Slim, pale-faced, the picture of
this boy, only taller, fuller grown, he had come to Gold City. With
ragged clothes that spoke of better days, he had tramped into town one
winter night through the snow and begged a bed at the Miners' Home. He
had struck it rich for a time down by Mormon Bar, and treated all the
boys in joy over his good luck, then lost it all over the card table
in the end. Thrice he had repeated that experience. In his better
moments he had talked of a wife and blue-eyed boy in the East, then
again he seemed to forget them. The gaming table, the drink, the crowd
he went with, ruined him. One night the boys heard cries in the hollow
back of "Monte Carlo," the worst saloon and gambling den in the
place; when morning came they found Teale and a boon companion both
dead there. Who was to blame? Nobody knew. Under the old pine trees on
the hill, just outside the graveyard gate, where the respectable dead
lay, they buried them. And now Teale's boy was come, and who should
tell him, and where should he go?

CHAPTER II.

ANDREW MALDEN.

Andrew Malden was in town that night, yet no one thought of asking
him, the hardest-hearted man in Grizzly county. Rich, with acres to
spare, a mill that turned out lumber by the wholesale, horses that
could outstrip any Bucephalus in the county. Either from jealousy or
some cause, the world about Gold City, Frost Creek, Chichilla, all
hated Andy Malden.

No one noticed how he listened to the story, how he glanced more than
once at the tired traveler, till they heard him order his horses at
moon-up, order the landlord to wake the boy and feed him.

When, promptly at ten, he took the strange lad in his arms and put him
in his buckboard, seized the reins and drove toward Spring Creek, the
Pines and home, the whole town was more dumfounded than in years, and
the landlord said he guessed old Andy was crazy. Only Yankee Sam
seemed to understand, and the old man muttered to himself, as he
turned once more to the saloon, "Well, now! Andy thinks it is his
youngster come back again that I helped lay beneath the pines, coming
thirty years now."

Sam was right. It was the dormant love of thirty long-gone years, all
roused again, that stirred the old man that night. The lonely,
homeless boy on the "Palace" doorstep had touched a heart that most
men thought too hard to be broken in this world or the next.

Andrew Malden was not a bad man, if he was hard. The outward vices