by
crime-opulent Ignorance; naked Virtue crouched shivering in the shadow
of exalted, ermined Vice; the sots and trulls of bestial Sensuality
deified and worshiped in the public places. He had seen the harlotry of
Society set above the sacrament of Maternity, the butchery of embryonic
souls so that their lawful heritage might be squandered in the
prostitution of Love to Vanity and Indolence. He had witnessed the
sacrifice of every civic virtue to the Moloch of Greed and Graft, the
abasement of all human motives to the idol of Self.

The fiercely-drawn cigarette burned his lips and he threw it away with a
snarling curse, his whole sentience revolted with the odor of social
corruption, his soul sickening in resentment of his own undeserved
failure. He had been honest and industrious, energetic, leal and true,
conscientious in all things--and to what end?

That he might look every man fearlessly in the face by day and go
ahungered to a scant bed at night. He had labored servilely in the
vineyard of the Lord and been paid by the contemptuously-thrown lees of
the vintage. Thrice had he lost employment because he had indignantly
refused to be a party to mendacity and rascality, the recollection of
his rather strenuous resentment in the last instance wrinkling his face
with a grim, unlovely smile; it had made an outlaw of him. But the
other was an object of compassion ever since. Another Ishmael, he had
turned naturally to the clean, free independence of the life outdoors,
drifting ultimately to the cow range. His natural ability and
adaptiveness soon brought him recognition in a sphere where men are
weighed in the scale of their actual worth as men, not as puppets in the
pantomime of conventionality. It paid him bread and he bedded where and
how he chose. In the first flush of independence he felt a certain
content, but his was too intense a nature--he was cursed with too much
knowledge and ambition--and the encysted leaven began to work.

In one thing he was fortunate. The hard outdoor work had hammered the
native iron of the man into finely-tempered steel and he was thewed and
sinewed like a cougar. He had learned self-reliance, which is a good
thing, and self-containment, which is a better. Best of all, he was
beginning to place a value on himself; all he needed was incentive. And
such men make their own opportunities.

The fast waning light warned him that it was time to take the trail
again. It was quite dark when h