en, seeing the thin wisp of smoke against the
dawn telling of a camp fire five miles away, he had grumbled and
trampled out his own embers and moved on, seeking solitude.

He had brought into the mountains a heart at once sore and bitter. The
soreness had been drawn out of it in time; the bitterness had but grown
the more intense. Hard, mordacious, no man's friend . . . that was the
David Drennen who at Pere Marquette's fete sought any quarrel to which
he might lay his hands. The world had battled and buffeted him; it had
showered blows and been chary of caresses; he had struck back,
hard-fisted, hard-hearted, a man whom a brutal life had made brutal in
its own image.

There had been a scar made in his world of men and women to mark his
leaving it, such a scar as a thorn leaves in the flesh when rudely
drawn out. A tiny cicatrix soon almost entirely lost as the niche
which had been his was filled and the healing over was perfected. It
doesn't take long for the grass to grow over the graves of the dead;
the dew forming upon the mounded turf is less like tears than like
glistening jewels to deck the earth in the joyous time of her bridehood
in the spring; the flight of birds over it and their little bursts of
melody are eloquent of an ecstasy which does not remember. How little
time then must pass to wipe out the memory of the passing of a David
Drennen from the busy thoroughfares into the secluded trails?

He had been a young man, the lightest hearted of his care-free set,
when the crash came. The chief component characteristics of the young
David Drennen of twenty were, perhaps, a careless generosity, a natural
spontaneous gaiety which accepted each day as it came, a strong though
unanalysed faith in his fellow being. Life made music in tuneful
chords upon the strings of his heart. The twin wells of love and faith
were always brimming for his friends; overflowing for the one man whose
act was to turn their waters brackish and bitter. That man was his
father, John Harper Drennen, a man prominent enough in the financial
world to make much copy for the newspapers up and down the country and
to occupy no little place in transoceanic cable messages when the story
broke.

A boy must have his hero worship. Rarely enough does he find his
Alexander the Great, his Washington or his Daniel Boone, his Spartacus
or his Horatius in his own household. But the motherless David had
proved the exception and had long ago b