sensitive face were forgotten. His heart was drinking an elixir through his ears, and at the sounds floating down from the heights new fancies leaped within him.

Ham with his eyes shrewdly fixed upon his brother swung his books to his other hand and shrugged his shoulders. He, too, was looking in fancy beyond the misty hills, but not to the flight of geese. He saw cities with shaft-like structures biting the sky and dark banners of smoke floating above the clash of conflict. His heart was burning to be at the center of that conflict.

He, too, heard a song of sirens, but it was such a song as Richard Whittington heard when bare-footed in Pauntley the notes of the Bow bells stole out to him:

Then he gazed about the desolate country where morning wore to night in a sequence of hard chore upon hard chore, and he groaned between his set teeth.

Here and there along the way stood deserted houses where the wind searched the interiors through the eyeless sockets of unglazed windows and where the roof-trees were broken and twisted. They were blighting symbols of this soul-breaking existence in a land of abandoned farms where Opportunity never came. They were mutely eloquent of surrender after struggle. They summed up the hazard of life where to abate the fight and rest meant to lose the fight and starve.

His heart told him that no other battle-field was hard enough or desperate enough to spell his defeat. The world was his if he could go out into the world to claim it, but here in this meager land of barrenness his soul would strangle without a fight. The things that had long flamed in his heart had flamed secretly, like a smothered blaze which gnaws the vitals out of a ship whose hatches are battened down. He, too, had kept the hatches of silence battened. But through many wakeful nights the voice that speaks to those whom the gods have chosen cried to him with the certainty of a herald's bugle. "What the greatest have been, you can be! Of the few to whom impossibility is a jest, you are one! Nothing can halt your onward march save—want of opportunity. You have kinship with the world's mightiest, but you must go out into the world and claim your own." For that was how Ham Burton dreamed.

As the Burton boys came to the farm-house where they had been born, the sun was sinking behind the ragged spears of the mountain-top, and its last fires were mirrored in the lake whose name was like an epitome of their lives—Forsaken.

The house seemed to huddle in the gathering shadows with melancholic despair. Its walls looked out over the unproductive acres around it as grimly as a fortress overlooks a hostile territory, and its occupants lived with as defensive a frugality as if they were in fact a beleaguered garrison cut off from fresh supplies. This was the prison in which Ham Burton must serve his life sentence—unless he responded to that urgent call which he heard when the others slept. Tonight he must share with his father the raw chores of the farm, and, when his studies were done, he must go to his bed, exhausted in body and mind, to be awakened at sunrise and retread the cheerless round of drudgery. Every other tomorrow while life fettered him here held a repetition of just that and nothing more.

The white fire of rebellion leaped mutinously up in Ham's heart. He would go away. He would answer the loud clarion that called to him from beyond the horizons. The first line of hills should no longer be his remotest frontier. And if he did that—a whispering voice of loyalty and conscience argued insistently—who would wear the heavy harness here at home? His father would never leave, and upon his father the infirmities of age would some day come creeping. There was Paul—but, at the thought of Paul with his strong imagination and his weak muscles, Ham laughed. If he went away he must go without consent or parental blessing; he must slip away in the night with his few possessions packed in his battered bag. Very well; if that were the only way, it must be his way. The voices were calling—always calling—and it might as well be tonight. Destiny is impatient of temporizing. Yes, tonight he would start out there, somewhere, where the battles were a man's battles, and the rewards a man's rewards.

But at the door his mother met him. There was a moisture of unshed tears in her eyes, and she spoke in the appeal of dependence—dependence upon her eldest son who had never failed her.

"Son, your father's in bed—he's had some sort of stroke. He's feelin' mighty low in his mind, an' he says he's played out with the fight of all these years. I told him that he needn't fret himself because we have you. You've always been so strong an' manly—even when you were a little feller. You'd better see him, Ham, an' cheer him up. Tell him you can take right hold an' run the farm."

Ham turned away a face suddenly drawn. A lemon afterglow hung above the hills, and where it darkened into the evening sky, a single star shone in a feeble point of light. It was setting—not rising—and to the boy it seemed to be his star.

"I'll go in and see him," he said curtly.

Thomas Burton lay on his bed with his face turned to the wall. When his son entered, he raised it and shifted it so that the yellow light of an oil lamp shone on it above the faded quilt.

It was a hopeless, beaten face, and for the first time in his life Ham saw the calloused hand which crept out to his own shake feebly.

He took it, and the father said slowly:

"Ham, somehow I feel like an old hoss that just goes as long as he can an' then lays down. Right often he don't get up no more. It's a hard fight for a boy to take up, this fight with rocks and poor soil, but I guess you'll have to tackle it. I didn't quit so long as I could keep goin'."

The boy nodded. He composed his face and answered steadily: "I guess you can depend on me."

But outside by the barn fence he set down his milk-pail a few minutes later and in the coming night his face twitched and blackened.

"So after all," Ham told himself bitterly, "I've got to stay."

He reached out mechanically and began loosing the top bar from its sockets, while he called in the cows to be milked. So many times had he taken down and put up that panel of bars that his hands knew from habit every roughness and knot in every rail.

"Mornin' an' evenin' for three hundred and sixty-five days a year;" the boy said to himself in a low and very bitter voice. "That makes seven hundred and thirty times a year I do this same, identical thing. I ain't nothin' more than servant to a couple of cows." He stood and watched the two heifers trot through the opening to the water-trough by the pump. "By the time I'm thirty-five," he continued, "I'll do it fourteen thousand and six hundred times more—When Napoleon was thirty-five—" But there he broke off with an inarticulate sound in his browned young throat that was very like a groan.

CHAPTER II

MARY Burton was eleven. Of late, thoughts which had heretofore not disturbed her had insistently crept into the limelight of consciousness. One morning as she stood, dish-towel in hand, over the kitchen table, her eyes