but not so within. Several people seemed to be moving about in a curious and stealthy manner. Suddenly some one ran down the hall and back again. Immediately after there was a scream from Christina, followed by a silence so sudden and complete that it seemed profounder than that without.

How he realized at once that Mrs. Nettlebeck was dead he never knew. She had not been a strong woman for years, and had spent more and more of her time in the big rocking-chair, looking out on the lake or reading her Bible; but when he had kissed her as usual the night before, she had prodded him playfully in search of damaged bones, and told him in her broken English that she forgot she was too old to work while she watched him skate and turn somersaults on the ice. Fessenden knew that she loved him more than she did her own children, for he interested her and they did not, and he showed her much demonstrative affection, which they thought beneath their religiously acquired Americanism—if indeed there were any impulses left in those dry economical natures. And now Fessenden looked about vaguely as if in search of the fleeing spirit. For the moment it seemed to him that he vibrated in unison with the great forces beyond the Universe. It was several days before he was conscious of grief and his loss, but he tingled with cosmic curiosity.

Morris’s window was open, and himself buried under so many blankets that he did not hear Fessenden enter the room. He sprang up when gripped by the shoulder, however, and after a brief visit to the death-chamber returned and endeavored until morning to answer his pupil’s eager almost incoherent questions. He expounded every belief he had investigated. After Fessenden had concluded that he would prefer to think of his poor old friend in that Nirvana where there was no more work, he went out and spent the day in the woods by himself. This new idea of Death and its impenetrability to mortal light seemed to him magnificent; and Christina, hastily patching together a shroud out of sheets—old sheets at that—and Fritz and Dolf, not even assisted by the hired man—who was sent to chop wood as usual—hammering together a rude coffin, while a few neighbors stamped through the defiles to “help lay the old lady out,” filled his ardent young mind with revolt.

The burial-ground was ten miles distant, close by a church, a mountain store, a post-office, and three or four houses—a hamlet in a clearing through which a stage passed twice a week. Once a month the church was visited by an itinerant preacher. Mrs. Nettlebeck, to the satisfaction of her family, had accommodated her setting forth to the Methodist’s returning flight, and, as there was no time to lose, her remains, on the night following her death, were placed on the “jumper”—a low sledge—and driven through the snowdrifts of the forest by torchlight. Fritz drove; Christina stood beside him, arrayed in fragments of hastily contributed black; Fessenden and his faithful chum tramped in the rear; and Dolf and the hired man lighted the way with great pine torches. The jumper was on runners; the men and the boys wore snow-shoes, for the snow was often five or six feet deep; now and then the rude vehicle plunged into a drift and had to be dug out, while the coffin was deposited beyond the reach of the plunging horses. Once the coffin disappeared, and as no one could remember exactly where it had been placed, and the pitch-pine was smoking heavily, it was some time before the treacherous catafalque was discovered. After the box had been dug out and safely hearsed, Fessenden let fly his wrath.

“Why on earth can’t you bury the poor old lady in the forest?” he demanded. “You’re treating her horribly, in my opinion; and I’d like to know what better church-yard any one wants than the woods.”

“I guess this family’ll git Christian burial every time,” replied Fritz. “But I must say it’s mighty inconvenient dyin’ in the winter. Still, we can spare the time better than if we was sowin’ or harvestin’; there’s something in that. You can’t for to git everything right in this world.”

And the tramp went on through the forest, where the late moon rarely penetrated, and the wild torches peopled the caverns of the dark with the evil spirits which had haunted the forests of the old peasant’s childhood, and cast sinister shadows over the stark outline bumping close to the ground. Mrs. Nettlebeck had been a bit of a cynic in her way, for she had never been persuaded that the transit from her quaint comfortable village in the toy state of Hamburg to this souring struggle for existence in an aboriginal wilderness had exalted her second condition over her first; and Fessenden wondered if she were smiling grimly in her coffin at the hardships of her final journey.

They arrived at the settlement in the late sunrise, but although several neighbors had assembled to help them, neither pick nor spade made any impression on the frozen snow, many feet in depth, which covered the church-yard and its graves. The preacher managed to flounder through the drifts to his duty, and preached a long and dismal sermon on the platitudes of life and death, which further outraged Fessenden; and then Mrs. Nettlebeck was stowed away in a little room behind the pulpit to wait till the spring came and the “ice went out.”

VII

It was several days before Fessenden realized that he felt something more than natural grief at the death of Mrs. Nettlebeck. He knew that his father loved him, but Mr. Abbott’s visits were brief and far between, and his infrequent letters rarely covered a sheet of notepaper. Fessenden now had his ardent following among the boys of his region, but boys manifest their liking by loyalty, not by sentiment. Fritz and Dolf treated him with good-natured indifference; he would as soon have thought of kissing one of the scraggy winter maples as Christina, in spite of her cross indulgence, and Morris might have been a disembodied spirit. Mrs. Nettlebeck had been his one steady well of affection. She had petted and crooned over him since he had come to her, a baby in a chronic state of disapproval with his nurse; and the large measure of rejected love that was still in her she had lavished upon him daily. He had taken it as a matter of course, for he was lordly and masculine, and there was no sharp contrast of neglect and ill-treatment to fuse it into light. But now that the magic had gone abruptly from him, and there was nothing to take its place, he felt himself up against the barren rocks of life; for the first time the future seemed to hold vague and unknown terrors, the present to be less than the supremely satisfactory thing he had esteemed it. He went first for consolation to his canoe, whom perhaps he loved the more ardently as her responses held an exciting element of doubt. But Pocahontas, like the bears, seemed to “deaden” in winter, at all events to be coldly impersonal until she was skimming above the sunken ice before the first breeze of spring. So he left her to the chill repose of the boat-house, and poured out his lonely and frightened soul to his father. Mr. Abbott answered that he would go up to see him at once, and did manage to pay his son a flying visit in the course of a month. But by this time Fessenden was ashamed of his reckless exhibition of sentiment, and, like a true American, had jealously concealed his gushing fountains under a cool, alert, and practical exterior. When his father arrived his head was high, and his blue eyes keen and bright, his very muscles expressive of masculine impatience with the soft side of life. Mr. Abbott had brought him a fishing-rod, which appeared to afford immediate consolement; and then, somewhat to his father’s relief, he began to talk about American history.

“Mr. Morris wanted me to wait until I had read more of English and foreign history,” he said. “But I couldn’t, and I’ve been reading out of hours. We’ve a great country, haven’t we?”

“Great.”

“Up here they all think it’s the greatest in the world. Is it?”

“That is largely a matter of experience. Personally, I see more in the future than in the present. We have never been whipped. That is fatal to steady and rounded development. A nation, like man, is full of vanity until life has trounced him more than once.”

“I should hate it if we had ever been licked. And we have had such grand men to guide us—I have read the lives of Washington and Hamilton and Franklin; and we have such grand ideals—after I read the Declaration of Independence I went out into the woods and whooped and whooped. With that to live by we can’t be in need of a trouncing; and of course all other men try to follow in the footsteps of our great ones—there are a lot of others whose lives I haven’t had time to read yet.”

Mr. Abbott turned his eyes to his son’s flushed face, and opened his straight lips as if about to smile and speak. But he closed them quickly, and brought down his lids over his cold dreaming eyes.

He answered in a moment: “Our ideals, like our theories, are the best in the world. When you are launched out into the hustle, it will be time enough to know how they work. Meanwhile, don’t worry about your country—it has an amazing power of taking care of itself; but develop your intellect and your strength of character. Do you repeat that lesson of mine once a week?”

Mr. Abbott invariably asked this question, and Fessenden was usually able to nod satisfactorily. He continued: “A man who came up here once said that this was the rich man’s country, that the poor man was getting less and less of a show, and often couldn’t get justice. They all argued after that—it was down at the store; but it didn’t seem to lead anywhere, and I’d like to know what he meant. Was he only talking? Is that the reason you are poor? You seem to me the cleverest man in the world—and even Mr. Morris thinks an awful lot of you—he’s not much on admiring. Are you ground down by the rich? I should think you could sail into ’em, and send ’em all higher’n a kite.”

Mr. Abbott opened the door of the stove and poked the fire. Its red glow was reflected in his face, usually the hue of leather.

“I cannot say that the rich have interfered with me,” he replied, after a considerable pause. “I have chosen my own course, and have felt justified in pursuing it. Don’t believe all this twaddle about the rich, my son. It is their enterprise that has made this country great, not the growling of the failures. It is they who encourage and promote industries, whether their employees like their manner of doing it or not. It is they who make the money circulate, find employment for millions, keep the fires crackling under the great boiling caldron. Moreover, most of them have risen from the ranks of these grumblers—who, one and all, dream of reaching their altitude and having their chance to dictate to those still below. Never forget that point. Every working-man on strike is a potential millionaire—in fact as well as in fancy—for this country offers equal chances to all. It is the brains of the men that are not equal; and every millionaire has only himself—in rare instances his immediate forebears—to thank that he is not still grovelling with the herd, close to the wall.”

“Then of course the millionaires have the really great minds nowadays. Having done such wonderful things, I should think they would feel as if all the rest of the world were their children.”

“H’m! My son, I think it is time for you to go to bed.”

VIII

Fessenden, until his Great Love Affair, which occurred when he had rounded his seventeenth year, lived in his books and the future, finding less and less companionship in his now humble and devoted band of followers. This interval of four years was pricked out by two variations only: the gradually discontinuing visits of his father and the slight change incident upon a letter received from Mr. Abbott on his son’s fifteenth birthday:

“My dear Boy”—(this letter began, in the well-bred but curiously unexercised handwriting which sometimes made Fessenden wonder if his father never wrote to any one else)—“It may be some time, perhaps years, before we meet again. I shall give you no reason now for this additional separation, so painful to me. When the time comes I shall explain, and you will find the explanation satisfactory. Meanwhile, I shall write to you twice a year, remind you of all the advice and admonition I have given you, and ask many questions. I am very much gratified with Mr. Morris’s accounts of you. It is in your blood to take naturally to books. I hope and pray that other things may come as readily to you in due course.

“I have now concluded that you are old and strong enough to support yourself—barring your tuition, which I shall manage to meet. I am writing to Nettlebeck to put you to work during the fine weather. As you know, I prefer you should not study during those months, and you will be paid what will more than meet your expenses the year round. You are quite equal to the work of a farm-hand, and it is time you knew how it feels to earn money. It will also be a very considerable relief to me, besides accustoming you to the fit of the harness before it is imperatively necessary to put it on. Your sister is well, and sends you her love. I add mine, and I beg you to believe that in spite of appearances I love you devotedly—more than I have ever loved any one. You ask for my picture. I have never had one taken. I have my reasons. One is that a man always seems to me most of an ass when smirking on cardboard.

“Your very affectionate “Father.”

“He believes in disciplining,” remarked Fessenden to Morris, with some acerbity. He was not enchanted at the prospect of being a farm-hand. “If I must I must, but somehow I can’t believe my father is as poor as he makes out. If he is poor, it must be because he wants to be, for it always seems to me as if a sort of power came straight out of him, and hit me hard. And up here, where all men are equal—quite unlike what you say it is in cities—the Nettlebecks show him more respect than they ever show any one else.”

“That is the mere force of personality. You can have the same experience when you are grown, if you make of yourself a strong and isolated spirit, not a mere creditable member of a type. As for your father, his opinions are worth their weight in gold. Obey him without question—therein lies the success of your future. He is not only a man of remarkable brain-power, but he is between three and four times your age. He is helping you now out of his own experience. Be thankful that he takes so great an interest in you, instead of spoiling you in the usual criminal American fashion.”

“His interest appears to be more excessive than his love.”

“Cannot you take love on trust?”

“Does anybody take anything on trust? Can I eat nails and believe them bread? I know what I see, what I feel, what I am permitted to enjoy. I might say to myself twenty times a day, ‘My father loves me,’ and it wouldn’t make one-thousandth the impression that a weekly visit of ten minutes would.”

“A weekly visit from Mr. Abbott—” Morris checked his laugh abruptly. “Your father is not too strong, and hates travelling. But you have brain and imagination; it is odd you should need the regularly administered pap of the ordinary youth.”

“I am human,” responded Fessenden dryly; and as usual he went to Pocahontas for comfort and counsel.

The world was green on this birthday of his, for the spring had come early. The snow had gone from the mountains, the young maple-leaves were fluttering in the forest, the fields were green, the golden sunshine flooded the lake. There was a light breeze, and Fessenden unfurled his sails and thought into the sympathetic soul of his canoe.

“Perhaps, on the whole, I like the idea,” he admitted.

“With one or two exceptions, our great men have risen from the ranks—were hired men, grocery-store clerks, born in log-cabins, and all that sort of thing. To be sure, my favorites happen to be the ones who were not; still it seems to be the proper thing in this country, and as I intend to be a great man, old girl, I am contented to start at the proper place—no log-hut could be uglier than the Nettlebeck farm-house, and I am going to be a hired man, all right. I can’t help being thankful that it isn’t to be a grocery-store clerk. What am I to be? What am I to be? Can’t you give me a hint?” He laid his ear to the spot where he fancied the heart of Pocahontas beat warmly, and for him alone. “When I read the life of a great warrior, I want to be one. Upon some other occasion I want to be a great statesman and orator, and spout the seventh-of-March speech in the woods, as exalted as if the world listened—and feel like a fool afterwards. Write? Morris says there are too many writers now, and that my brain is that of the man of action. He certainly seems to know more about it than I do, and as for you, my beauty, you’re a selfish hussy. When your sails are up you think of nothing but filling your belly with wind.”

IX

Fessenden was so preoccupied that even the voices and laughter of girls did not attract his attention for some moments. He was inserting the little nickel troughs called spiles into the trees of the maple orchard, and hanging the red buckets beneath to catch the sap. Dolf was in the sugar shanty nearby, scouring out the vats, for the boiling would begin to-morrow, and maple-sugar was an industry from which the Nettlebecks derived a yearly income of several hundred dollars. This year Fessenden, who was now seventeen and tired of being a farm-hand, had stipulated that he was to work on shares, arguing that if he did two-thirds of the work he was entitled to at least one-third of the profits. Nettlebeck, after some demur, and a long growl over his pipe one evening, capitulated when young Abbott threatened to stake off a claim on government land and in partnership with Jeff Hunter build his own vats. Fessenden was feeling much elated over his rise in life, and his imagination was running riot in a great future to which sugar should be the stepping-stone—he had recently read several articles on self-made men in magazines sent to Morris—when his house of cards came tumbling down, and the future financier rose from the ruins, a blushing, shivering, gibbering swain.

“This here is Grace Morton, Fess,” remarked the dry young voice of Mamie Hunter. “She’s come to stay with me a spell. Lives down to Malone, and ain’t very well.”

During this elaborate introduction Fessenden was gazing into the soft black eyes of the prettiest girl he had ever seen. Her hair was dark, her features fragile and regular; she wore a black frock and a red-peaked cap, red about her throat and tiny waist. Her complexion was sickly, her figure might have been that of the last woman, but Fessenden saw no defects. Neither did he recognize the vacant, the utterly commonplace mind that looked from that sweet unchanging face. She was a little beauty in her way, and wholly unlike the buxom rough-handed girls of his district; there pervaded her that neutral refinement which nature has lavished with such a curious lack of discrimination upon all classes in the United States; and to Fessenden, who had never seen even a village, she seemed city-bred and fashionable. She blushed under his devouring gaze, and then she looked like a wild rose of the woods; one barrier fell. She raised her eyes and glanced vaguely round.

“I’ve never seen the sap running before,” she remarked. “It looks real nice. Is it sweet like what we eat on cakes?”

“You goose!” exclaimed Miss Hunter. “It’s got to be boiled down first—the water boiled out of it; not that it’s so bad now.”

Fessenden had produced a tin cup and filled it with the running liquid. “Will you taste it?” he asked hoarsely.

She took the cup from him, and their fingers met. He trembled. She did not, and tasted the sap daintily. “Well, I like it,” she announced. “It’s real refreshing, and we had a long walk over here. I never walked so far before, and I’m all tuckered out. I guess I’ll sit down.”

Fessenden hastily cleared off a log, and regretted that he had no coat to fling upon it—for obvious reasons he could not remove his sweater. She seated herself with the fastidious little manner which pervaded her personality, and Miss Hunter, remarking that she guessed she was not wanted, strolled off to call on Christina. Fessenden, humbly craving permission, seated himself beside the beauty from Malone, regardless of the sap that was flowing from the punctured trees which still awaited spile and bucket. They talked disconnectedly of various things, no one of which could Fessenden recall later. Her remarks were pleasant and meaningless and she was utterly unmoved. She thought this young mountaineer very handsome and clever-looking, and she had a faint romantic preference for tall men; but her poor little body was not destined for reproduction, and her brain was too small for imagination and sentiment. She was vain and liked attention, but she was without guile, and as she had no immediate reason for marrying, her mother keeping a small store comfortably, she encouraged no one of her admirers, while accepting the homage of several as a matter of course. The wild tempest in Fessenden she could not have understood with the aid of a miracle.

“Is this your first visit to the woods?” asked Fessenden, who wondered dully why he was so stupid; he could think of nothing to say to this divine creature, and words, as a rule, came to him almost as rapidly as thoughts.

“No, I’ve never been before. I always wanted to.” Her voice was sweet and thin; it was only when she raised it that it escaped through her nose. To the infatuated Fessenden it sounded like the rilling of one of the minor streams in the woods.

“I hope you’ll stay a long while.”

“I guess I will. Most of our folks’ve died of consumption, and I’ve had a hackin’ kind of cough. But I guess I’ll get over it here. I’m better already.”

If there was a mutter of protest from the race in Fessenden’s depths he let it pass unheeded. His suddenly conceived and violent passion needed but the lash of pity to transform him from the individual into the type, tumultuous with sentimental desire; the instinct of the strong to protect the beloved weak, keen and quick; pouring into a flimsy shell such an ideal as man knows only in his dreams—the determination to possess this inestimable treasure though the world stood still and the angels warned through brazen trumpets.

“I hope this log isn’t damp,” he said anxiously. “I’d better fetch you something from the house to sit on.”

“Oh, I’d be afraid to stay here alone, and I can’t walk another step. It’s bad enough to walk home. I guess this log’s all right. Have you ever been to Malone?”

“Never!” Fessenden for the first time realized his rude wild state. “I’ve never been twenty miles from here.”

“My! you are a country bumpkin. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings,” she added contritely as Fessenden’s sunburnt face assumed a purple hue. “I’m always saying silly things. You mustn’t mind me. The boys always say I just rattle out anything that comes into my head, and they don’t mind a bit.”

“I’m sure I don’t either,” said Fessenden quickly; he was determined to equal the Maloner in insensibility. “I should think”—he blundered somehow through his first compliment—“that anything you said would be about right.”

“Well, that’s what they tell me,” she replied complacently. “You can get me another cup of that sap if you like.”

Fessenden held the cup to her mouth, which was thin and curved and scarlet. Then, partly because his emotions were rendering him speechless, partly because he was fired with the primitive desire of the male to show off before the female, he swung his axe to his shoulder and muttered that he guessed he’d better cut down a tree; he was wasting too much time.

His axe he always carried with him. It occupied a place in his affections second to his canoe, and preceding a more lukewarm passion for his gun. In a moment Miss Grace Morton, of Malone, was admiring a lithe strong back, the supple free action of two brawny arms as the axe swung as easily as a switch, cutting straight and deep at every stroke. The old tree was quickly brought to earth, and Fessenden leaned on his axe and dared once more to look into the soft eyes beneath the red cap.

“It was time that old tree came down,” he remarked huskily, yet with a fair assumption of indifference. “It hasn’t given any sap for two years, and has been bothering the other trees.”

“Bothering? You talk as if trees was people.”

“Well, they are in a way—that is, they’ve often seemed alive to me.”

“My! You ain’t crazy, are you?”

Fessenden laughed, and a term of endearment ran close to the tip of his tongue. “People who live much alone have odd fancies. But that doesn’t mean they’re crazy.”

“I guess they’re crazy enough if they’re too different. But you look real sensible. I presume you’re all right.”

She looked adorable in her feminine attempt to console him, and Fessenden wheeled about and swung the axe victoriously into a fruitful maple. This time the young lady was bored. She preferred conversation, and this mountain stripling certainly was handsomer than the Malone small-fry who worshipped at her shrine.

She coughed pleasantly but imperiously, and as Fessenden turned quickly the sun blazed full upon her, covering her bright hair with little golden sparks. Her eyes looked babyish and wistful; she had one of those mouths that quiver when pouting. The poor little creature was the more dangerous for being quite natural and sincere. She had neither the brains nor the energy for coquetry, and even to youths of some slight experience she seemed as perfect as she was pretty.

Fessenden threw aside his axe. “Let’s go down to the lake,” he said, with brutal abruptness. “It’s not far, and I’ll row you and Mamie home—here she comes.”

He strode on ahead, and when the girls reached the shore he had one of the boats drawn up to the landing. He rowed with such swift strong strokes that the light craft fairly flew up the lake.

“My, Fess!” remarked Mamie Hunter. “You appear to be in a hurry—must have wasted time after I left you.”

“Of course the trees have to be spiled, but Miss Morton was too tired to walk home. You shouldn’t have brought her such a distance the first time.”

“She didn’t calculate on finding a nurse ready made; she’s real fortunate. Perhaps you’ll come over and carry her next time.”

“I should like to.” He smiled protectingly into the impassive expectant eyes; even in the throes he was the lordly male. Moreover, pride had shaken him into a temporary possession of his senses. “What do you think of our scenery?” he asked Miss Morton.

“It’s real pretty.”

“Pretty? Beautiful, I should call it.”

“Yes, I guess beautiful suits it better.” If he had applied to it erudite and foreign adjectives she would have assented as amiably.

“Fess is a crank,” advised Mamie. “You mustn’t mind anything he raves over. You’ll be the next thing, I suppose—he’ll find it quite a relief after so much brain work.” Mamie was an admirer and disciple of Christina, besides possessing a quick and observing eye of her own. She had a long, investigating nose, and no beauty whatever; but with the boys, whom she treated villanously, she was the most popular girl in the district.

“Have you read much?” asked Fessenden of his divinity, ignoring Mamie.

“Oh yes.”

“What? Shakespeare? History? Biographies?”

“I guess so. I always forget people’s names that write things.”

And even then the rosy halo swirled unrent. Fessenden returned home and viciously punctured his trees. At supper he was so incoherent that Christina arose and felt his pulse. He passed the greater part of the night wandering in the woods. During the ensuing fortnight he spent every evening at the Hunters’. Several times the girls came to the sugar shanty where he was boiling, and he rowed them home in the dusk. He lived aloft with the gods and the goddesses, one of whom was Grace, who gradually assumed heroic proportions. It mattered not that every interview betrayed her paucity the more pitifully; it mattered not that he never once struck fire in that meagre breast, that never once did her brain respond to the confidences, the ambitions, the aspirations he poured into her puzzled and ofttimes weary ear. He no longer loved Grace, little as he realized that world-old fact; he loved the ideal it was her limited destiny to quicken in his imagination. The great forces rushing through his veins and thumping in his brain had nothing in common with mere facts and girls. They were having their first innings, and not even grateful to the cause. Nothing in the vagaries of nature is more inexplicable than nine-tenths of what, for want of a better name, is called love. It is a wanton waste of good energy and a lamentable waste of spiritual forces; for the passion moves the victim to all sorts of unselfish impulses, exalted emotion, and even religion, all of which, in the reaction when delusion is over, are finely scorned. That love which is composed of an instinct for companionship, and a complete honesty of emotions, and is lacking in sentimentalism and the tragic note, delays its arrival, to people of ardent imagination, until so late that they must have much richness of nature and large recuperative powers to dismiss into the past the memory of all they have spent. The theory that the blind passion of youth springs from the relentless instinct of reproduction is true only in part, for some of the maddest passions are inspired by anæmic and useless women, and the earth has its full measure of sickly children. If Nature has any well-defined plan she has as yet hesitated to reveal it, and it is probable that she is still amusing herself in her laboratory. Most love would appear to be a momentary fever of the imagination to which the body responds, and the soul, always struggling for utterance, tries its wings, flies a little span, and flatters the brain: when a man is in love then is he most pleased with himself; he never imagined that for heights and depths, within an apparently trite exterior, he was so remarkable a being; and until the wave recedes he bestows a like approval on the chance object who, in the prettiness of her hour, or by some trick of manner, bulged his ego into grander proportions.

Considering the issues, it was fortunate in many respects that Fessenden had the inevitable attack so early in life.

He was subjected to an unmerciful chaffing, to the most sarcastic achievements of Christina’s tongue, and to more than one crude remark by Mr. Nettlebeck; in subject the eternal damnation tendency of young fools to fall in love with a bigger fool than themselves—in this case as useless a bit of furniture as ever littered the earth. Morris for a time ignored the episode, but after Fessenden, who scorned his tormentors, overflowed one day in the presence of the polite philosopher, and announced that he intended to marry as soon as he had a maple-grove of his own—college had no further charms for him—the tutor and Nettlebeck had a long and meaning conference. At its conclusion Morris spent an hour in composition, the farmer hitched up his buckboard and, in spite of the pressing duties of the season, drove thirty miles to the station and gave the letter to an obliging conductor to post in New York. Nettlebeck, not many days later, took a trip which lasted nearly a week.

X

Fessenden, who had long since proposed to Grace and been listlessly accepted, started as usual for the Hunters’ one evening, striking through the woods. The moon illuminated the recesses, in which the snow still lingered, and Fessenden strode along, idealizing even that beautiful forest; for would it not, in another hour, shelter two divinely selected beings? He still trod the upper ether, but even in that rarefied atmosphere he experienced a slight chill as he saw Jeff Hunter hastening towards him through the romantic reaches.

Jeff, who under Fessenden’s training had acquired a direct and uncompromising method of speech, wasted no time in coming to the point.

“I’ve got bad news for you,” he announced. “Grace’s gone, and she won’t come back, neither.”

Fessenden, who had a confused sense that he was tumbling through space, merely stared at Jeff, who continued:

“Her ma came this morning and yanked her off—said she’d have no such nonsense with a girl who was not strong enough to darn her own stockings, let alone getten’ married. Grace cried, of course—all girls do whenever they get an excuse—but soon dried up when her ma said she’d take her out West and show her something of the world. Grace told me to tell you she guessed it was all right, she hadn’t felt much like getten’ married, anyway; she’d only said yes because it wouldn’t have been any use to say no; and the old lady told me to tell you that it was no sort of use to follow her, for she was coverin’ up her tracks—she’s a tartar, that one, and I guess you needn’t cry that you ain’t goin’ to have her for a mother-in-law; and I guess she’s got enough money to go ’s fur ’s she likes—she told me she’d be five hundred miles away before night. As for Grace, Fess, she ain’t worth one of the ribs in Pocahontas—that’s the reason I didn’t warn you this morning.”

“Good-night,” said Fessenden.

The blood had rushed to his head. It remained there and confused him, until, after a brief sleep, he awoke next morning; then he burst in upon the astonished Morris and raged like a madman. He smashed a window and two chairs, vowed that he would walk to the West, that he knew Grace loved him, and that if she did not he had no use for life anyway.

Morris brought him partly to his senses by the ironic method, to which Fessenden was peculiarly susceptible, and then suggested that he put a sandwich in his pocket and spend the day in the woods.

“When you are a rational being once more I shall be glad to see you again and talk it over. I sincerely hope I may be able to help you in some way. But we all have to go through this, my boy. It is as inevitable as the phenomenon of man and woman itself, and must be taken as philosophically as the ills of the flesh, which under the proper diffusion of scientific knowledge will be obviated in time. It is to be hoped that puppy-love will prove an equally amenable microbe. Now take to the woods and think like a man.”

Fessenden took to the woods, but the time was not yet come when he could think like a man. Calf-love has furnished the mills of the wits since the first pen impaled the emotions; but it may be a hideous experience to youths in whom are the makings of strong and passionate men. The academic standard arbitrarily established by our literary powers has given the world an entirely false idea of the American temperament, which, in its masculine half, at least, is excitable and sentimental. It is their capacity for intense and powerful emotion, making them in mob capable of the maddest excesses of enthusiasm, which is the deep indestructible bond of unity in the American race; that has saved it from passing off long since in fireworks; that, when it has found the courage and acquired the brain-power to struggle through its artificial envelope, will permit it to become as great as it now thinks it is.

Poor Fessenden had not yet reached the analytical stage. He went out into the forest and suffered horribly. He wept and raved, and believed that so far as he was concerned the world had reached its finish. For the time he was primeval man balked of the first woman; later, when the acute stage had passed, and imagination had returned, every fine impulse and need of his nature which had leaped to assertion under the quickening process of idealized woman seemed to have withered out of him under the sudden blight. He felt shorn, impoverished, hopeless; worse than all, helpless. To pursue would be less than folly. Only a fortune and a detective could have found the indifferent girl, hidden in the skirts of a determined mother; and he had not a penny. The little he made beyond what Nettlebeck charged him for his board went, after the replenishment of his rough wardrobe, to New York for books. His helplessness degraded his manhood, added to the sum of his miseries. He stood two days of this mental hell, during which he ate little and slept less, and then he shouldered his axe and put a sandwich in his pocket.

“I’m going over to the river to get a job driving logs,” he said to Nettlebeck. “I’ve had fourteen years of this, and I’d like a change for a week or two. When the logging is over I’ll come home.”

The river was twelve miles distant. Ten minutes after he had started on his tramp through the forest he heard a shout behind him. He answered mechanically, and a moment later was joined by Dolf.

“I thought I’d come along,” panted the younger Nettlebeck. “I ain’t seen drivin’ for six years or so, and it’s good exercise; you have to jump so lively.”

Fessenden shrugged his shoulders ungraciously, and declined conversation, but even here he did not recognize the ever-watchful spirit of his father. Nevertheless the thought of that sympathetic parent spontaneously occurred to him. He was the one person to whom he could have spoken, but he remembered his fiercely reacting pride at the age of thirteen; moreover, he was bound to respect his father’s mandate of complete separation. He had puzzled deeply over the motive which had prompted this decision in a proud and affectionate parent, but had finally put the question aside, as so far beyond his limited experience that he had better apply his inquiring mind elsewhere. He had perfect faith in both the wisdom and the love of his father, in spite of occasional outbursts of disappointment, and although the kind firm hand that guided his destinies and smoothed his path without weakening his spirit was too well covered to attract his attention, some spiritual emanation from it kept his heart from closing and the bitterness of neglect from entering his soul.

They reached the river in three hours, hearing from the forest the roar of the dam, the loud shouts of the men. On their side the woods grew down to the stream, but on the heights opposite and far beyond hundreds of virgin trees had been sacrificed that the people of New York might have their daily news. The gates had just been opened, the river was foaming and racing over the rocks, its surface already crowded with long sections of tree-trunks, while others were rolling down the hill. The boss was short of men, and Fessenden and Dolf were employed at once, for the logs were already becoming jammed. Fessenden had watched “driving” many times, and, jumping from log to log to avoid crushing his feet, while at the same time he pried refractory logs into position and relieved jams, he was soon so deeply occupied learning his new trade, to say nothing of preserving his bones, that Grace lay down among the memories. His passion for proving himself the best man replaced the other, and applying all his intelligence to the task, he was very soon the most expert driver on the river. This elated him and sent consoling rays through the dark recesses of his soul. At night he was so tired that, after the evening meal—a repetition of the two preceding ones of pork, beans, bread, and coffee—he was asleep before he had settled himself in his bunk; and although his spirit may have wept over the hearse in the back alleys of his memory, for he awoke depressed and rebellious, he sprang out of bed at once, ate his beans with a relish, and went to work.

As he tramped home at night two weeks later, he informed himself that he was cured, and when he reached his own comfortable bed he slept until late on the following day; moreover, he enjoyed Christina’s savory dinner with a relish which, as a rule, associates only with an untroubled mind. Then he went for a stroll through his favorite haunts of the forest—a guilty sense of disloyalty had led him to avoid Pocahontas since the day he met Grace—and it all came back. As it rushed upon him, as he realized that he was still in bondage, he trembled in panic. The horror of returning into the torments of a fortnight since was as strong as the overwhelming passion itself. He ran back to the house, the blood pounding in his head, and searched the shelf over Fritz Nettlebeck’s desk, where letters for the household and neighbors awaited the leisurely claimant.

There was nothing for him; and then he realized that, subconsciously, he had expected Grace to defy her mother and write to him—had believed the separation to be a matter of a few weeks; that the time would come when her demand would be as imperative as his own. He leaped up the stairs to his room and rummaged among the papers on his table; there were fragments of exercises in five languages, dead and alive, brief studies of public men, but there was no letter, even from his father. He returned to the forest, his hands and knees trembling, his brain whirling, his panic increasing, muttering vague phrases, filled with terror of the future, confusion, a mad desire for annihilation. Then, as his ego reached its depths and grovelled there, he straightened himself suddenly and, flinging his fist against a tree, exclaimed: “By God, what slavery!” What he had seen of religion as expressed by itinerant and ignorant preachers had left him cold, but he had entire faith in some great force pervading the Universe, although he did not think it worth while to apply a name to it. He bethought himself of this force, and by a violent effort put himself in relation with it, demanding imperiously that some of its strength should pass into him and relieve him from this intolerable state of slavery. His prayer was answered so quickly that for a moment he stood as dazed as if he had been transferred abruptly to another planet. Then he shrugged his shoulders, laughed at his recent self, went down to the lake, and took Pocahontas out for a long, confidential, and somewhat cynical conversation.

He half expected that the obsession would return, but it did not, even when, missing his agonies, he endeavored to evoke their ghosts. Finally he sat down and wrote a long letter to his father.

“It has taught me two things,” he concluded: “the advisability of keeping a tight hold on the bulk of your energies until you are sure of having found the right woman, and the danger of praying for strength to annihilate unless you are quite sure you are not making a mistake. In this case it was all right, but she might have been the one woman; there might have been merely a misunderstanding, and the result would have been the same. I dragged the strength from out there into myself and blasted the thing to the roots. I am convinced that I can evoke that strength whenever I will, but it rather frightens me to think that I might have made this discovery at the wrong time.”

XI

The immediate results of Fessenden’s enslavement and deliverance were a terror of women, which he called contempt, an augmented interest in the great men of history, and a daily mounting ardor for his country. He had the usual school-boy’s idea of the isolated grandeur of the American Republic, and a corresponding resentment against the rest of the world for having annoyed it occasionally. Mr. Abbott, who liked all healthy manifestations in a youth, had asked Morris to let him keep his illusions until he was old enough to accept their loss without bitterness. Fessenden, who had been patriotic enough in all conscience before he met Grace, now burned with a holy fire, built an altar in the depths of the forest, and solemnly devoted his life and energies to the service of the United States—thought of her, dreamed of her, poured upon her all the rejected passion of his nature. But as yet no light had been shed upon the manner in which he should best serve her, and one day he abruptly broached the subject to Morris. The tutor came to attention at once. He had been in correspondence with Mr. Abbott for some time, and was awaiting his opportunity to speak: Fessenden was a delicate subject.

“I have been thinking it over,” he said. “Of course your father’s wish—and mine—has been that you should go to Harvard, but in the few years since I left college things have changed so in America—I am not old as years go, and judging from the occasional newspaper and magazine that comes my way, the world seems to have run by me.” He spoke hesitatingly, as if the subject had been presented to him too abruptly, after all; and Fessenden, who did not count patience among his virtues, beat a roll-call on the window-pane. The woods were green and warm; Pocahontas was making imperious little motions on the lake. A hint, a stimulus, was all he expected from Morris; the final solution would be found in solitude.

“Why not Harvard?” he asked, as Morris continued to look out upon the world in mute reproach. “Of course I expect to go to Harvard. And my father says the world’s all right.”

“Whatever is is right. I am philosopher enough to believe that—but this is the point: the great universities, like Harvard, are for the sons of rich men, or at all events for those of that privileged class who do not have to enter into the great struggle the moment they graduate. If you had even a small income, and purposed to become a man of letters, if you had in you the makings of a professor or a clergyman, I should say Harvard without hesitation, even though you would have to skimp through in a manner that is very humiliating to a gentleman; but I have studied you closely now for seven years, and I cannot associate you with any of the old-fashioned callings. You are peculiarly energetic and practical. You have tremendous ideals, but you would never have the patience to angle for them in an ink-pot, and you have too much common-sense to stump the world as a propagandist. The way for you to achieve great ends is through the medium of money—no one in this country to-day respects anything as much—and through that medium you could make yourself understood at once, and have what following you chose. It seems to me that you could make money in very large amounts—you were born with concentration, obstinacy, and industry; you must excel in all you undertake or burn to ashes in the attempt, and you have an uncommonly good brain. Of course I have only been able to cultivate its intellectual part, and there are a thousand things you must study in the next few years—men, your country, other countries, the great industrial, financial, commercial, and political problems which make up the machinery of the world. Now, if you were merely to be a dilettante in these matters, I should again say Harvard; but as it seems to me that you were born to take an active part in the great world problems, and as you have your living to make, I have thought it expedient to suggest the University of the Northwest—” He paused again and turned away his head; the polite scholar loathed the thought of the Western college. As Fessenden stared at him in earnest attention, he proceeded, in a moment.

“It is quite a remarkable institution in a way, and very cheap. As it is in a small Western town, living costs next to nothing; and as it is not patronized by rich men’s sons, the scale of living is very low—there are no expensive clubs and other constant demands. Of course it is your duty to consider this, as well as the more complete freedom which it would give you. It is my private opinion that the great colleges are no place for a man who cannot spend money like a gentleman. If my father had lost his money earlier I should not have gone to Harvard.”

“Well, what should I get at this Western university that would send me straight from the log-cabin to Aladdin’s cave—it used to be the White House.”

“That is what you would decide after you had been there a year or two. The point is that you would find there special courses on electricity, mechanics, banking, transportation, agriculture, international relations, politics, all the industrial problems. Through some one of these great modern avenues you will make your way to wealth, and you will have the inestimable advantage of starting from the ground up—of mastering, for instance, all the details of a machine-shop, of an engine, of railway tracks, of the progressive development of that most mysterious of all forces, electricity, while your mind is still plastic. There is still another reason for making yourself familiar with all these things while you are young and enthusiastic—even if you happened to make your money in some field outside them all.” He hesitated again, but proceeded almost immediately, and in the tone of a man resolute to pursue any subject as far as analysis would take him. “Suppose, for instance, you should make a very great fortune, modern conditions would place you in the most complex relations with all the subjects which this university specializes. You would be elected upon the boards of companies without end, perhaps become president, vice-president, of others; and, as a rule, directors know next to nothing of the industries over which they preside; employers know too little of what is a b c to the men under them. Railroad presidents cannot know too much about mechanics and electricity if they want to pay heavier dividends than their rivals—in a word, it is the millionaire who knows most of those subjects of which most millionaires know nothing who rules all the other millionaires. You see, I have let my imagination run away with me—I already saw you aloft on a gold pedestal. Perhaps I am too sanguine for you—one dreams much when one lives the solitary life—”

“The millionaire proposition seems to me a good deal of a come-down after all my fine dreams and ambitions, but if it’s the short cut— I haven’t much patience— Is money really so easy to make?”

“There is nothing less easy to make. My argument is that you are one of the few who could make it if you would.”

“Well, the harder the better. I wouldn’t give a red cent for anything that could be had for the asking.”

Again Morris turned his head and stared into the fire. He heartily wished that Mr. Abbott had come up and done his own talking.

“Your life is likely to be strenuous enough,” he said, after a pause. “When you are rich—if you ever are—you will work as hard, if not harder, than before. Will you think over what I have said about this university, and write to your father? He told me once that he should leave the matter to you; but, of course, he must know soon, as you could enter any college this autumn.”

“I do not need to think it over. How long do you suppose it takes me to make up my mind? I shall go to the Western University.”

XII

He started early in September, accompanied by Morris, who now confessed that he had long pined for the orange groves, the perpetual sunshine of southern California; and as far as the station by the stoical but cheerless Jeff. Christina embarrassed him by a farewell embrace and a tear, while promising him a monthly box of good things. Morris requested him to take no clothes but those he was obliged to wear, but he stuffed his sweaters among his books; he could imagine himself permanently in no less elastic envelope. In spite of remonstrance he also packed his axe. He was quick and eager for the change, and, with the ingratitude of man, left even Pocahontas with little reluctance; his imagination pictured the great gates of the world at the foot of the Adirondacks; and at last he was to pass through them and into that infinite beyond where all dreams were realities.

Morris had chosen the night train for obvious reasons; and when they reached the station in New York he hurried his young mountaineer into a cab and drove to the best of the tailors, who met the immediate demand. The necessary autumn and winter wardrobe he bought for his charge called forth a vigorous remonstrance; Fessenden had never imagined such reckless extravagance; but when his mentor had reassured him, he further indulged himself in several sweaters. He was the proud possessor of a hundred dollars, made in sugar, and his fingers tingled with the new pleasure of spending.

From the shop they drove directly back to the station to catch the morning train for the West. Fessenden grumbled, for he wanted to see New York; every nerve had sprung to greet the great city, and he hung out of the cab in spite of remonstrances and to the amusement of passers-by.

“I know how you feel,” said Morris. “I should like it myself, but I dare not linger in New York an hour—its air is fatal to me—so near the Atlantic—you will see enough of New York in the future—I am sure you will not mind.” And Fessenden submitted with what grace he could muster. As they were standing in the station awaiting the announcement of their train, Fessenden, to the alarm of Morris, suddenly darted from his side and disappeared in the crowd. Morris suspected the cause and turned pale with anxiety. The color the mountains had given him came back as he saw his charge returning alone. Fessenden’s face, however, was flushed, his eyes were as bright as tears.

“I saw my father!” he exclaimed, with a complete disregard of the bystanders that was quite superb. “I know I saw him! Why does he act like this? I was sure he would come to meet me. Why should he look at me and go away?”

“It could not have been Mr. Abbott,” said Morris soothingly, and taking his arm he hurried him through open gates. “It is doubtful if he is in New York, and he is not the man to do anything so silly and sentimental. He is very busy working out some idea which requires all his energies—he dares venture upon no distraction—there, I have told you that much—your unerring instinct has kept you from doubting that he loves you.”