The comment was not softened with the modification of banter, but rasped with the twang of suspicion as though the speaker expected to give offense—and did not care. Young Edwardes received it with a peal of laughter so infectious that the man in the chair looked up, surprised.
"So that's how they figure me out, is it?" inquired the traveler. "I suppose though," he added as if in answer to his own question, "no man knows what portrait public opinion paints of him. At all events I'm a harmless hobo and quite willing to pay when I put my fellow-man to inconvenience. I live in the mountains by the sentence of my doctors."
"Lunger, eh?" Burton nodded his head comprehensively, but quite without sympathy; and the guest bowed his assent.
"Some folks turns lungers away," commented the host reflectively, "but that's only in the summertime when the vacation boarders kicks on 'em. As for me, I don't take in boarders summer nor winter, but when the snow drives a man in I don't drive him out."
"So they accept us in the winter, do they, and cast us out in the summer when the ribbon-clerks come?" Edwardes spoke musingly, yet amusedly, and in his accustomed manner of self-communion. "After all, men are much alike everywhere, aren't they? The lepers must not walk the streets of Jerusalem, but they may sit in full concourse at the Jaffa and Damascus gates where their wrappings are brushed by every caravan that goes in or out."
Ham, who was just entering, stood on the kitchen threshold in time to hear a man, whom he had never seen before, talking casually of the world beyond the seas. Perhaps this man knew, too, the cities that brought conquerors as well as prophets into their own; perhaps to him the sepia-tinted monuments of Rome and the great tomb in the Place des Invalides were familiar spots! And the man was young himself—almost a boy. For an instant, Ham stood there while his eyes traveled around the room, contemptuously taking in the cheap lithographs and offensive ornaments which he knew so well and hated so sincerely. He straightened resolutely, and his hands clenched. There would be a time when the earth's greatest artists should contribute paintings for his walls, and palaces give up to him their bronzes and tapestries.
When a half-hour later Ham Burton was alone with the stranger he found himself asking and answering many questions. He had not meant to impart his secret of discontent, but just as Mary had confided her troubles at the roadside, so Ham told his as he sat on the edge of the bed in the chilly attic-room of the farm-house. Perhaps it was because this man had actually seen the things that existed beyond the sky-line, and had walked through the veil of mystery which the boy himself so burned to penetrate. At all events it transpired. Ham had shown his little store of greedily conned books and had bared to the gaze of the other his naked and scorching torture of ambition. The lad knew something of the men who had made themselves masters of the world and wished to know more. Edwardes had not even laughed when Ham declared with naïve conviction: "None of them men ever did anything I couldn't do, if I got the chance." It was impossible to laugh, though listening to such boundless egotism, in the face of so deep a sincerity and such an implicit self-belief as shone from those young eyes.
"Sometimes the great man knows his greatness in advance," said the visitor gravely. "Sometimes it surprises himself. But most of the mightiest made their own chance."
"I know that. I'm going to make mine. Power is what I want an' it's what I'm goin' to have. But I've got to get away from here. Julius Cæsar couldn't do nothin' here."
When Jefferson Edwardes came down stairs Mary, who had slipped timidly away, edged into the room, bashful and adorned. She had put on her best dress, and her lustrous hair was braided and coiled on her head, after the instruction of one of her fashion plates. As the visitor saw her he once more checked his inclination to laugh, for the marvelous mismated eyes were fixed on his face and they held an almost passionate anxiety to be approved by the man who had prophesied her beauty. The thin child with her hair so inappropriately dressed in the style of her fashionable elders—or what she fondly believed to be their style—would have been a ludicrous little figure had she not been, in her eagerness, too serious for humor. The one detail in which she thought she could follow the dictates of Fashion's decree was this arrangement of her hair, and that she had attempted. Now she stood first on one foot then on the other, watching in suspense to see if she had succeeded.
So the stranger slipped over unobserved and with a courtier's smile raised a tiny hand to his lips.
"I am a good prophet," he assured her, and now he let the suppressed merriment dance at will in his pupils, "but don't forget that a queen's queenliest necessity is—kindness."
And so, while Mrs. Burton and the elderly aunt busied themselves over the stove and the father napped restlessly, the sleeping thing that had not heretofore given warning was ripening for its outburst.
When the evening meal was finished and the family sat listening to the stranger's talk, Thomas Burton suddenly demanded: "Are they still quittin' over your way?"
Young Edwardes nodded.
"Except for one or two shiftless fellows like myself," he responded, "my immediate section is deserted. A half-dozen families moved out this fall. The general verdict seems to be that the fight's not worth while."
Tom Burton growled deeply. "The country mayn't be much," he grudgingly admitted, "but how do these fellers that are leavin' all they own behind 'em expect to better themselves? Ain't a few rocky acres better'n none at all? That's what I asks 'em and they ain't got no answer to give me. Ain't a little bit better than nothin' whatsoever?"
The visitor did not immediately reply. He seemed to be reflecting, and, when his answer came, Ham straightened himself in his seat and sat rigid as if struggling to fix a seal on his own lips and remain a silent listener.
"Perhaps so and perhaps not," suggested Edwardes. "The open sea doesn't offer much prospect in a storm, but it may be better than a sinking ship."
Tom Burton's eyes lighted with the same stubborn glint that had given his Pilgrim forefathers kinship with the granite of their shores.
"My ancestors have lived here since they ran the Indians out," he said quietly. "They're buried here an' they fought for this country an' won it. I guess what they bled for is worth holdin'."
"Your forefathers fought for the whole land, not only this section of it," suggested Edwardes mildly. "Right here the acres are stony and unproductive. You can't hope to compete with the farmer whose crops grow near arteries of transportation."
"All we need is roads—an' aqueducts—an' some day they'll come."
"Perhaps," admitted the younger man. "The question is how many can hold out till then?"
Tom Burton looked up and for an instant his eyes blazed. "Well, for one, I can! By God, I don't mean to be run away from my home by a panicky notion of hard times. I can stay here an' fight to a finish—an' when I'm licked, my boys can go on fightin'."
His eldest son rose and paced the floor with the restlessness of a caged leopard. At the black window he halted to gaze out on the bitterness of the night. The ultimatum of his father's obstinacy galled him beyond endurance. He heard himself pledged to the emptiness and futility of a life-sentence which he loathed; from which he was seeking escape and his soul clamored to rise in its vehement repudiation. Yet he felt that just now his heart was in too hot a conflagration to make speech safe. If he spoke at this moment he must speak in violent passion and bitter denunciation, and so with his hands tautly clutched at his back he held his counsel and paced the floor. Old Tom Burton's unaccustomed hours in the confinement of convalescence had left him petulant. The courtesy of the stranger's argument was lost upon him. All he saw was
