"Some of you are fools, some liars! When Dad comes back . . ."

He had choked up under the keen eyes of the Chief. And what angered
him most was the look in the Chief's eyes. It was not incredulity; it
was merely pity.

At first the papers had it that John Harper Drennen had absconded with
fifty thousand dollars of the Eastern Mines Company's money. With
rapid investigation came ready amplification of the first meagre
details. Drennen's affairs were looked into and it was found that
through unwise speculations the man had been skirting on thin ice the
pool of financial ruin for a year. The deficit of fifty thousand grew
under the microscope of investigation to sixty thousand, eventually to
seventy-five thousand.

When at last David Drennen got the back numbers of the papers and
locked himself up in his father's library to work his way laboriously
through the columns of fact and surmise he was not the same David
Drennen who had struck a man in the face for suggesting to him that his
father was a thief. Here was the first sign of a weakening of faith;
here the first fear which strove wildly to prove itself a shadow. But
from shadow emerged certainty. He looked his spectre in the face and
it did not dissolve into thin air. When he had done he put his face
upon his arms and sobbed. The tardy but crushing sense of his hero's
guilt had stricken him; the thought that his father had in no way
confided in him, had left him without a word, perhaps without a
thought, broke his heart. He was never to be quite the same David
Drennen again.

He remained at his father's home through the weary months during which
the miserably sordid horror dragged on. One morning he packed into a
suitcase the few little articles which he felt were his own. He went
out of the house before the others came in; he had no desire to see the
home go, as everything else had gone, to pour its handful of golden
sand into the great hole which John Harper's ruin had left behind him.
It had been almost a year since the first news; and upon the day on
which David Drennen set his back to all he knew and his face toward
what might come to him, a paper brought the last word. He read it
calmly upon the train, wondering at himself that there was such a thing
as calm left to him. A man, looking over his shoulder, commented on
the news lightly. Drennen didn't answer. He was visualising the final
episode dully; the great, masterful body of his own