carrying with him an uncomfortable sense of
having been at various times in his life something of a cad, and a fear
lest this painful fact should be known to his new master and friend.

"Well, youngster," said French, noticing his glum face, "you did me
a good turn that time. That beggar had me foul then, sure enough,
and I won't forget it."

Kalman brightened up under his words, and without further speech,
each busy with himself, they sped along the trail till the day
faded toward the evening.

But the Edmonton trail that day set its mark on the lives of boy
and man,--a mark that was never obliterated. To Kalman the day
brought a new image of manhood. Of all the men whom he knew there
was none who could command his loyalty and enthral his imagination.
It is true, his father had been such a man, but now his father
moved in dim shadow across the horizon of his memory. Here was
a man within touch of his hand who illustrated in himself those
qualities that to a boy's heart and mind combine to make a hero.
With what ease and courage and patience and perfect self-command
he had handled those plunging bronchos! The same qualities too,
in a higher degree, had marked his interview with the wrathful and
murderous Galician, and, in addition, all that day Kalman had been
conscious of a consideration and a quickness of sympathy in his
moods that revealed in this man of rugged strength and forceful
courage a subtle something that marks the finer temper and nobler
spirit, the temper and the spirit of the gentleman. Not that Kalman
could name this thing, but to his sensitive soul it was this in the
man that made appeal and that called forth his loyal homage.

To French, too, the day had brought thoughts and emotions that had
not stirred within him since those days of younger manhood twenty
years ago when the world was still a place of dreams and life a
tourney where glory might be won. The boy's face, still with its
spiritual remembrances in spite of all the sordidness of his past,
the utter and obvious surrender of soul that shone from his eyes,
made the man almost shudder with a new horror of the foulness that
twenty years of wild license upon the plains had flung upon him.
A fierce hate of what he had become, an appalling vision of what
he was expected to be, grew upon him as the day drew to a close.
Gladly would he have refused the awful charge of this young soul
as yet unruined that so plainly exalted him to a place among th