ood
and early youth. Long ago he had told her how his grandfather, a
California pioneer of good Southern family, a successful judge, had turned
an only son away, penniless, because the boy of twenty chose to take for
a wife a pretty little dressmaker, of no family at all; how the couple had
gone East, to live on a few hundred dollars left to the boy by an aunt;
how he had hoped and expected to succeed in New York as a journalist and
writer; how he had failed and starved with his bride; how he had faded out
of life while Nick was a baby; how the girl-widow had taken in sewing to
support her child, and when she couldn't get that, had washed or scrubbed;
and how, as Nick became a wise, worried old man of four or five years, he
had been able to help earn the family living by selling the newspapers
which had refused his dead father's contributions. Nick had not enlarged
upon his adventures after this stage of his youthful career, merely
sketching them in the baldest manner, when it had been necessary to
present his credentials to the "boss"--"old Grizzly Gaylor." But in one
way or other it had leaked out that the boy had learned to read and write
and cipher at a night school in New York, not having time for such
"frills" as schooling by day. And Carmen could not help knowing that he
had gone on studying, and thinking out his own rather queer ideas about
heaven and earth, ever since, in spite of the most strenuous
interruptions--for she had been ashamed occasionally by happening to
discover how much Nick knew. He had read everybody and everything from
Plato to Schopenhauer, whereas it bored Carmen unspeakably to read
anything except novels, and verses which she liked sometimes in magazines,
because their pathos or passion might have been written round her.

She knew how Nick, as a little boy, had swept shops and found all sorts of
odd jobs; how he had been errand boy, and district messenger in a uniform
of which he had been proud because it made him feel "almost like a
soldier"; how after his mother's death he had got his long-cherished wish
to "go West," by working on the railway and eventually becoming a
brakesman. After that short experience "cowpunching" days had come, and
after several years in a subordinate position on Eldridge Gaylor's ranch
he had at twenty-five been made foreman. But by this time he was already a
familiar figure in her life--the life which she had chosen, and hated
after it was chosen, except for Nick