house seemed to huddle in the gathering shadows with melancholic despair. Its walls looked out over the unproductive acres around it as grimly as a fortress overlooks a hostile territory, and its occupants lived with as defensive a frugality as if they were in fact a beleaguered garrison cut off from fresh supplies. This was the prison in which Ham Burton must serve his life sentence—unless he responded to that urgent call which he heard when the others slept. Tonight he must share with his father the raw chores of the farm, and, when his studies were done, he must go to his bed, exhausted in body and mind, to be awakened at sunrise and retread the cheerless round of drudgery. Every other tomorrow while life fettered him here held a repetition of just that and nothing more.
The white fire of rebellion leaped mutinously up in Ham's heart. He would go away. He would answer the loud clarion that called to him from beyond the horizons. The first line of hills should no longer be his remotest frontier. And if he did that—a whispering voice of loyalty and conscience argued insistently—who would wear the heavy harness here at home? His father would never leave, and upon his father the infirmities of age would some day come creeping. There was Paul—but, at the thought of Paul with his strong imagination and his weak muscles, Ham laughed. If he went away he must go without consent or parental blessing; he must slip away in the night with his few possessions packed in his battered bag. Very well; if that were the only way, it must be his way. The voices were calling—always calling—and it might as well be tonight. Destiny is impatient of temporizing. Yes, tonight he would start out there, somewhere, where the battles were a man's battles, and the rewards a man's rewards.
But at the door his mother met him. There was a moisture of unshed tears in her eyes, and she spoke in the appeal of dependence—dependence upon her eldest son who had never failed her.
"Son, your father's in bed—he's had some sort of stroke. He's feelin' mighty low in his mind, an' he says he's played out with the fight of all these years. I told him that he needn't fret himself because we have you. You've always been so strong an' manly—even when you were a little feller. You'd better see him, Ham, an' cheer him up. Tell him you can take right hold an' run the farm."
Ham turned away a face suddenly drawn. A lemon afterglow hung above the hills, and where it darkened into the evening sky, a single star shone in a feeble point of light. It was setting—not rising—and to the boy it seemed to be his star.
"I'll go in and see him," he said curtly.
Thomas Burton lay on his bed with his face turned to the wall. When his son entered, he raised it and shifted it so that the yellow light of an oil lamp shone on it above the faded quilt.
It was a hopeless, beaten face, and for the first time in his life Ham saw the calloused hand which crept out to his own shake feebly.
He took it, and the father said slowly:
"Ham, somehow I feel like an old hoss that just goes as long as he can an' then lays down. Right often he don't get up no more. It's a hard fight for a boy to take up, this fight with rocks and poor soil, but I guess you'll have to tackle it. I didn't quit so long as I could keep goin'."
The boy nodded. He composed his face and answered steadily: "I guess you can depend on me."
But outside by the barn fence he set down his milk-pail a few minutes later and in the coming night his face twitched and blackened.
"So after all," Ham told himself bitterly, "I've got to stay."
He reached out mechanically and began loosing the top bar from its sockets, while he called in the cows to be milked. So many times had he taken down and put up that panel of bars that his hands knew from habit every roughness and knot in every rail.
"Mornin' an' evenin' for three hundred and sixty-five days a year;" the boy said to himself in a low and very bitter voice. "That makes seven hundred and thirty times a year I do this same, identical thing. I ain't nothin' more than servant to a couple of cows." He stood and watched the two heifers trot through the opening to the water-trough by the pump. "By the time I'm thirty-five," he continued, "I'll do it fourteen thousand and six hundred times more—When Napoleon was thirty-five—" But there he broke off with an inarticulate sound in his browned young throat that was very like a groan.
CHAPTER II
MARY Burton was eleven. Of late, thoughts which had heretofore not disturbed her had insistently crept into the limelight of consciousness. One morning as she stood, dish-towel in hand, over the kitchen table, her eyes stole ever and anon to the cracked mirror that hung against the wall, and after each glance she turned defiantly away with something like sullenness about her lips. Elizabeth Burton, the mother, and Hannah Burton, the spinster aunt, went about their accustomed tasks with no thought more worldly than the duties of the moment. It never occurred to Aunt Hannah to complain of anything that was. If her life spelled unrelieved drudgery she accepted it as the station to which it had pleased God to call her, and conceived that complaint would be a form of blasphemy. Now as she wielded her broom, her angular shoulders ached with rheumatism, and, in a voice as creaking as her joints, she sang, "For the Master said there is work to do!" Such was Aunt Hannah's creed, and it pleased her while she moiled over the work to announce in song that she acted upon divine command. To Aunt Hannah's mind, this lent an august dignity to a dust-rag.
When Mary savagely threw down her dish-towel and burst unaccountably into tears, both women looked up, startled. Mary was normally a sunny child and one not given to weeping.
"For the name of goodness!" exclaimed the mother in bewilderment. "What in the world can have struck the child?" It was to Aunt Hannah that she put the question, but it was Mary who answered, and answered with a sudden flow of vehemence:
"Why didn't God make me pretty?" demanded the girl in an impassioned voice. "They call me spindle-legs at school, and yesterday Jimmy Marquess said,
'If I had a sister Mary that had eyes like that,
I'd put her out of pain with a baseball bat.'
"It ain't fair that I've got to be ugly."
Mrs. Burton, confronted with a situation she had not anticipated, found herself unequipped with a reply, but Aunt Hannah's face became severe.
"You are as God made you, child," she announced in a tone of finality, "and it's sinful to be dissatisfied."
But, if dissatisfaction was wicked, Mary was resolved upon sin. For the first time in her eleven years of life she stood forth mutinous. Her eyes blazed, and she trembled passionately through her slender child-body, with her hands clenched into tight little fists.
"If God made me this way on purpose, He didn't treat me fair," she rebelliously flamed out. "What good can it do God to have me skinny and white, with eyes that don't even match?"
Aunt Hannah's face paled as though she feared that she must fall an innocent victim to the avenging bolt which might momentarily be expected to crash through the roof.
"Elizabeth," she gasped, "stop the child! Don't let her invite the wrath of the Almighty like that! Tell her how wicked it is to complain an' rebel against Infinite Wisdom."
They heard a low, rather contemptuous laugh, and saw Ham standing in the door. His coarse lumberman's socks were pulled up over his trousers' legs and splashed with mud of the stable lot.
"Aunt
