He was deep
in the foothills, many miles, as far as he knew, from the home of any
settler. In daylight he could, no doubt, find his way back to town,
but daylight might be too late. He did not know whether Allan was
dying on his hands at that moment. Certainly to attempt to move him
in the buggy would be dangerous in the extreme.

And as he sat he thought of the missing money, the fruit of his
life's labour, snatched from him in a moment in the darkness. The
loss did not hurt him as deeply as he might have thought; he was
numbed by the greater blow that hung over him. If Allan would only
live!...The boy had been his constant companion since babyhood. All
his hopes, all his ambitions, which had found their expression in his
years of feverish toil, had been wrapped about Allan. He had no one
else...His better self revolted at that thought. "You have a wife and
daughter," it said, "ready to share your life as soon as you are
ready to share theirs." He forced his mind from that phase of his
position, but it reverted to it again and again. He could not wander
in memory up the path of his boy's life without meeting his boy's
mother. And all the pain and unhappiness of the later years--how it
cut like an evil bank of fog across the once bright course of their
career! But he had suffered for their sakes, holding fast to his own
course because he knew it to be best...Best? And it had brought him
to this?...The question would not down. Rather than relax an iota
from his own purposes he had broken up his family; he had crushed
them under the wheels of his inflexible will, and now that same will
had driven his son to destruction and himself to ruin.

It is not easy for a man who has laid out a career and followed it
with all the energy of a virile nature, recasting his gods from time
to time to conform with the evolution of his ideals, but recasting
always in the mould of his own will rather than any vessel of creed
or persuasion--it is not easy for such a man to stop at fifty and
say, "I was wrong." It requires a break in his process of evolution,
a shock sufficiently powerful to pulverize his gods before his face,
to drive home the truth that they were not gods at all but merely
idols of his own creation. In Harris's later life two idols had grown
up to the exclusion of all others; they were the wealth which he had
builded with his hands and the boy Allan about whom he wrapped all
the affection of his nature; and they had crumb