Had not Mr. Jefferson said
that he would overtake them?--and there he was! He was coming down to
the camp-fire, he was going to stop and talk to the surly giant, like
Giant Despair, who sat and smoked beside it.

Lewis Rand left the river and the windy sycamore and hastened across the
sere grass. "Father, father!" he cried. "Do you know who that is?" In
his young voice there was both warning and appeal. Adam Gaudylock, he
knew, had spoken to his father, but Gideon had given no sign. Suppose,
no matter _who_ spoke, his father would give, forever, no other sign
than that oft seen and always hated jerk of the head toward the
tobacco-fields?

Gideon Rand took his pipe from his lips. "It's Mr. Jefferson," he
answered laconically. "He's the one man in this country to whom I'd
listen."

Jefferson rode up to the group about the camp-fire, checked his horse,
and gave the tobacco-roller and his son a plain man's greeting to plain
men. The eagerness of the boy's face did not escape him; when he
dismounted, flung the reins of Wildair to his groom, and crossed the bit
of turf to the fire beneath the pines, he knew that he was pleasing a
young heart. He loved youth, and to the young he was always nobly kind.

"Good-evening, Mr. Rand," he said. "You are homeward bound, as I am. It
is good to see Albemarle faces after years of the French. I had the
pleasure of making your son's acquaintance yesterday. It is a great
thing to be the father of a son, for so one ceases to be a loose end and
becomes a link in the great chain. Your son, I think, will do you
honour. And, man to man, you must pay him in the same coin. We on a
lower rung of the ladder must keep our hands from the ankles of the
climbers above us! Make room for me on that log, my lad! Your father and
I will talk awhile."

Thus it was that an able lawyer took up the case of young Lewis Rand. It
was the lawyer's pleasure to give aid to youth, and to mould the mind
of youth. He had many proteges, to all of whom he was invariably kind,
invariably generous. The only return he exacted was that of homage. The
yoke was not heavy, for, after all, the homage was to Ideas, to large,
sagacious, and far-reaching Thought. It was in the year 1790 that he
broke Gideon Rand's resistance to his son's devotion to other gods than
those of the Rands. The year that followed that evening on the Albemarle
road found Lewis Rand reading law in an office in Charlottesville. A few
more years, and he