father in the Paris
morgue, the ignominious grave, even the cowardly death, self-dealt.

"And he never wrote me," he muttered to himself.

There he was wrong, though he could not know it until months later when
the brief letter, forwarded to him by the Chief, reached him. His face
had been hard, because his heart was hard, when he read the note which
at last John Harper Drennen had written and which, sodden and blurred,
was found upon the dead body drawn from the Seine.

"Dear Davy," it had said. "Some day maybe you'll come to forgive me.
God dealt me a hard hand to play, boy. Be a man, Davy; for your
mother's sake if not for your dad's."

Drennen a year ago would have dropped his face into his hands and would
have wept over this letter; now he laughed at it. And the laugh, this
first one, was the laugh men came to know as Dave Drennen's laugh. It
was like a sneer and a curse and a slap in the face.

The hardest blow the fates could deal him had been delivered
mercilessly. But other relentless blows were to come after, and under
their implacable, relentless smiting the soul of the man was hardened
and altered and made over as is the bit of iron under the blacksmith's
hammer. Those characteristics which had been the essentials of the
spiritual man of last year were worked over; the fine steel springs of
buoyancy were beaten into thin knives of malignancy. That the work
might be done thoroughly there was left in him one spark which glowed
later on and grew into friendship for a man whom he met far in the
north where the Yukon country called to such men as Drennen. The
friendship fanned into life a lingering spark of the old generous
spirit. Drennen, gambling his life lightly, had won as careless
gamblers are prone to do. He made a strike; he trusted his new friend;
and his friend tricked, betrayed and robbed him. This blow and others
came with the gaunt years. At the end of them David Drennen was the
man who sought to quarrel with Kootanie George; he was a man like a
lone wolf, hunting alone, eating alone, making his lair alone, his
heart filled with hatred and bitterness and distrust. He came to
expect the savagery of the world which smote and smote and smote again
at him, and he struck back and snarled back, each day finding him a
bitterer man than the preceding day had left him. Long before he had
turned back from the Yukon to the North Woods, empty handed, empty
hearted, men had come to call hi