at her, I made up my mind to kill
him."

"Good Lord!" said Brian, shocked.

"That's one of the reasons I don't dare go back. I'm afraid. You
can't guess what it is," he choked. "He taunts and jeers and curses in
a breath and he gets drunk every night. I wish to God he would die!"

The wish was horrible in its sincerity. Brian ignored it.

"If you were older," said Brian, "and your chief need wasn't school,
I'd take you abroad with me, free lancing. But in the circumstances,
with your welfare somewhere else, that's impossible."

Donald hung his head.

"I--I wish it wasn't," he blurted. "I want to go wherever you go."

"That first night when I asked you to tramp along with me," said Brian
gently, "I said, in my letter to your sister, that I'd see you through.
That I'm going to do. But you've got to help me. I want you, after
I'm gone, to stay up here at the quarry, study nights, and next year
work your way through college."

The boy stared, blank terror in his eyes.

"A year's work will put you on your feet--your kind of work when the
mood is on you--and you can enter in the fall. I know a chap who's
working his way through Yale. He'd show you the ropes."

"Here!" said Donald. "Alone!"

"Here," said Brian quietly, "alone. I know you can do it."

Don brushed his hair back heavily from his forehead. It was but little
browner than his face. The gesture reminded Brian irresistibly of
Kenny, Kenny in rebellion.

"It isn't the college part," Don said hopelessly. "There I think I'd
get through. And I'd like to be an engineer. It's the year here. An
entrance examination would be stiff, wouldn't it, Brian?"

"Yes."

"I know chunks of a lot of things I don't need, almost nothing of
things I ought to know a lot about. When I liked a thing, I studied.
And when I didn't I let it slide. It worried my sister. And I work by
fits and starts when there's nobody around to keep me at it. Up here
alone, working all day and studying half the night, I'd never swing it.
It would mean the hardest kind of work."

"Once," said Brian, "I saw you chop wood for thirteen hours."

"You were there."

"And down there in the quarry Grogan says you can load more stone to
the hour than two wops."

"You're there feeding the crusher. And you work as hard as I do."

Brian rose. His pipe was out. He knew as he knocked the ashes into a
saucer and filled again from a bowl of tobacco upon the mantel, that
Donald'