ess girls should prove his love.

Those were gala days for Captain Morton; the whole universe was
flowering in his mind in schemes and plans and devices which he hoped to
harness for his power and glory. And the forensic group at Mr.
Brotherton's had much first hand information from the Captain as to the
nature of his proposed activities and his prospective conquests. And
while the Captain in his prime was surveying the world that was about to
come under his domain the house of Adams, little and bleak and poor,
down near the Wahoo on the homestead which the Adamses had taken in the
sixties became in spite of itself, a gay and festive habitation.
Childhood always should make a home bright and there came a time when
the little house by the creek fairly blossomed with young faces. The
children of the Kollanders, the Perrys, the Calvins, the Nesbits, and
the Bowmans--girls and boys were everywhere and they knew all times and
seasons. But the red poll and freckled face of Grant Adams was the
center of this posy bed of youth.

Grant was a shrill-voiced boy, impulsive and passionately generous and
all but obsessed with a desire to protect the weak. Whether it was bug,
worm or dog, or hunted animal or bullied child or drunken man,
fly-swarmed and bedeviled of boys in the alley, or a little girl teased
by her playmates, Grant--fighting mad, came rushing in to do battle for
the victim. Yet he was no anemic child of ragged nerves. His fist went
straight when he fought, and landed with force. His eyes saw accurately
and his voice carried terror in it.

He was a vivid youth, and without him the place down by the river would
have been bleak and dreary. But because Grant was in the world, the
rusty old phaeton in which Amos and Mary rode daily from the farm to
their work, gradually bedecked itself with budding childhood blooming
into youth, and it was no longer drab and dusty, but a veritable chariot
of life. When Grant was a sturdy boy of eight, little Jasper Adams came
into this big bewildering world. And after Grant and his gardenful of
youth were gone, Jasper's garden followed. And there was a short season
when the two gardens were growing together. It was in that season while
Grant was just coming into shoeblacking and paper collars, that in some
indefinite way, Laura Nesbit, daughter of the Doctor and Bedelia
Satterthwaite, his blue blooded Maryland wife, separated herself from
the general beauty of the universe and for Grant,