at deed's delivery have been the very day on
which he had elected poverty? Here was a foreordination as pointed as
the index-finger of a guide-post. "'Every man carries his fate,'" he
repeated, "'on a riband about his neck.' Chum, do you believe in fate?"

For answer the bulldog, cocking an alert eye on his master, discontinued
his occupation--a conscientious if unsuccessful mastication of the
flattish packet that had fallen from the folded deed--and with much
solicitous tail-wagging, brought the sodden thing in his mouth and put
it into the outstretched hand.

His master unrolled the pulpy wad and extricated the object it had
enclosed--an old-fashioned iron door-key.

* * * * *

After a time Valiant thrust the key into his pocket, and rising, went to
a trunk that lay against the wall. Searching in a portfolio, he took out
a small old-fashioned photograph, much battered and soiled. It had been
cut from a larger group and the name of the photographer had been erased
from the back. He set it upright on the desk, and bending forward,
looked long at the face it disclosed. It was the only picture he had
ever possessed of his father.

He turned and looked into the glass above the dresser. The features
were the same, eyes, brow, lips, and strong waving hair. But for its
time-stains the photograph might have been one of himself, taken
yesterday.

For an hour he sat in the bright light thinking, the pictured face
propped on the desk before him, the dog snuggled against his knee.

CHAPTER VII

ON THE RED ROAD

The green, mid May Virginian afternoon was arched with a sky as blue as
the tiles of the Temple of Heaven and steeped in a wash of sunlight as
yellow as gold: smoke-hazy peaks piling up in the distance, billowy
verdure like clumps of trembling jade between, shaded with masses of
blue-black shadow, and lazying up and down, by gashed ravine and rounded
knoll a road like red lacquer, fringed with stone wall and sturdy shrub
and splashed here and there with the purple stain of the Judas-tree and
the snow of dogwood blooms. Nothing in all the springy landscape but
looked warm and opalescent and inviting--except a tawny bull that from
across a barred fence-corner switched a truculent tail in silence and
glowered sullenly at the big motor halted motionless at the side of the
twisting road.

Curled worm-like in the driver's seat, with his chin on his knees, John
Valiant sat with h